Consistent spring-like weather has arrived at last here in northern Illinois. So we took the opportunity late this afternoon to visit Volkening Heritage Farm, an open-air museum with structures dating from the 1880s. It’s part of the larger (135-acre) Spring Valley.
Spin the wheel of time back – not that long, really – and German immigrant farmers put this part of Illinois, the future northwestern suburbs, to prosperous use. The open-air museum of our time echoes that previous time. Not in each detail, but the facsimile is pretty good. There’s a vegetable and flower garden —
That meant that Spring Valley’s former peony farm, about a 10-minute walk from the former German farm, was abloom with peonies. Like cherry blossoms in other places and other contexts, they don’t last long. Some years we miss them all together, partly because the blooming isn’t quite fixed. One year, for instance, I visited on my early June birthday once and found an embarrassment of peonies. Other years, they are earlier. This is an early year.
So we walked some of Spring Valley’s various trails, themselves flush with spring green, toward the peony field.
Across one of Spring Valley’s creeks, still vigorous from the heavy late-night rain a few days ago.
The peony field.
The blooms.
Digital cameras make astonishing images sometimes, but still pale compared to an eye view.
Down in South Jersey earlier this month, I didn’t see the Jersey Devil. I did see Mighty Joe.
He counted as my introduction to the Pine Barrens, standing at a convenience store on US 206 in Indian Mills, Shamong Township, New Jersey. His story, which Roadside America tells well, began in Spain – really? – though immigrant Mighty Joe apparently has spent most of his existence in New Jersey as a commercial mascot of one kind or another. He’s still that, but also a memorial to the son of the store’s owner, Larry Valenzano, according to the sign on the gorilla’s chest. The younger Valenzano, a body builder nicknamed Mighty Joe, died of cancer in 1999.
I didn’t stop for Joe heading south on US 206. Can’t stop for everything. I figured I wouldn’t see him on my return to Trenton either, since I was planning to return on smaller roads through the heart of the Pine Barrens, after visiting Atlantic City. All went according to plan, until I actually got into the heart of the Pine Barrens fairly late in the afternoon of April 9.
Considering how close you are to Philadelphia and New York, it’s remarkable how remote the Pine Barrens feel. The region, I understand, is the largest surviving forest on the Eastern Seaboard south of Maine’s North Woods, totaling over 800,000 acres.
The region is also called the Pinelands. It certainly fits.
Remote, maybe, but still plenty of signs of human habitation, past and present. I stopped to take my bearings at a wide place in the road, and noticed gravestones.
French Cemetery, named for a number of people buried named French, not for their nationality. “One of the oldest burial grounds in South Jersey,” the stone asserts. Could be, but I have no way to check that.
Interesting little spot anyway, northeast from Egg Harbor City and past the Mullica River and near the Wading River. Or was that the actual location? I was traveling on marked county roads, but pretty soon I started seeing county road signs covered with black plastic bags, next to newer signs. I can only guess, but I think that meant a recent change in the numbering of the county roads.
That further meant that both my paper and electronic maps were wrong – in as much detail as they had anyway, which wasn’t a lot. “Lost” is too strong a word, but I’d say I was disoriented in a web of meandering, ill-marked roads. I stopped more than once among the pines of the Pinelands to try to figure out a better course.
Then it occurred to me: I remembered seeing some of the exit numbers on highways near Trenton had been changed, too. I’m speculating, but I think that had something to do with my GPS going just a little funny in the head the night before. Damn it, New Jersey.
Eventually I worked my way back toward Egg Harbor City, a sizable town on US 30, which connects with US 280, which goes straight back to Trenton; the way I’d come. That’s how I was able to stop to see Mighty Joe.
Even so, I happened across a few places in the Pinelands to stop, especially Batsto Village, site of the former Batsto Iron Works.
Most of the open-air museum buildings are 19th century, but the Batsto Iron Works had roots that went back to Colonial times. Some enterprising early NJ settlers found bog iron in the area. By the 19th century, the iron smelting was doing well enough to support a company town, including of course the boss’s house.
The company store.
The company paid in script until the workers were organized enough to demand legal tender for their labor. Unlike at Fayette Historic State Park in Michigan, the actual industrial facility, the 19th-century blast furnace, is long gone. The place has a good-looking lake, however. Created by a small dam on Batsto River to harness the water for the sawmill.
A vista that says New Jersey? Yes, but not the New Jersey of song and story.
