The trip through Texas

I think we left you at the Arizona/New Mexico border. Well we have come along way since then, both literally and, well, as a couple. We are now just outside of Shiner, TX on our way to Houston, more on that later.

New Mexico was rather uneventful. The countryside was kind of cool, they sell a lot of fireworks there. I was driving and all of a sudden we crossed a river and we saw a sign that said it was the Rio Grande. Pretty exciting, it just snuck up on us. It goes right through the middle of Las Cruces, home of New Mexico State University.

We were driving into El Paso and there are all these shantys, not a very nice town at all. And then just as Geoff was commenting on them we realized that was actually Juarez Mexico, it is like 30 yards away. It is insane.

It was there, at the New Mexico/Texas Border that Geoff took over the driving. He has been driving since. He plans on driving across the entire state of Texas, what a bad ass. And by the way, Texas is not small. In fact, it is ginormous.

So we were cruising along and had like 3/8 of a tank of gas. We decided to stop at the next city to get some gas. Little did we realize the next town was about 348 miles away. We pulled out our trusty AAA TripTix and it showed there was a small establishment called Roosevelt. We pulled in on fumes. Roosevelt does not boost a school, or restaurant, or more than 10 stationary houses. It does however have one functioning gas pump. Geoff fell in love with the town. Interesting story about Roosevelt; Alice Walker originally sent an application for a Post Office for the city under a different name, but the Post Master General, who was a friend of then President Teddy Roosevelt, decided to name the city after him because there was a military post there when he was a Rough Rider. So now the town is named after Teddy Roosevelt, not Alice Walker.

Speaking of Teddy Roosevelt – Rick Shook let us know about a little hotel in San Antonio where Teddy Roosevelt recruited the Rough Riders, more accurately the bar inside of the hotel where he recruited them. It is in the Menger Hotel – which is actually quite classy, far too classy for Geoff and me. It is right across the street from the Alamo, I recommend checking it out if you are in the area. But it is important to not that the bar does not open until 11AM and it is not smiled upon when you ask, ‘Hey, when does the bar open, I’m dying for some whiskey’ at 8:45AM like we did.

Backtracking a little bit, it is important to note where we stayed in San Antonio. We were hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Manship the two nicest people in the entire state of Texas, no, the entire WORLD. They are the parents of famed Stanford pitcher Matt Manship who I know from school. They took us to a tasty Texas dinner (I had the chicken fried steak) and they we crashed at their place that night. As if that wasn’t nice enough, they made us breakfast in the morning. Which included the best damn cantaloupe I’ve ever had. It was has if God came down and touched the cantaloupe before I consumed it. Delicious.

By the way, Texas has about 657 counties. They just hand these things out. I think it is possible to have a county named after us by the time we leave the state.

We left the Manship household this morning and headed to Downtown San Antonio. Real nice. The Alamo is rather small but I’ll tell you something, made me proud to be an American. Those studs held the Mexican Army off for 12 days without a single one of them dying before they got absolutely destroyed on the 13^th day. The Alamo museum also gave a real nice history of the Bowie Knife, seeing how Col. Bowie fought and died at the Alamo. Not to mention the story of how Davie Crockett did not get elected for a 4^th term as a Congressman so he told his constituents, ‘You can go to Hell, I’m going to Texas’. We need more Congressmen like that. We also walked the Riverwalk a little bit. Very cool. Yet not nearly as cool as ….

Shiner, TX. This town ROCKS! Why, well they have restaurants like Little Rudy’s with no signs, you just have to know it exists. And there you can get a $3.25 bacon cheeseburger the size of your head. We had lunch there while we waited for our free tour of the Spoetzl Brewery, home of Shiner Bock the #1 specialty beer in the state of Texas. The original brewmaster claimed to boil off the alcohol in the beer during Prohibition because they sold it has “near beer”. I guess he would tend to forget to do that. It is that kind of stuff that makes me love Texas. That and the cowboy hats they sell in Wal-Mart or the enormous high school football stadiums. What a delight.

We are on our way to Houston as we speak and rocking out to Led Zeppelin.