In this third part of our road trip from Watsonville to San Antonio, my wife, Sarah, and I wrapped up our visit to Silver City, New Mexico as our friends, Phil and Amanda picked up the tab for a fine Mexican lunch and walked us over to the town paper, the Silver City Daily Press and Independent.
For a town of around 10,000 people, they still put out a newspaper six days a week and maintain an early-day style office in the heart of town.
It warmed my heart to see on their shelves of hardbound volumes of back issues, all carefully labeled and dated. Their website states: “Today, the Daily Press owns the back editions of the Press and the Independent, past and present, and although time may cause newsprint to decay and crumble, the newspapers themselves live on. The paper has been around since 1935.”
We bade farewell to our friends and drove south on Hwy. 180 to Hwy 10 and into the large city of El Paso, Texas. The 22nd largest city in America has a population of 700,000 people and spreads out over 255 square miles. Their chief industry includes cotton, fruit, vegetables, and livestock. The city has also stepped up in manufacturing petroleum, metals, medical devices, plastics, machinery, defense-related goods and more.
From a previous visit here, Sarah knew of the Holiday Inn, perched on the edge of Old Town, and of the elegant Central Cafe. So we checked in and took in the sweeping view of the city and a busy chunk of Hwy 10 from our room before walking downtown through San Jacinto Plaza to Central Cafe for dinner. The area was surprisingly scant of people walking the city. Scores of businesses were dark and shuttered. By contrast, Central Cafe was abuzz with life and excitement and we felt lucky to be seated right away.
Since this was an evening to splurge, Sarah got their honey lavender island duck and I ordered prawn brochette, a word I had to look up in the dictionary. People watching, the impeccable service and fineries that were largely out of our league added up to a divine evening.
In the morning we headed back through the old part of town and again saw numerous closed businesses, including lovely and historic S. H. Kress & Co., a chain of five & dime stores that operated from 1896 to 1981. At one point, there were Kress stores, noted for their fancy architecture, in hundreds of cities and towns.
Around the corner, Sarah led us to the famed Pancho Villa stash house where agents found $500,000 in U.S. currency and gold coins in a raid of the house by U.S. Customs in 1915. Understated, the single story building nonetheless housed a huge chuck of history, and ended up warranting a tall bronze statue in the area with this description by RoadsideAmerica.com: “A bronze statue on a cement pedestal depicts ‘The Friendly Meeting’ between Mexican revolutionary Francisco Pancho Villa and U.S. Gen. John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing. The handshake between the two took place on this spot on August 26, 1914. A plaque on the statue’s base notes that less than two years later the two men were ‘sworn enemies’ after Pancho and his men attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916. The battle left many more Mexicans dead than Americans.”
In the next part we surge southward on Hwy 10 to Balmorhea State Park to check out the natural springs and then Fort Stockton for the night before driving into San Antonio, the goal of our journey.
