The Road Trip Continues

Wemberley and Austin

We spent a couple of nights in Wemberly, Texas with our friends Bob, Donna, David and Ellen, who have adjoining plots of land.










Contrary to popular belief, Central Texas is not a sun bleached, cow skull dotted desert. Instead it's a landscape of rolling hills, oaks, limestone bluffs and rivers.










The intense heat is alleviated by frequent trips to swimming holes.























Sometimes you have to get a friend to pump the water out of your lungs.





We also spent a day in Austin, my hometown.









We took a drive past our old house. We found the address, but our house was gone. It has been torn down and replaced with a very silly, turreted McMansion.




We consoled ourselves with big pile of meat.









Proper Texas Barbecue is slowly smoked over a wood fire, has no sauce and is eaten without utensils.










The smoking pits.





The fire.






You order by the pound.




















Toothpicks are often necessary.









On the way out of town we stopped for snow cones.

Road Trip!

My mother, Rahel and I are on a road trip through New Mexico and Texas. A week or so before we left, my mother had found an ad for a bed and breakfast in Yellow House Canyon, the canyon outside Lubbock where my mother, father and I lived for the first few years of my life.

We decided to have dinner in Lubbock with my grandfather, step-grandmother and aunt, and then stay out in the canyon.

In setting out to find the house, we had only vague directions - there was no address, but we were told to look for an ornate gate and an adobe house.

We found the gate and realized that it was hung before the drive leading to our old house, the house entirely designed and built by my father and mother! Some subsequent owner had plastered our house with adobe, turned our greenhouse into a living room, and added another bedroom, but the house felt largely the same.
































This is the mesa, a Paleoindian site on our old property.






We used to buy live Christmas trees and plant them in the front yard after the holidays, these are now huge trees. This was a sapling planted by my mother 20-something years ago.