Day 30 - Langtry, TX to Del Rio, TX

A Texas State Trooper approached me as I walked into the only store in Comstock looking a bit bedraggled after four hours of fighting headwinds and hills in the central part of the Chijuajuan Desert. Looking suspicious, he asked whether I was the bicyclist who had been seen last night sleeping underneath his bike as it was leaning against the guardrail in the narrow shoulder of the two mile bridge over the Amistad Reservoir. He said I fit the description he had been given.

Not sure whether the cop believed me, but I spent last night in my tent in Langtry on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande River Valley and the mountains of Mexico. There was no wall and it was beautiful.

The only human contact I had was with the guy at the Roy Bean Museum in Langtry. I asked him whether he lived in Langtry. He laughed kind of derisively and said he lived in Comstock (pop. 191). There are exactly 10 people living in Langtry, but back in 1900 when it was the domain of Judge Roy Bean it was a bustling railroad town.

In 1900 the Texas towns along the Rio Grande Valley were spaced linearly 30 miles apart along the railroad line. Those towns were the water stops for the steam engines, which needed to stop for water about every 30 miles. 

When Diesel engines replaced steam engines, some of these desert towns pretty much disappeared, making it difficult for a bicyclist these days to obtain resources through this portion of the Chihuahuas Desert!

But now I have crossed the beautiful Pecos River snd am in Del Rio, a town of about 36,000, right on the Mexican border. It is one of the major battlegrounds in the war against illegal immigration, about which much will be said in a later post.