Truck Stops and Desert Rocks: Michael and Dan Drive Across Texas
Daniel Emberley, January 2024
Michael and I have been talking about going back to Marfa, Texas, since we first visited in 2010. At the time, we did not know there were two Judd Foundations there, and had only been able to see Chinati, the art museum section. Plus, we’d heard great things about Big Bend, one of the largest and least visited National Parks. We rented an SUV and hit the highway on a big west Texas road trip. Food was mediocre, but scenery amazing.
Wednesday, January 3
Our first stop was the Gonzales Buc-ee’s on I-10. Buc-ee’s is an east Texas institution, and bit of a cult. Technically, they’re a chain of truck stops. On the ground, they blow that paradigm out of the water, with massive food halls, themed retail, and (as their billboards boast) the cleanest bathrooms. We got a steak burrito, bbq sandwich, and salad that we ate in the car, since there are no picnic tables.
My in-laws live in a development where the streets are named after Texas State Parks. That has intrigued me, I want to see what places like Possum Hollow and Mustang Island look like. Palmetto State Park was our first, the northernmost stand of palmetto palms in the States. The CCC did a lot of work here in the 1930s, and their infrastructure is still the backbone of the park, with classic picnic pavilions and well-mapped paths through the forest. It’s a level hike through the subtropics, with fields full of the palmettos that you’ve likely seen only as landscape plants. They survive here due to a moist soil layer over clay, from geologic eras when the whole southern part of the States was tropical. We were going to see this a lot in the Parks, an island of vegetation that has hung on due to altitude, soil conditions, or a rain shadow as climate changed around it. We picked up a Texas State Parks pass here, which made our entrances to the others free and simple. Their park system is disrespected, underfunded, and understaffed. Being able to flash the pass blitzed us through entry gates where folks were not well equipped to take payment.
An hour west of Palmetto is San Antonio, where we started at the San Antonio Museum of Art. We’ve been to San Antonio a couple of times, liked it, but always blew off their main art museum. That was a mistake. Cambridge Seven, the architecture firm founded by Walter Gropius, renovated the former Lone Star Brewery into a breathtaking collection of buildings linked by skywalks and elevators. The collection is quite good: weak in European, but strong in Spanish Colonial, contemporary, and Asian art. Surprisingly great halls of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman. Nelson Rockefeller gifted them a good collection of Mexican folk art. Also good, as one would expect, Texas furniture and art. The travelling show, out of Charlotte’s Mint Museum, was “American Made”, which showed the DeMell Jacobsen Collection of American Art. It is fantastic, the collection built by a widow in honor of her husband, of art they both loved.
The Holiday Inn Express Riverwalk should be taken out of commission. Originally built in the 1800’s as the Bexar County jail, it got what I’m sure was a fine historic renovation in the previous millennium. Now, though, it is exhausted, worn, with odd entry steps and even odder parking. Part of the allure of staying in the HIE brand is that we can drive up, park, get a standard room, and relax after a frenetic day of touring. Not here. It is, however, on the Riverwalk, right in the historic center, so we took advantage and walked up to the Mercado for the cliche but romantic Mi Tierra for margheritas, pork carnitas, and a giant salad. The lights post-Christmas were lovely.
Thursday, January 4
We woke up with a sweet walk around downtown. The San Antonio Municipal Art Collection, in the former Governor’s Palace, was open early, with a not bad collection of local artists. We enjoyed strolling past the Spanish Cathedral, Richardsonian Courthouse, and along the Riverwalk to La Villita. This was part of O’Neil Ford’s original vision for the Riverwalk, historic buildings restored and supplemented with 1950’s Modernism. It had looked tired years back, but has been well renovated, with market spaces of restaurants and small shops. Sweet. The Riverwalk itself reminded us of Rosslyn: it is yesterday’s vision of tomorrow, too many concrete retaining walls and parking garages, but still an asset. We put in a couple hours of work and condo board business, then drove north to Breckenridge Park. This is adjacent to Alamo Heights, the “nice” part of San Antonio, and the park and houses were stunning. Before WWII San Antonio had a Mexican artist who specialized in faux bois; concrete sculpted into fake woodwork. His family’s work filled the park as benches and pavilions, the best collection of this we’ve seen outside “Martha Stewart Living”. Lunch at DelicaTexan, the restaurant front of a smokehouse next door. A fantastic Texas Reuben and okay Italian coldcut, both with meats from the smokehouse.