Back in Egg Harbor City (pop. 4,442), I chanced across the Egg Harbor City Cemetery – another reason to leave the GPS inactive most of the time. If the box tells you where to go, you’ll miss minor misdirections that take you to unexpected places.
I’ve come up with my next approach to traversing the Pine Barrens. There will be a next time, provided my health holds out. That’s always a contingency these days, but anyway the approach can’t be as rational as trying to plot oneself on a map, or even follow the directions from a machine.
The region isn’t that large. That is, provided your car is gassed and in good running condition, since walking out of the Pine Barrels, even following surfaced roads, seems like a bad idea unless you’ve prepared yourself to do so. Assuming you drive, pick a direction – say east, toward the morning sun – and head that way, hewing to the direction as much as possible. It won’t be too long before you come to a reliably numbered state or US highway. Or in that case, the Garden State Parkway.
Sounds doable. Unless you encounter the Jersey Devil.
Time for spring break. Back to posting around April 26, when it might actually be spring in northern Illinois. There have been a few days recently when I’ve been able to sit out on my deck comfortably, which is my idea of spring, but not that many.
The recent trip to Texas seems like a while ago now. As usual, though, there were many details. A lot more than I can convey, but here are a few more.
Faces
At the National Funeral Museum in Houston, one display featured, chronologically, 20 photographs of Abraham Lincoln. The third to last one, from February 1865, is one you don’t see much.
On a wall in downtown Nacogdoches, familiar figures from Texas.
I didn’t work out who this was supposed to be, in downtown Houston. Better that way, I think.
Signs
This place in Austin, well known to Tom, serves most delicious tacos.
Bastrop: Cobbling runs in the family.
Belton.
Structures
A re-creation of an ancient Caddo home.
Durst-Taylor Historic House & Garden in Nacogdoches.
The Old Stone Fort Museum in the same town, which is made of stone, but was never a fort. On the campus of Stephen F. Austin State University. Recommendation to the university: if you want people to visit the place, provide just a little unrestricted parking. A little visitor parking anywhere on campus would be good.
Then again, the university seems determined to move the structure anyway — which might mean taking it apart, and then not putting it anywhere where because such a move would cost too much.
A place that has seen better days in Houston.
Downtown Lockhart.
The Southwest Museum of Clocks & Watches is permanently closed, alas.
Items
Cosmic in Austin is a bar and a collection of food trucks that surround an informal plaza with a lot of tables and chairs and shade. It’s a very pleasant place, and within walking distance of Tom’s home.
Houston manhole covers.
An artifact at the Old Stone Fort, but from San Augustine, and a hyperlocal soda bottle.
The New Mexico flag near Carlsbad NP.
Landscapes
Not just any landscapes, but within the Sierra Madera Astrobleme in West Texas. US 385 cuts right through the ancient crater for about eight miles, on the way to Marathon. You’d never know but for signs telling you that you’re entering the astrobleme, and one telling you that you are leaving it.
Memorials
The Houston National Cemetery.
RIP, Richard Allen Wilson. I don’t think that I’d ever seen an infinity symbol on a national cemetery stone. That, of course, made me curious, and I checked: it is one of the 98 various symbols that the National Cemetery Administration allows. The list is here.
I’m familiar with most of them, but not quite all of them, such as the Church of World Messianity, which is a Japanese new religion – it’s hard to keep track of all of those – and the Aaronic Order Church, which may or may not be part of the LDS movement, but in any case is an American sect. Hard to keep track of all those, too.
The NCA says: “No graphics (logos, symbols, etc.) are permitted on Government-furnished headstones or markers other than the available emblems of belief, the Civil War Union Shield, the Civil War Confederate Southern Cross of Honor, and the Medal of Honor insignias… Emblems of belief for inscription on Government headstones and markers do not include social, cultural, ethnic, civic, fraternal, trade, commercial, political, professional or military emblems.”
So (for example) symbols for the Loyal Order of Moose or some odd emoji or maybe a grawlix will not be considered, though as a comment about the Army, the latter would be funny.
Finally, a less formal memorial, but I’m sure just as heartfelt.
A memorial for Francisco Lin Herrera happens to be near the Giant paintings outside of Marfa. He died in an accident along that stretch of US 90. RIP, Francisco.
