Texas, where football is religion

Ryan and I are parked at a gas station four miles west of Kerrville, Texas, working furiously to get this blog and a photo gallery online. We just toured the Alamo and San Antonio's hip RiverWalk district and want to get everything uploaded before we lose the cell phone coverage we need to access the Internet.

Our next stop being El Paso, almost 600 miles away, we've been told repeatedly how boring and desolate this 10-hour stretch of I-10 will be. "You'll see a lot of tumbleweeds," Alamo Gator Club president Michael Millet told me today.

Looks like we're finally getting to the desert portion of the Desert Dash.

At the Alamo we met Sgt. Thomas Heimel. He and other soldiers were the subject of a local newspaper story today about decorated troops meeting with high school football players to remind them there's more to life than X's and O's.

We saw that Tuesday when we toured the Katrina-battered Ninth Ward in New Orleans (check out the video). Another reminder is Heimel's Purple Heart, which he earned in Najaf, Iraq in 2004. "I had a mortar land behind me and I caught a piece of it in my hip."

Next we lunched at The County Line barbeque restaurant at the RiverWalk. It's a groovy bar and restraurant district where a faux river runs through it. Over brisket San Antonio Express-News religion writer Abe Levy told us college football is a religion in the Lone Star State. He said he's not surprised to hear that Gator transplants like Millet feel unappreciated here. "We're Texas -- the world revolves around us," Levy said.

My guess is that in the next few days we'll be meeting some Gator and Buckeye fans who disagree. Stay tuned.

While you're waiting, check out photos from San Antonio.