What drew us here was the Witte. This is San Antonio’s local history and natural history museum, with a little art as well. I thought it would be a half-hour walk through, but the exhibits of archaeology, photography, and science are fantastic. They provided a great grounding for the geography we were about to drive through; we were really glad we made this stop. In the gardens around the Witte are historic small buildings, like jacals and farm structures, that had been relocated for their preservation, all accented with more faux bois.
Nearby is the massive San Antonio Botanic Garden. This has only been around since 1988, but is a great display. The greenhouses are sunken into the earth, so you walk into a courtyard below ground level surrounded by glass spirals and domes protecting the plants. A Japanese garden, trails that lead through variations of the environments of Texas, gardens demonstrating water and energy saving strategies. Yes, they had formal gardens, and yes, these were full of rose bushes. To our surprise, in a Texas January those roses were still well in bloom, and fragrant. They were taking down what had to have been massive Christmas light displays, so lots of contractor trucks about, but they never blocked us from seeing what we wanted to see.
We drove through Alamo Heights to a Target, got gas, then hit an HEB (Texas’s gift to supermarkets; makes Wegman’s look like a trashy bodega) to pick up dinner.
There’s still a lot to see on a future trip. The Art Museum anchors the Pearl District, which warrants a walk and meal. The King William District is like their Cleveland Park or Brookline, famous for restored Victorian homes. Government Canyon State Natural Area was on my Texas Parks roster, but is closed on the days we were there. Natural Bridge Caverns looks really commercial, but could be worth a stop if we wanted to see another cave system. And their other great art museum, the McNay, deserves a revisit that we couldn’t squeeze in.
Friday, January 5
An hour west of San Antonio, in Ingram, is the Hill Country Arts Foundation. This is a community theater and artists’ studios. Years back they inherited a scale model of Stonehenge (same footprint, but concrete re-creation 60% as high) from some free spirits who had created it on their ranch. Also a couple of reproduction Easter Island statues. Like if a tiki bar had landed in ancient England. Unlike the real Stonehenge, there was no one there, and you can get up close and personal with the structures. Bizarre and fun.
Texas Route 39 carried us through a gorgeous part of the Hill Country. This is where rich Texans buy “ranches”, complete with staff to water the cattle, deal with USDA, and mix martinis at cocktail hour. We’d heard of this world, but never seen it. Lots of vacation houses, lakes that are actually reservoirs, and barbed wire fences artistically topped with worn cowboy boots. The further west we got the more the ranches started advertising exotic animal hunting; folks have discovered there’s big money in stocking African wildlife for people to helicopter in and shoot. There are so many different Americas. Our goal was Lost Maples State Park; we expected as we got closer to Vanderpool there would be hotels and fast food, or at least some grocery stores for campers. Nothin’. We got the last breakfast sandwiches from a gas station near the park entrance and lunched in our car at the Visitors’ Center.
Lost Maples is another of those geologically isolated pockets. Maple trees once covered the plains here, but as the region got warmer and drier they retreated north, leaving behind a stand where the soil, water, and sheltered sun were just right to allow them to thrive. In January it’s hard to tell the difference between maples, more dominant sycamores, and other native plants, but the paths are well marked and the landscape amazing. Giant travertine boulders are interspersed amongst the trees. We took paths marked Easy to the stand of maples; we think the fords across Sanibel Creek might make these more Moderate, but in winter the stepping stones are simple to cross. Campsites were full, but the park pretty empty, so I suspect a lot of folks were there for hunting.