The Republic of Texas started out with 23 counties, with more carved out of those in the years afterward, until the most recent establishment, Kenedy County, in 1921. In our time, there are 254 counties, including (slightly) infamously, Loving County, pop. 64 last time I checked. If you go looking for a county with fewer people anywhere in the entire United States, you’ll be out of luck. Loving is it.
Strictly as a tourist proposition, county courthouses have a lot to recommend them. In all but the largest cities, they’re usually easy to find, on a square ringed by smaller buildings, and pretty much in the middle of their towns. They’re free, but not always open. Some have small museums; a few former courthouses are themselves more sizable museums. A good many date from the golden age of U.S. courthouse building, which I’d put from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War I.
With all that in mind, the following are five more Texas county courthouses I saw this time around.
Hill County, Hillsboro, Texas.
Presidio County, Marfa, Texas.
Runnels County, Ballinger, Texas
San Augustine County, San Augustine, Texas.
Scurry County, Snyder, Texas.
My maternal grandparents grew up in Scurry County. The courthouse I saw wasn’t the one grandpa would have seen as a young blade. That would be this.
My idle musing about visiting every 254 Texas courthouses was no mere musing for an architect who did exactly that, and blogged about it. About the modern Scurry County courthouse, he said, “Without a doubt, the 1972 alteration of the historic Scurry County courthouse is the most offensive desecration of a Texas courthouse to date. It’s truly sad.”
“These redesign plans are — interesting. Where are the windows?”
“Window are passé.”
Another resource for courthouse (and postcard) enthusiasts: Courthouse History, a collection of postcards depicting every county and parish in the United States. Now that’s an epic project.
Houston’s Glenwood Cemetery sprawls out near downtown, adjacent to much of the parkland along Buffalo Bayou. In Nacogdoches, Oak Grove Cemetery is a more modest burial ground. Nacogdoches is a more modest city. The entrance to Oak Grove is about a half block from the Main St., but the grounds are still tucked away in a residential neighborhood along Lanana St.
Decent flora, but not a garden cemetery.
It’s an old cemetery by modern Texas standards – the first burial was the year after independence – so the cemetery punches above its weight in one way: noted early Texans. Such as Harden Edwards.
The state saw fit, during the 1936 Centennial, to put up a new stone for Edwards, an empresario and “Leader of the Freedonian Rebellion,” who must have penned the rousing tune, “Hail, Hail Freedonia,” for future generations to enjoy.
The stone of a great-great granddaughter of Edwards who died in 1963 seems eager to bask in his remote glory. Why not?
He was a signer, fought at San Jacinto, and had a notable career in antebellum Texas and U.S. politics. There’s is a town a county over from Nacogdoches named Rusk, seat of Cherokee County. Also, strangely, a font based on his handwriting was created in our time, “Texas Hero.”
Some regular folks.
I don’t know how ordinary this person was, but perhaps he was gifted with Victorian prolixity. Or maybe his family was.
Brick tombs of the kind I’ve seen elsewhere in the South from roughly the same period, that is, sometime in the 19th century.
Adjacent to the cemetery but not associated with it is the former home of Zion Hill Baptist Church, one of the oldest African-American Baptist congregations in Texas, founded in 1878. The church is on the corner of Lanana and the delightfully named Bois d’arc St., as in lumpy “apples.”
The congregation hasn’t used the structure, designed in 1914 by architect Diedrich Rulfs, for nearly 40 years. It’s a fine little museum these days, restored to its early 20th century glory.
Rulfs was a German who made good in Texas, as so many have, within a very special niche: most of the buildings worth seeing in Nacogdoches are his work.
This clown in your nightmare. What did he look like again?
Right, Jack from Jack In the Box fame. Old Jack, that is, maybe from the early days of the fast-food chain in the ’50s and ’60s. Has that tired mid-century look because the mid-century was quite a while ago now. On the whole, even later versions of the clown has been retired.
I was fully awake when I encountered Jack, an artifact at Roadside America Museum, Hillsboro, Texas, a wall-to-wall gathering of American roadside advertising, or at least items that were pretty close to the roads – a sign or novelty item or product you might see at a gas station or a diner or a bar or a small grocery store or any such mid-century service business for a nation newly on the road, and with great gusto. Items large and small.
Located on a modest street of Hillsboro, a town between DFW and Waco. Jay and I arrived around mid-day on February 23.
Jack is around, but there are also Big Boys in quantity and variety. If I were that first one, I’d watch out for the criminal element from McDonaldland, standing right behind him trying not to look suspicious. Sure, he’s a burglar, but he might be a pickpocket or even a stickup man, too.
