LONE STAR ROAD REPORT--ODDS AND ENDS FROM ODESSA
[LIVE, ON LOCATION, ON-SCENE REPORT]
ODESSA--Greetings from the Permian Basin! In our continuing effort to introduce you to some of what the Lone Star State has to offer (and to justify more travel expenses for myself in the process), your faithful reporter is back on the bus again and covering a part of the state that he rarely gets to cover. {Hey, even a reporter who's been around Texas needs to learn a few new things now and then...)
Again, we start from our Texas headquarters city of Plainview--where I this time am required to spend most of the night to come on a crowded TNM&O (Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahome Bus Lines) bus going south on I-27/US 87 towards Big Spring. From the station in Big Spring, we then proceed west on I-20 through Stanton until we get to Midland where we see some of the tall buildings that reflect the business atmosphere present there. NEXT STOP--ODESSA!
Note that I write about these cities from this viewpoint-- I have only been in Odessa once. That was when I was in high school when I was in Senior English and our class took a class trip to Odessa to see a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre at Odessa College [http://www.globesw.org]. The Midland/Odessa area is a very interesting area in at least two ways. The first is in the population of each city-- which stands at approximately 95 to 100 thousand. If you combined the total population of both cities, you could theorectically have a city that would be about the same size as Lubbock, half the population of Albuquerque, NM, and about a fifth of the population of Dallas. The second is in how things are laid out between the cities. Midland and Odessa are about 20 miles apart--but it would be hard to tell where one place begins and the other ends if you were going through both cities via U.S. 80/Business I-20. It seems like both towns are built around three things: I-20, Bus. I-20, and the Midland International Airport (which is basically stuck out in the middle of nowhere--more on that later...).
As you get closer into Odessa, you find the lights of places like the lighted windmills of Prime Time Christian Broadcasting [http://www.ptcbglc.com] greeting you even in the middle of the night. We finally find ourselves at the bus station in Odessa around 3:30 AM. Right next door (at the place where E. 8th St. intersects with Bus. I-20) is a 7- Eleven [http://www.7-eleven.com] and along the street are several car dealerships and other assorted places. I take all of the items that I brought with me for an overnight stay and head towards my first destination (which takes a good while to