Heading north on Texas 187 the land got higher, drier, and emptier. We stopped at a Holiday Inn Express in Junction, a town full of chain motels because it’s where cross-country travelers on Interstate 10 get tired. Great view of surrounding mesas from our room, conveniently located next to the laundry, which we sorely needed. Dinner in town at classic ‘60’s Isaack’s Restaurant, country fried steak and grilled chicken.
There were alternative stops to Ingram and Lost Maples. For history we could have done F-Troop-like forts at Presidio de San Saba, Fort McKavett State Historical Park, or Fort Concho National Historic Landmark. Sonora Caverns is a tourist-trap cave tour, eh, we’ve been to Mammoth and Carlsbad. Monahans Sandhills State Park is closer to I-20; again, we’ve been to several places for dunes, gave this place a pass.
Saturday, January 6
Texans don’t call it “the Great Plains”, but that boring stretch of the continent dips down through the northern Panhandle and into the center-west of the state. This was the first time we’ve crossed it, and as reported there is little to see. Trees gave way to bushes which became scrub, rocks, and sand. We never got dunes, but the surface declined to visible gravel with desert plants. Where the highway cuts through ridges you can see how shallow the soil is. Three hours on I-10 got us to Fort Stockton. We took photos with the giant concrete roadrunner, Paisano Pete, and hit Dragon Buffet for classic American Chinese, with a guarantee of vegetables. Chocolate pudding with canned mandarin oranges for dessert!
Another hour west got us to Balmorhea State Park, an oasis that the CCC turned into an L.A.-style swimming pool. We’d been here in 2010, when they were renovating the motel court that services summer visitors. It reopened, but then closed again a few years back. We’re resigned to the fact that, like Paris’s Pompidou Art Center, we may never see it fully open. Still fun to walk around the pool, and even in January there was a car of University of Houston students in wet suits ready to “dive the desert”, as it says on their t-shirts.
We turned off I-10 into Davis Mountains State Park. The Chihuahuan Desert here is amazing; the mountains rise out of it giving a variety of climate zones based on the altitude. Again, an “island in the sky”, lots of plants and animals (like deer) marooned on upper levels, since they could not survive the trek north to the next area that can support them. Lots of sotol, a cactus that looks like a pineapple top with one flowering spike, and ocotillo, a bush of spiny branches ending in what are supposed to be brilliant red flowers (not in bloom, sadly). We were greeted on the Headquarters Trail by four deer, then got back in the car for their Skyline Drive. Indian Lodge, a 1930’s-built state-run hotel, is supposed to be amazing, and was scheduled to re-open this month, but it has not. Adjacent to the Park is Fort Davis, another Army base from the Indian Wars that is interpreted by the U.S. Park Service. We blew that off in favor of a daylight arrival in Marfa.
Marfa does not allow chain hotels. Like the Hamptons, it’s a little piece of artworld NYC transported to nature; here the desert rather than the ocean. Much more remote, which the locals pride themselves on enduring. I’d booked us into The Lincoln, which had once been a series of casitas crammed onto a town lot, little houses for agricultural workers. It was abandoned by the 1980’s, discovered early in this Millennium by a gay couple from L.A. making a film, and turned into a cool collection of small accommodations. Totally automated, we never saw the staff, although some are on site. We skipped the opportunity to stay in an original fall-out shelter for a multi-room suite that looked like Joanna Gaines had thrown up all over, with wonderful Texas-rural touches and a great art and book collection. We parked, dropped our bags, and took off for a walk around town.
Last time we were here we stayed at El Cosmico, a campground with trailers that we loved. But it was a little far from downtown, and I feared even the campers would not keep us warm in the desert mountain winter. From The Lincoln we could walk everywhere, and took advantage of the business hours to do a little gallery visiting and shopping (we were going to be here Sunday, but most stores close Saturday afternoon thru Wednesday). Lots of quirky shops, but our best souvenirs came off the street. Literally.