Betty Boop. From a slightly earlier time, but still pulling her weight as a carhop.
Mr. Peanut. Didn’t something happen to him? Died of a busted goober?
Esso. I’m barely old enough to remember the Exxon brand consolidation. (Mad magazine parodied that as “Nixxon: Still the Same Old Gas.”)
Who is this? Why does anthropomorphic hot dog man, though the liberal application of condiments, encourage larger creatures to take a bite out of his head, indeed consume him as completely as unfortunate extras in Jurassic Park movies?
Admittance to Roadside America – no relation to the web site and (former?) book series of that name that I know of – is by making a phone call outside its door. The proprietor, one Carroll Estes, comes to the door, invites you in, and shows you around the place, pointing out things and sometimes recalling the acquisition of this or that, or letting you know how rare or not certain items are. An affable old fellow, grizzled if ever anyone was, probably in his 70s. So the commercial memorabilia all around us was no memorabilia when he was a lad, but part of the lay of the land. I came along in time to see some of those ads or at least characters myself, though they were fading.
He said he was particularly fond of Grapette items. Once he pointed that out, I started seeing them everywhere.
Been a long time since I had a passing thought about Grapette soda. It was available in north Texas in the mid-60s, and I’m sure I had more than a few Grapette bottle caps, once upon a time. I don’t remember its sister sodas, Orangette and Lemonette. According to Wiki at least, Grapette still exists as a house brand in Walmart’s beverage stable, and is popular even yet in Latin America.
I don’t remember O-So Grape.
Originated in Chicago and, like so many, has been revived at premium prices, which seems to go against the spirit of soda water you bought for coins in your misspent youth, but never mind.
There was much more. Mr. Estis has a sizable classic car collection in another part of the building, a much larger structure that had some industrial use at one time. He showed us around. He’d restored many of them himself, but he said he doesn’t do that as much anymore. He had some great ones, too. Wish I’d taken notes. But I was in the moment.
Even in the moment, you don’t notice everything. Especially at a chock-a-block place like Roadside America, where curios compete for your attention like a gaggle of souvenir-wallas in Delhi. It wasn’t until I looked at this picture that I noticed Wile E. Coyote sitting at the diner booth.
Stands to reason that Wile E. would patronize the few diners on the desert roads he haunts. He never managed to make a decent meal of the Roadrunner.
Rain. All the way from Illinois to Texas. We got mighty bouts of it that had died down ’round midnight. As if to remind me, about time I’m home. Huh?
Come to Marfa for the West Texas art city vibe, stay for the concrete structures. Even if they are off in the distance, at least from the parking lot.
How to think of the untitled works by Donald Judd (d. 1994) on the grounds of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa? Brutalism in a brutal environment? Man’s – that is Humanity’s – longing for angular order in world of irregularity? The strange coprolite of giant angular creatures barely known to paleontology?
I could go on like that all day. Yuriko and I arrived at Chinati early in the warm afternoon of February 18. I can’t say we weren’t warned. The foundation’s web site says: “Our collection is installed across 21 buildings and two off-site locations; additionally, three works are site-specific, outdoor installations. Guided tours are the only way to see the majority of Chinati’s collection and grounds. Purchase your tickets in advance; tours often sell out.”
As we told a volunteer behind the desk, we didn’t have time for a tour. What to see on one’s on?
A long line of concrete structures in the West Texas scrub, that’s what. No tour guide, just a wander among the structures. But not inside them, according to instructions that we did follow.
After a little wandering, I came to think it isn’t just the structures, but the shadows too. What is it that the shadow knows? Right, the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.
I could turn on the art-speak spigot to describe Chinati (one of those infinite AI spigots, I figure), but no. I will note the tumbleweeds we saw.
A little less permanent than the Judd works, but only a little.
Approach Huntsville, Texas, from the south on I-45, and you can’t miss Sam Houston. Big Sam.
The largest soap carving in the world until the city of Qufu (曲阜) in southwestern Shandong province put up one of Confucius that is 18.5 inches taller, from pedestal to top of the head.
That only goes to show that you don’t need AI to make stuff up. Sam Houston isn’t made of soap, naturally, but something a little more durable, concrete and steel, and towers 67 feet from the plinth — he must have a dandy view of the Interstate. It’s been up only since 1994, the work of Huntsville native David Adickes. As for Qufu, there are surely statues of Confucius there, but I don’t feel like looking them up.
