I remember reading a quote that said something like “the best vacation is one you plan to the finest detail, then never take.” My experience going to Texas this past March turned out quite the opposite: almost none of my plans worked out. Instead, I got to rely on spontaneous surprise. Original itinerary in brief: …
“What do you want for your birthday?” I asked my Lina. “An adventure.” I pulled some levers, pushed some buttons, and made a plan. Sunday, February 16, 2020. We headed NW on US 183. This was a pleasure trip for ourselves, and I was also keen to preview a new route to West Texas …
There’s a desire that builds in me after too long a time away from Trans-Pecos Texas. The final winter weekend of 2016 presented an opportunity to scratch that itch when I learned that the Nature Conservancy’s Davis Mountains Preserve would be open. Lina and I chose to combine this year’s wedding anniversary trip with a …
Here’s a guest post: Austin holds a reputation for being a strange place. What are the most bizarre aspects of this creative city? photo: propertytaxloansfortexas.com Red Wassenich would never have imagined what he started probably as a novelty and a mild shocker would turn into a monster. Neither could he have foretold that the city …
Youth camps have graced the Kerrville area of the Texas Hill Country since the 1920s, but Presbyterians were the first denomination to start a summer church camp there. Methodists, Lutherans, and Catholics soon followed suite. Currently, one can visit nearby Mount Wesley, Camp Chrysalis, and TECABOCA. Mo Ranch is a 500-acre conference and camp center …
June 8, 1974, from the HWR Travel Log: On that Saturday, I was exploring southwest of Austin. I remembered that my high school algebra teacher, Turner Ferguson, taught riflery at a camp called Friday Mountain Ranch during the summers, so I drove into that gate to look for him. This was only three years since …
Although traveling and exploring Texas has been my life-long pursuit, I begin earnestly to do it in 1973, just after buying my first automobile. Still at UT studying radio-TV-film and living just off campus, I could walk to class, but on weekends drove my car. The Dodge Dart Sport Convertriple was so designated because it …
I’ve traveled back and forth from Austin to Corpus Christi probably hundreds of times, still making new discoveries every trip. On a recent weekend, though, I reached back to a distant, personal past. My first night out away from family as a teenager was during the summer of 1965 or ‘66, early in my junior …
It’s a tradition for Lina and me to commemorate our wedding every year by sleeping in a historic hotel or bed and breakfast. For our seventh this April, we added two other criteria: the place must be next to the ocean and a destination where neither of us had ever been. Tall orders? Filled! It …
Austin’s outdoors hold many hidden gems. In particular, I just rediscovered a public place that isn’t a park or preserve per se. The Austin Water Utility owns frontage along 3.5 miles of the Colorado River’s north bank near Bergstrom Airport. The 1,200-acre Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant offers a major bird observatory, manufactures Dillo Dirt …