Hill Country of Texas

Bluebonnets on a ranch near Kerrville, Texas

In the hill country of Texas bluebonnets, white poppies, daisies, and several other flower species all bloom around the end of March and into April. This year, 2016, has been an especially great spring for the flowers as the winter was mild with plenty of rain.

My mother's sister lives near Bandera, the Cowboy Capital of the World. It's hard to believe as the only "cowboy" I've seen so far was a dude in shorts, a cowboy hat and painted cowboy boots, probably bought that very day at the Western Warehouse in San Antonio.

We flew into San Antonio on Tuesday and spent a sunny Wednesday traveling all through the hill country stopping often to photograph the rolling limestone hills, red granite cliffs, clear streams, and wildflowers. Because it was a weekday there were no traffic jams at the more scenic spots, though there were certainly a lot of people out doing the same thing.

The Hill Country is an area bounded by San Antonio in the south, Austin in the East, and the Llano red granite uplift in the north and west. West of Kerrville the hills seem like small mountains, the roads narrow and twisty, the views from hilltops spectacular.

Larger towns have common national brand-name hotels, but the smaller towns feature B&B's, cabins, cottages, and furnished apartments available from local internet sites and others like AirBnB and HomeStay. The streams and rivers are fairly shallow but wide, and navigable by flat bottomed canoes that are available to rent. Cypress trees line many of the creeks with spaghetti-piles of convoluted roots.

This year it is green, so green as to seem like a miracle to most of us westerners who've grown accustomed to the decade long drought.

The local food is phenomenal: BBQ (Coopers in Llano) and chicken fried steak (Hill Country Cafe in Kerrville). Mashed potatoes with cream gravy, fried okra, crispy green beans, fresh salads, coleslaw, potato salad, black and pinto beans, cobblers with local blackberries and cherries, even homemade apple ice cream in Medina.

So far it's been a fantastic trip; visiting relatives, seeing friends in Austin, and adding one more checkmark on my bucket - photographing the bluebonnets at high season in Texas.

Ranch decor with bluebonnets.

Cypress roots holding trees to the riverbanks.

Remnant of a long ago Cypress along the Median River

Last few days of the Eastern Trip!!

After Louisianna, I whizzed through the eastern part of Texas to Austin to visit an old friend. Our relationship was that of acquaintances who go back a very long distance. After high school, I lived with Becky, and after I moved out, Marcy moved in. Becky's little house, behind the pharmacy where she worked was the hang-out for all our high school friends who still lived at home while attending CU in Boulder. John, now Marcy's husband, was one of those hang-out buddies. He was the acknowledged genius of our school, and went on to invent a very cool hearing aid, as well as many electronic devices having to do with audio. He even has an Oscar for tech work in the movies. Needless to say, he's done well, and they have a home in Colorado, and a condo in Austin.

John was gone so I visited Marcy by myself. We used her I-phone to call Becky and do "face time". It was great for the three of us to hang out like we did 40 years ago. And Becky hadn't seen Marcy's condo so we gave her a visual tour, she gave us a tour of her dogs wrestling and her hubby rummaging in the closet.  We went for a short dog-walk down 6th street where there was at least one bar with a live band on every block. And good bands too! The next day we took a bus tour of Austin and ate lunch at the world's largest Whole Foods. In fact, though it's been remodeled and enlarged, I do believe it is the first Whole Foods too. What an experience. It's somewhere between a health food joint, a food court, and a grocery.

Austin was just lovely, breezy, warming up, full of walking trails and a river that is damed up into several lakes where people were out boating, running along the paths, where bats live under the bridge, and there are lots of dogs on leashes. I was sorry I'd only scheduled one day to hang out with Marcy. We had a great time together, and there is so much more to see. I would have loved to be there over a weekend and really experience the Austin night life.

On to Bandera where my aunt and uncle, Judy and Bob, have parked their RV for the winter. It claims to be the cowboy capital of Texas, if such a place might be said to exist. A cute little town with charming shops and a good Mexican restaurant where I got the first enchilada I'd had in months. Soul Food. It made my belly's heart pitter with happiness.....

RV park near Bandera, TX

I spent two days with my relatives. We drove around the area, it really is gorgeous countryside. A limestone uplift, there are ridges full of fossils, valleys, steep hills, tight curves, and small towns where the root business is apparently ranching as there is no top soil for farming. Quite a number of second home mansions dot the hilltops, but in the little towns people live in modest frame homes on quiet streets. Towns where churches seem more numerous than businesses. There are feral wild pigs that uproot gardens, dig in ponds, and terrorize the population. Years ago an entrepreneur let some African Black Antelope lose, and now the countryside is awash in those. The males are black with interesting horns that look somewhat like small moose antlers, the females are buff colored with smaller racks. Larger ranches have fenced in the beasties and they let city slickers come out and shoot them for the trophy heads (and meat too, I hope!) A few ranches also raise buffalo, kept inside with electrified fences. A concept that reminds me of Jurassic Park. I think the buffalo stay there because there's not much to eat anywhere else.

Poor Texas. It has suffered such a terrible drought. It was so dry most of the grass had crumbled and blown away. Usually they get 14 -18 inches of rain per year, and last year, only one inch fell. Much of the state has burned up. What ought to have been the brown and gold landscape of winter was instead dusty gray.

A collection of Christmas bears.

On Friday night we drove to a nearby town to a cowboy jam session. There were about 20 players and 50 audience members. It was in the bottom floor of the Masonic hall, a large rectangular room with a bathroom and "kitchen" along the back wall and metal support poles down the center. They'd set up tables with white paper covers and Christmas decor, and more tables along the edge of the room for the potluck. We got there a bit late and there wasn't much left to eat except turkey and some carrots with dip. However, the dessert table was still overflowing. My aunt Judy has a reputation for making pies and her coconut cream pie was obscured momentarily by bodies crowded round it, then vanished entirely.

