Free Republic

PORT ARANSAS — Northerners who spend winters in Texas are still making the trip south, but they're thinking twice about traveling to violence-plagued Mexico.

I now have tasted the good life. Sunshine. Leisure. Camaraderie. Bare legs in January. Time to kill. Five days as a "winter Texan" is an experience that is old hat to many of my generation including a number of my friends. But it was new to me. Life at the border is different - culturally, racially, linguistically. It features a diversity well established. A diversity much of our European-settled nation is just now experiencing. And it seems to work. My hosts saw nothing strange about breakfast at Chapita's in Harlingen, Texas, lunch across the border at Garcia's in Nuevo Progreso,...