Naturally I followed the signs to the statue’s parking lot, got out and looked around.
My priority afterward was lunch, and I happened on Mr. Hamburger there in the heart of Huntsville, a few miles from Big Sam.
Not in the original location that opened nearby in 1959, I later found out, but in a redeveloped gas station. The original mascot, looking a little tired after decades in the Texas weather, had been moved inside to greet customers as they go to the bathroom.
All that wouldn’t be noteworthy if the place hadn’t delivered the goods, but it did.
Thus fortified, I found my way to the Sam Houston Memorial Museum, which is on the campus of Sam Houston Institute of Technology.
Old joke: Sam Houston State University. Not a large museum, but a nice collection of artifacts.
None better than Santa Anna’s silver chamber pot, a spoil of war at San Jacinto that the Mexican government probably has never wanted back.
Besides the museum building, the grounds sport a small open-air museum. Including a log cabin (not Houston’s) from the Huntsville area, from around the time of the Republic.
A log cabin that was Houston’s. He used it for his law office.
The earlier of the two Houston homes in Huntsville.
The later of the two, Steamboat House. The nickname fits. Houston, relieved of the governorship due to his belief that Texas was making a mistake in leaving the Union, died there in ’63.
The grounds has a water feature. With water fowl and cypress knobs.
Elsewhere, some land fowl.
A touch of authenticity, since the Houstons must surely have had chickens around.
One place I didn’t go in February was Ghana, the west African nation. If I had to pick a place to visit in that part of the world, I might well pick Ghana, for various reasons. One is that the coffin shopping is unlike anywhere else.
Rather, I stopped by the National Museum of Funeral History in northern Houston, which has a connection to Ghana. I was expecting a display of coffins maybe, but the museum has so much more: many hearses, horse-drawn and automobiles; items from the funerals of U.S. presidents and popes, including a large display about the funeral of President George Bush the elder; entire sections on cremation and embalming from the earliest times to now; Victorian death memorabilia in its macabre (to us) variety; a Day of the Dead exhibit; and, to my surprise, Ghanaian coffins, which the museum calls the largest such collection outside west Africa.
My favorite, though it’s a hard choice: the Duracell coffin, with its distinct copper top. Guess those batteries are sold in west Africa. You’d think Energizer would be the better choice.
The museum, founded in 1993, occupies more than 30,000 square feet in an unassuming building in a neighborhood of unassuming buildings. Had it not been for the billboard advertising it on the highway into Houston, I might have missed it. Or not. I have a way of ferreting out smaller museums. One important advantage of the NMFH: it’s open on Mondays. Many Houston museums are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays — the two days I was in town.
As with many specialized museums, NMFH is the legacy of a single person with a driving interest in a single subject and, in his case, access to many of the relevant artifacts. The subject just happens to be death adjacent, so when I mention the museum, people get a little weird.
“The idea for the Museum grew from Robert L. Waltrip’s 25-year dream of establishing an institution to educate the public and preserve the heritage of death care,” the museum says. Waltrip, a Houston mortician born to an undertaker father, didn’t need death care himself until recently, dying in 2023 at 92.
The hearse collection is impressive, making the museum count as a carriage and auto museum. Not all automotive hearses, at least in earlier times, looked like the stretch postwar hearses one thinks of now.
A vehicle the likes of which I’d never seen: a 1921 Rockfalls Hearse, built in Sterling, Illinois, the museum says. The hearse’s hand-carved body is composed of six types of wood.
Some horse-drawn hearses.
A children’s hearse from, of course, Victorian times.
Some coffins and caskets, too. “It’s not the cough/that carries you off/but the coffin/they carry you off in.”
Including an oddity known as the Money Casket, which is on loan to the museum, and was never meant to be put into the ground.
A section about presidential funerals. I spent a while there.
Prominent is a replica of President Lincoln’s casket.
There was a model of Lincoln’s funeral car, probably the most famous such in American history.
Other methods for carrying Lincoln when he wasn’t on the train.
Other presidential funerals got their due, such as those of Washington, Grant, Garfield, McKinley, TR, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford and as mentioned, an entire small room about the elder Bush. He had a funeral train as well, though relatively modest: from Spring to College Station, all within east Texas.
Papal funerals, as you’d think, involve a highly precise set of rituals, told in some detail by the museum.
There is much more.
All in all, a first-rate museum about coping with finality.