The Judd Foundation sells expensive knit hats with “Marfa” on the brim. Michael was watching his footing and found one on the sidewalk, in the dirt. We bagged it, washed it, and it was proudly on his head in the Texas cold. Then as we were walking across a church parking lot a group of tumbleweeds blew up and started following us. When one attached itself to Michael’s leg, we adopted it. We worried about how to get it to D.C., but it’s a tumbleweed: what could USPS do to it that months of blowing around the desert hadn’t? Arrived safely at Boston House last week, it should be on display next time you visit.
There are some excellent restaurants in Marfa. Sadly, a lot were closed; January is not a big tourist month. Para Llevar, however, served us fantastic arugula-prosciutto pizza and a Greek salad.
Sunday, January 7
We slept under every blanket the room offered. When we woke I figured out that the AC was also the heat, and we could have been more comfortable with just a phone call to figure that out. Oh well. Aster Café next door to The Lincoln served a brilliant breakfast.
Our agenda for the morning was the Judd Studio and Home, The Block. This requires reservations, so plan ahead. It is the first property Donald Judd bought when he started exploring here, a couple of airplane hangars the Army was surplusing. It was wide open to a massive grain and feed warehouse next door, with trucks barreling across the lot. Judd moved here with two young children, so his first action was to create an adobe wall around the grounds to protect the kids. That encouraged him to think bigger than the paintings and his early sculptures, and he spent the next decades turning the space into the perfect home for an artist. The adobe bricks age faster than concrete mortar joints, something that was happening even under Army tenure, which creates an amazing texture to the walls. There are multiple buildings, all renovated or built to his designs. Judd created two foundations: Chinati, the one that maintains the larger Army base he purchased further out and used as a museum for himself and friends, and the Judd, to keep up his NYC home, this home, and his studio, also in town. Then went to Europe for several months, where he died. With the support of his kids, then young adults (his daughter is still on the Board), the Judd Foundation locked down the properties, so every scribbled note, custom picnic table, and piece of art-in-process is where it was when he flew out of El Paso. It’s pretty amazing. They don’t allow photos, so don’t ask, but the combination of Judd’s design, the industrial materials, and the natural light of Marfa is stunning. There are bedrooms and kitchens all over the properties, as Judd frequently communed with his art to get a better sense of how it wanted to be. Even the chickens were kept in a coop with perfect Modern sculpture proportions. He was close friends with Yayoi Kusama, and several of the tables show a Japanese influence. A lap pool, cattle tank, and pergola all show the intersection of Modern art and design for living. The walled Winter Garden was recently repaired and the formerly invasive bamboo replaced with local plants (although our guide confirmed that yes, the bamboo was AMAZING). Judd had fame as an art critic before people took his art and sculpture seriously; there are two large libraries on site. In the 20th Century Library books are organized by subject, so if you want all the books on De Stijl architecture, or John Chamberlain, or Frank Lloyd Wright, they’re together. The European Library is organized by region, similar idea, but with all of Italy from ancient Etruscans to Liberty-style Milan on the same banks of shelves. Wicked. The shelf units, to Judd’s design, have extended tops to block the rain: early on it was more economical to protect each bookstack than to fix the former warehouse roof. The first “Judd door” prototype, which you see at Chinati, was designed for this property by one of Judd’s former girlfriends. All over you see art inflecting life, and vice versa.
We got lunch at The Sentinel, which is where the local newspaper is published, but as happens in small towns, doubles as a good café. Excellent tacos. Lots of attitude amongst the customers.
In addition to his other careers, Judd also saw himself as an architect. He turned a former bank into his architectural office, and adjacent Safeway into his “studio”. Our afternoon tour was of both. Very few of Judd’s architectural designs were built, but apparently the drawings are respected as efforts by an untrained practitioner. This idea, that Judd came up with concepts that were better executed by others, was made clear in the studio space. He had tremendous respect for fabricators, the people who could execute his thoughts in materials that he could not work himself. An art world joke is that the further Judd was from executing his piece, the more of his work it was. This was clear in the studio space: no machinery, no paint or canvas, but samples of materials and demonstrations of how they could be worked sent by the people who made his work, from which he would make selections that his staff would relay back to the fabricators. Sounds bizarre, but it set a paradigm for the art world that put the final nail in the idea that an artist’s hands had to make his work, to the concept that an artist’s brain is his most important tool. Not sure I buy it, but it is demonstrated really well here.
