Ok, so you could probably count the number of existing travel blog entries for Laredo, TX, on one hand...and that includes this one. I know of at least two country songs about it though. But even those that live there admit there's not much there to see. (The closest restaurants that aren't an American chain or Tex-Mex are in San Antonio, 150 miles away.) Full flights to other places mean you have to make your own adventures sometimes so we decided to take the short flight down and do some exploring along the road that runs along the Rio Grande with Andrew and Stefanie from work.

Situated on the border with Mexico, Laredo is one of the busiest ports of entry into the US and is a major industrial area. Rising drug trafficking and violence have all but killed tourism all along the river in recent years though. Nuevo Laredo, on the other side of the river, has a reputation for being extremely unsafe and has a very high kidnapping and murder rate. I'm glad I'm not the guy in charge of writing the tourism phamplet.

Since Laredo isn't much by itself, we rented a car and drove South down the road that runs parallel to the Rio Grande. We drove through several towns that have almost fallen off the grid. In most, the only people in the so-called "tourism" areas were us and border patrol agents.

One actual claim to fame along the Southern border is this hand-cranked ferry across the river. It is the only government-licensed, hand-pulled ferry on any boundary of the United States. We drove on this tiny winding road to the village of Los Ebanos and walked down to where the road literally went into the river. $1 got us across and back. There wasn't anything on the other side but sometimes that's the point.

We walked across the bridge into Nuevo Laredo instead of driving to have dinner that night. The hotel clerk's advice was right on as the line back into the U.S. was more or less a parking lot. I'm pretty sure I've never crossed into such a different universe in such a short distance. It didn't really feel unsafe, but it did have that feeling that you weren't too far from an area where you might be unsafe. At any rate, I can now say that I went to Mexico just for dinner.

Sunday morning was spent walking around the main square of Laredo and looking for the non-existant "market" area that turned out to be a bunch of modern buildings where they sold lawn ornaments. We saw the rest of what Laredo had to offer including what has to be the world's longest mall and TAMIU campus, which is apparently safe-haven for troubled deer. So yeah, that's about it for Laredo. I'm not sure I'd put this on the recommendation list, at least not very high, but it was a very different 36 hours. I more or less went to Mexico for the day and I got to eat Tex-Mex 3 times in 4 meals, so it can't be all bad.