Photo of the Week #20 – Nuevo Laredo Across the Rio Grande

This photo is a shot of Nuevo Laredo across the Rio Grande River from Laredo, Texas. This is one of several U.S. Mexican border crossing city pairs. I was here in 2003 on my Texas touring adventure with my buddy from New Zealand, Brian Morris. We had just returned from a cruise to Cozumel, Mexico that departed and returned to New Orleans, pre Katrina. Brian’s wife, Carol, was flying off to Phoenix to meet a group of other women from Auckland who were competing in the international Sweet Adelines competition. This left Brian and me to our own devices. A Texas adventure seemed in order.

We departed New Orleans where we left Carol, off to Phoenix, and proceeded to Austin and then through several southern Texas cities and many small towns, ultimately ending up in Laredo where we listened to Carol’s Sweet Adelines group perform via the Internet from our hotel room. It was the rainy season while we were in the Laredo area. I have to say, while I always find it interesting visiting new places, I was quite underwhelmed by Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. We did cross over to the Mexican side of the border for a few hours one afternoon where we had lunch and Brian visited a Mexican pharmacy where he was able to obtain prescriptions and fill those prescriptions for some antibiotics he wanted to carry back to New Zealand.

The streets had poor drainage and were somewhat flooded by large puddles much of the time we were there. In my reality, I found little difference between the two cities on opposite sides of the borders. Perhaps, this was because the population of the American city of Laredo is approximately 95% Hispanic, thus, Spanish seemed to be the dominant language, so it didn’t look, feel, sound, smell or taste all that much different then its Mexican neighbor. However, to be fair, I only saw a small part of Laredo and even less of Nuevo Laredo. I’ll need to revisit Laredo and see more of this city that dates back to 1790 and almost doubled in population between 1990 and 2010. Brian and I parted ways at the Laredo International Airport where I dropped him off to fly to Los Angeles to meet up with Carol and then fly back to New Zealand. Anytime Brian and I are together we have some kind of adventure and this was another fun one.