Never cared much for the term snowbird, with its connotations of getting up every morning to play golf during winter in some arid place, or spending the evenings with members of your cohort in some gated community, maybe drinking but definitely grousing about the state of the world. Still, considering that in the winter of 25/26, I’ve spent two out of the last three months – the hard winter months, up Illinois way – in warmer places, it would be churlish to cast shade on fellow old people who happen to enjoy golf or grousing.
On the other hand, I’m not about to claim snowbird as descriptive for myself. I just happen to be able to take long trips during the cold months (along with my laptop, for work). In December, Florida. In February, Texas.
Back on February 3, I got on a plane and flew to Austin. I flew home from Dallas on March 3. In between, I spent time – and Yuriko joined me for a while – traversing the state of Texas, going so far west at one point that we ended up in New Mexico. By traversing, I mean long drives, in a rental car part of the time, and in my brother Jay’s car as well, a blue Subaru known as the Blubaru.
I drove from Austin east to Houston, mostly on US 290; from Houston to Nacogdoches, mostly on US 59; then to Dallas on various state highways, such as Texas 21 and 19; and from Dallas to San Angelo to Marathon, Texas, on US 67 and on the grandly remote US 385, which will also take you to the desert reaches of the Big Bend.
From Marathon, Texas, across to Carlsbad, NM, our route took us along US 90, then Texas 56, then US 62/180. Later, US 62/180 took us from Carlsbad part way back to Dallas — to Sweetwater, Texas — but mostly we went on the faster but less interesting I-20. Dallas to San Antonio was partly I-35, but also US 281, which takes you around the perma-gridlock that is Austin.
Of all those, the road between Nacogdoches and San Augustine on a day trip, Texas 21 heading east, winding through greenish (for February) rolling hills, was a favorite.
The towns listed above were just the places I spent the night, alone or with Yuriko or with my brothers. In between were such places as Bastrop, these days a day-trip from Austin, with the requisite boutiques and restaurants; Huntsville, home of Sam Houston and memorials to the first president of Texas; San Augustine, rival with Nacogdoches in claiming to be the oldest town in Texas; Stephenville and Ballinger, geographically about as deep in the heart of Texas as you can be; the West Texas art town of Marfa and the way station of Van Horn; a string of oil patch towns such as Hobbs, NM, and Seminole, Lamesa, Snyder, and Sweetwater, back in Texas. Later, traversing north to south and back again, I stopped in Hillsboro and Belton, along the I-35 axis; and Lockhart, which has claimed for itself barbecue capital of the state.
Along the way, oddities were encountered. Otherwise, why drive on smaller roads?
Such as an ice cream shop in Waller, Texas.
Or a highly visible ad for Rockets RV Park in Gaines County, Texas, not far east of the border with New Mexico.
A former Texaco station on an obscure Texas highway (Farm-to-Market 1690).
Had various encounters with the historic El Camino Real, whose various tendrils crossed a large slice of the future state of Texas, once upon a time.
Yuriko and I visited Big Bend National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I saw the National Museum of Funeral History in the city of Houston and the museum devoted to Houston (the man) in Huntsville. Also, Roadside America in Hillsboro, an eccentric collection of American commercial art, complete with a personal tour by the proprietor, and the outdoor art at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, that is, brutalist concrete structures in the brutal desert environment. I became acquainted with the splendid Glenwood Cemetery in Houston and the smaller and more ragged, but no less interesting city cemeteries in Huntsville and Nacogdoches and Palestine. I stopped and looked at about a dozen county courthouses, of which Texas has many.
We ate a lot of meat along the way. As one does in Texas.
Also, Mexican food.
Eat like that and you’d better do some walking, and I did: various places in Austin and Houston and Dallas, in all three national parks, around downtowns and courthouse squares in a number of small towns, and a handful of local parks.
All that was good, but of course best of all, I had time to visit friends and relatives, of whom there are many in Texas: Tom and Nancy in Austin, Kirk and Lisa in Nacogdoches, another Tom and Steve and Ron and Greg and Judith in San Antonio, to list the friends; both brothers, two out of three nephews and their wives and all four of their children, to list relatives, along with the mother of one nephew’s wife (niece-in-law sounds peculiar, but that fits too). Also, I met for the first time two good friends of Tom’s in Austin, and one of Kirk and Lisa’s granddaughters.
I’d set out to do four long drives when I was 64, but this makes five. Guess I’m an overachiever about driving, anyway.