The jam session was a riotous and fun affair. Most in the audience were over 50, some in their eighties, including a couple who also played. The musicians were all good, except for one poor man who has apparently been trying to play the fiddle for the last five years and is almost as good as when he started. He squeaked and squawked his way through Little Town of Bethlehem. The only way I knew which song he was playing is that the other guys played the actual notes and kept the rhythm. But, God bless him, he was up there trying and everybody clapped when he was done. (Was the cheering from those grateful he'd stopped?)  Some of the tunes were traditional Christmas carols, but most of them was just good ol' Country/Western songs with lyrics like this:

But my tears have washed I Love You
From the Blackboard of My Heart
It's too late to clean the slate
And make another start
I'm satisfied the way things are
Although we're far a-part
My tears have washed I Love You from
The Blackboard of My Heart.

On Saturday I drove forever. You know, Texas is a big state. People know that, but you don't really know it till you've driven the breadth of it. All in all, I drove for two whole days to get across. Spent Saturday night with my cousin Bryon and his wife LuAnne in Farwell, TX. We had a great time catching up since we've not seen each other much in the last thirty years.

Then, another five hour drive across New Mexico to arrive home mid afternoon on Sunday. Whew.

Aunt Judy and Sachs.

It sure was nice to get into countryside I recognized and didn't need a GPS or a map to traverse. I sure know how Dorothy felt after visiting OZ. There's just nothing like home.

This is the last entry for the Eastern Trip. Over 4,000 miles in two months.....

Stay tuned for a new series of Mexican blogs that should start showing up mid January. Nos vemos!

Los Alamos, New Mexico. So beautiful in early winter.

I-40 Road Trip - Texas

New Mexico seems to flow seamlessly into Texas, except that as soon as you cross the border, the road smooths out and the wind picks up. It’s the most memorable thing about the Panhandle. Trees grow sideways, pointing to the north-east, never having had a calm day to spread in any other direction. 

The mesas and bluffs more typical of New Mexico eventually disappear and give way to a landscape that reminds of giant swells in a calm ocean. By the time the road reaches Amarillo, the land has flattened out to a finely honed plane, pierced by an occasional silo, known as a grain elevator, rising to ten stories or more. Every town seems to have one, and sometimes the concrete buildings are all that is left of a crumbling little burg.

Several land owners have started farming the wind. Over twenty five wind turbines are lined up taking advantage of the constant source of energy. At over a million dollars a pop, that’s quite an investment.

I spent five years of my childhood in the Panhandle of Texas. Back then, it couldn’t quite qualify for the Buckle on the Bible Belt Award. But it was definitely one of the holes.

Now I find that it qualifies as a winner, hands down.

In India, it was amusing to see non-religious businesses named after gods. There was the Hanuman Dry Cleaners; “We move mountains to serve you,” a reference to Hanuman’s picking up an entire mountain and flying it to a healer so he could find the right herbs to cure the prophet.  Other businesses had Ganesh or Ganesha, Shiva, Kali, Durga, and Buddha in the names.

So it should not be surprising that people in the US have taken to the idea. In Amarillo there was a huge sign that advertised the Jesus Is Lord Travel Center, “Cash the same as Credit!” I never actually spotted the place though for a while I thought it might be approaching. On the horizon arose an enormous white cross, as tall as a grain silo. The place was Groom, Texas and indeed it was taller than the elevators, lording over the multitudes of single level homes.

Cadillac taggers

West of Amarillo, about 5 miles, there is a most interesting ‘tourist’ attraction. It’s called Cadillac Ranch. A farmer who owns a large stretch of cultivated land planted 8 Cadillacs, nose down in the middle of the field. It’s apparently the custom for people to spray paint the hulks. There are signs just outside the fence that forbid spray painting on “this side” of the fence. Of course the signs themselves have been graffitti’d and so has the nearby trash dumpster. A short walk to the crop of Cadillacs in the late afternoon revealed a colorful array of messages and symbols, painted over many layers of the same. It reminded me of the big rock in White Rock, NM where every few days the locals paint the entire rock a new color and then add birthday greetings, congratulations, or political statements. Some scientist from Los Alamos National Lab did a core drill and discovered the rock has grown eight inches thicker since people started doing this forty years ago. 

Cadillac Ranch

A real cowboy at Cadillac Ranch

Colorful Caddy

Clouds built up in the west giving a glorious red and gold sunset just as I pulled into McLean, Texas in search of dinner. It’s a disappearing town dominated by a Mega Church along old Route 66. In fact, a faded sign advertises McLean as The Heart of Route 66. Just as that road was absorbed by I-40 and only minute stretches of it remain, so it is with McLean. There are three going enterprises in town that I could see: a gas station/convenience store, small motel, and a Grocery-Deli on an otherwise empty main street. I ordered some food from the deli and then took a walk around the town. The streets are still paved with red bricks, a common practice back in the 1930s and 40s. The town has a city hall, a library in a good sized building, about seven closed and apparently deserted antique stores and one lawyer’s office. Many buildings had collapsed or been torn down. Others were boarded up. I think the whole town would make a great set for a movie, but it would need some fixing up first.

Even though the town seemed deserted on this Friday night, several people came into the deli to pick up pizzas or other groceries while I was there. The owner has only lived there for a year, having moved from Houston. That must have been culture shock! Her daughter is 15 and goes to the high school which has about 50 kids total. The town was decked out with “Go Tigers” and Homecoming greetings. She told me their team only has six players. I wonder if there is a micro football league? Football is so huge in Texas, even an almost ghost town still has an amazing spirit.