Other Judd memories: lots of Gerit Rietveld furniture, the only Rembrandt drawings in west Texas, an entire suite of furniture from Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road house in Los Angeles. We walked around more of Marfa, then got dinner at one of the only places open, the Dairy Queen. We’d wanted to check out the Museum of the Big Bend an hour away in Alpine, but time got away from us. This evening we slept a little warmer, with the heat working – smile.
Monday, January 8
We faced a dilemma on leaving Marfa. I’d planned we would go down to Presidio and drive to Big Bend through the largest state park in the U.S. (bigger than Rhode Island), Big Bend Ranch State Park. It’s a massive former ranch adjacent to the National Park, bringing another half as much land into contiguous protection. The drive along the Rio Grande is supposed to be one of the great drives in America. BUT: Michael was concerned about the curves through the mountains, and risking the rental in a place where replacement would take hours stranded in the desert. Without cell service. Dan was concerned that the park’s website said the interior of the park was closed due to hunting, but did that mean the river road? The weather report was warning about high winds. As we stood debating, God sent us a sign: a snow flurry. In the desert, in West Texas. We heeded the Lord’s warning and took the safer inland route down through Alpine.
Terlingua is the western gateway to Big Bend National Park. We checked out Study Butte, and got lunch at Venga Café in Terlingua Ghost Town. Pretty trendy, good t-shirts and high-priced camping gear. Also a great lunch: quinoa bowl, pepper hummus, and a ham and cheese panini.
We drove into the Park at Maverick Junction, and onto the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive. Big Bend is one of the most beautiful National Parks we’ve seen. It’s also one of the least visited. It is the Chihuahuan Desert, with the Rio Grande as its southern border, wrapped around the Chisos Mountains (the only mountain range entirely within a National Park). Great heights, great drops to low elevation, water only comes with tremendous work to bring it to agriculture level. Lots of abandoned ranches, farms, and mines (mercury), which add interest to hiking trails. The land was formed by volcanoes, which gave basalt and ash/tuff mountains, on the edge of what was an inland sea, which gave layers of sedimentary rock. Lots of amazing heights with alternating layers of these rocks, with thousands of years of erosion showing them off. It seemed like the Grand Canyon with the color washed away, but then the sun would rise or set and light would paint the mountains in pastels. The sotol cactus we’d seen above is the signature species here, its presence defines the Chihuahuan versus the Sonoran Desert further west. There are lots of pull offs teaching this geology and biology, and almost no one on the road, so it’s easy to dip in and out of the Drive. We walked the short hike through abandoned Sam Nail Ranch, with a still-working windmill providing the water to keep Mrs. Nail’s deciduous trees alive today. Sotol and Mule Ears Viewpoints provide stunning mountain vistas. As we ascended mountains to the south the desert gave way to forest. We descended again to Castolon, approaching the river; now a visitor center, it was once a ranch where they grew cotton. In the desert: shades of the Israelites in Exodus. Then west eight miles to Santa Elena Canyon Overlook. We were lucky enough to catch the vista before the sun shifted it into shadow, which happens early in the steep canyons. We backtracked to Texas 118, the main east-west highway through the Park, then south into the Chisos Mountain Basin. The only lodging (versus camping) in the Park is here, in a crater between volcanic mountains. Chisos Mountain Lodge books up early, so I’d been forced to reserve different rooms for two successive nights. The kind staff shifted rooms around so we got both nights in the same room, a lodge uphill with our own porch and amazing vistas of Casa Grande Peak. It was up thirty steps from the closest parking, but well worth it. A classic Park hotel room, nicer than a motel, not fancy, but sufficient. A simple dinner in the Lodge restaurant: burger, salad, fried green tomatoes. Fantastic view of The Window, a gap in the crater that frames distant mountains. The 60-year-old Lodge complex is scheduled to be torn down this year and replaced with more eco-conscious accommodations, so we were grateful we were able to make it here this year, as who knows when the new facility will open?
Tuesday, January 9
Woke up sneezing blood; welcome to the high desert. Uggh. Breakfast in the Lodge restaurant was a step above Holiday Inn Express, with that same view of The Window. Today we started north, to the Fossil Discovery exhibit. Lots of centuries of ocean coming and going here, and each layer of subsequent rock locking in different eras of fossils. They use casts of bones from the Perot Museum in Ft. Worth to explain what you are seeing, doubling as kids’ playgrounds. Fascinating. Then a drive south and east to Rio Grande Village, where we picked up sandwiches at the camp supply store. Rio Grande Village Nature Trail is a long walk from the Park amphitheater through parking lots and campgrounds, but the trail itself worth it, through a marsh then a loop up and over a mountain. The view is okay, but go for the plants. We continued east to the Boquillas Canyon Overlook, the furthest east you can drive in the Park. Boquillas del Carmen is a town across the river in Mexico; craftspeople there hike onto these trails and leave illegal-but-tolerated displays of pottery, embroidery, and bead sculptures on blankets on the trail. Honor system, we dropped a twenty in a box and walked away with beaded roadrunner and ocatillo. Then we saw a live roadrunner heading back to the car. Cool. We did the Chihuahuan Nature Trail at Dugout Wells, where we learned the difference between yucca, sotol, lechugilla, prickly pear cactus, and candelilla. Good, but we remember the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center being better. Gassed up in Panther Junction, dinner at the Lodge, and an amazing sunset view of The Window.
Wednesday, January 10
Breakfast at the Lodge, then the Windows View Trail: this is a wheelchair accessible walk set up to introduce the Park to people who cannot hike it. Drove north out of the crater and down the mountain, leaving the Park via Panther Junction and Persimmon Gap. Got lunch at French Grocer in Marathon: not a French bakery, but an oil field general store founded a century back by a woman named French. Decent sandwiches. East on U.S. 90 to Langtry; just past the town is a scenic overlook that gives a great view of the Pecos River Canyon, which descends out of view to the Rio Grande. Seminole Canyon State Park was again, sadly, closed for hunting. In Del Rio, we had high hopes for Amistad National Recreation Area. Amistad Lake is a massive reservoir establish decades ago by the U.S. and Mexico for flood control, boating, and distribution of the water to agriculture in both countries. We were disappointed. The controlling powers have privileged Big Agriculture and drained the reservoir so severely that recreation cannot happen; the sight of abandoned piers, docks, and resorts on the shore is very sad. It looks like Amistad wants to be a National Park, but with the drained lake at its center that is a failed notion. We checked into a Holiday Inn Express in Del Rio. So, mainly a day of getting ourselves back east a ways. We had gotten to see a roadrunner, deer, swallows and hawks during the drive. Dinner at Chili’s was surprisingly delicious: a salad with grilled chicken, ribs, quesadilla, jalapeno sausage, and corn on the cob. We think they must have Mexican chefs in the kitchen who are cooking off-book to prepare the food.
Thursday, January 11
We pointed ourselves northeast to Fredericksburg. As we traveled on US 290 East desert scrub transitioned into dry Hill Country, but it was not a great drive. Fredericksburg is a German settlement from before the Texas Revolution and U.S. Civil War, and revels in that history. We blew past Enchanted Rock State Park in our quest for lunch at the Old German Bakery & Restaurant. Unfortunately, a January Thursday was not a big tourist moment. Not only was the Bakery closed, but so were most other restaurants on Main Street. We ended up at Hondo’s, more ice house/tavern than restaurant, but the roasted cheese-stuffed jalapenos, smokehouse salad, and red chili with beef were quite good. We shopped the wine store near where we’d parked; the Germans brought winemaking with them, and there is still an active winery scene producing decent German-style vintages that we passed on our way out of town, amongst retirement ranches and vacation resorts.
We could have stopped at the LBJ Ranch or Birthplace in Johnson City, or Pedernales Falls State Park, but instead headed to Dripping Springs, an artsy suburb of Austin. Shopped the store at the Texas Hill Country Olive Company, where they had some interesting olive oils. We’re thinking of throwing an olive oil tasting party when we get back to D.C.; would be fun to compare the artisan produced against what we usually get at home.
The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is a botanic garden founded by the former First Lady with the help of Helen Hayes. They became friends in Washington, and Hayes had suggested the Center as a worthy retirement project for Lady Bird. It is a well-run and well-funded subdivision of UT Austin’s Agriculture Program in a southwestern corner of the city. They only allow Texas plants on the grounds, which in January meant no color, but excellent hardscaping and division of the grounds into multiple gardens. It was a little preachy on environmental issues, but we suspect is gorgeous in the right season.
We had not been to Austin for over a decade, when our nieces were in school at UT. In the interval it has become a different city, one that we don’t like. It is not really a Texas city; they do not have the freeway infrastructure that makes DFW, Houston, and San Antonio work. But they also are not a coastal city, they lack any decent public transport to support the skyscrapers that dominate downtown and bring thousands of commuters in each day. We’d heard about their horrible traffic, but crossing downtown from Lady Bird to Round Rock, the Tysons-like suburb where our hotel was, was disillusioning in a way we’ve never experienced. Folks on the East Coast talk as if Austin is the only place in Texas they would consider living, but honestly, they are not ready for you. It took us an hour and a half to cross town (eight miles), then another half hour to get to the correct Avid Hotel just within Round Rock. When we checked in we were so exhausted that we cancelled our second night there, and the clerk was happy to do so as he knew it would be rented within the hour. We left our car in the parking lot and got dinner at Waffle House: not because it was good, but because we could walk to it.
Friday, January 12
Round Rock didn’t look any better in the daylight. We had planned to see the Elisabet Ney Museum, which preserves the home and studio of a Victorian sculptress, but could not handle driving back downtown. Instead, we headed to McKinney Falls State Park. This was an inspired choice. McKinney Falls is a gem of the Texas State Park system, it is where Park headquarters are. The usual limestone layers have been eroded by Onion Creek into a series of ledges and swimming holes that fill every summer with happy Austinites. In January it was a great hike through picnic grounds, woods, and back and forth across the pools. You can step right over the waterfalls, it’s fantastic.
Michael has been following Ryan Holiday, a podcast philosopher who preaches ancient Roman Stoicism as a guide for our times. He runs the Painted Porch Bookstore in affluent Austin suburb Bastrop. This store is so well curated that if you shopped here regularly you would never have to read a book review; every title is excellent. We got Holiday’s book on Marcus Aurelius, The Obstacle Is the Way, and another writer’s interpretation of Horace. Just finished reading these, both are meaningful. Great shopping on their Main Street, a Texas version of the Hamptons. Lunch at Maxine’s Café, meatloaf and a fajitas salad. Then headed southeast, crossing into the Gulf Coast Plains around Smithville, and landed back at the Seto’s in Sugar Land.
We do not recommend you take this trip. We enjoyed Palmetto and Lost Maples State Parks. Big Bend and Marfa are totally worth it, and should be on your bucket list. When you go, fly into El Paso and drive east into the Bend from there. The first time we did Marfa we did that, then drove north to Santa Fe, which was fantastic. The Chisos Mountains and Rio Grande both reward the visit, as does the frontier culture along the Border. Terlingua was a surprise, lots of vacationers, golf, campers, “nomads” a la Frances McDormand, and motorcycle gangs, all seemingly getting along. The eastern side of Big Bend is comparatively empty, with few residents either short or long term. Food overall was nothing special, we eat Texas much better in Houston. I had a fantasy that we would fall in love with Texas State Parks, but most of them are set up for families or school groups for camping, hunting, boating, and fishing; “active” recreation that does not tick our cultural or scientific boxes. I’m glad we bought the Parks pass, but will probably not plan another trip specifically to take in more.
