Texas Overview

There is little we can say about Texas that Texas hasn’t already loudly and proudly said about itself. Only a state like Texas could turn the fight against litter into a clever rallying cry of strength and Texas pride. And, let us be clear, we are fully on board with it’s famous passionate suggestion – we have absolutely no desire to mess with Texas, whether via litter or any other route. Being from New York, a state that has seemed to us to have a certain reputation, especially amongst Texans, we found ourselves anxious to be good ambassadors in a state that had a certain reputation to us. When we think of Texas, we think of cowboy hats, the boots to go with them and the cowboys wearing them. We think of ”Howdy”s, rodeos, oil (and lots of it), bbq, guns, music, trucks, NASA, a hot sun, Texas pride and famous southern hospitality. And we think of size – we think of Texas big. We encountered all of these things and more in our time in the Lone Star State.

When we first crossed the state line into Texas, Julie was absolutely giddy with excitement. Without a reason she could directly point to, Texas was top on Julie’s list from day 1 as one of the states she was most excited to visit (sharing the top spot with Alaska). She didn’t know if it was simply because it is one of America’s most famous and controversial states. (As we mentioned in a previous post, as we’ve traveled the country, the three states we have found people to have the most opinions about, whether they have been there or not are California, our home state of New York and Texas, with Florida as a runner up). Or maybe it was because Julie has a special place in her heart for good bbq. Or was it all the important history that has happened here. Or maybe it was because Julie has been a NASA fan since she was little. Julie thought, maybe it’s because her dad was born in Dallas and it somehow felt like there was a little Texas blood running somewhere in her veins. Or maybe it was the potency of that Texas spirit that Julie was looking forward to taking a dip in. Julie didn’t know why, but Ryan noticed her level of excitement shoot through the roof when we saw that Lone Star and crossed into the largest state in the lower 48 (2nd in the union only to Alaska’s massive footprint)

If you haven’t heard the news, Texas is big. Our only regret is that, even with the 11 days we gave to our Texas visit (that is how much time we would usually be able to cover 2 states in), we still left some must-see spots unseen. The major factor in that was not actually Texas’s size, but the fact that we would be in Texas over Christmas and this had impacts on how we needed to plan our route that would make certain stops that we had really wanted to see untenable. Stops like heading down to the center of Texas’s border with Mexico to hit Big Bend National Park or up into the panhandle to take in the little town of Amarillo that has Cadillac Ranch and is also the namesake to one of Julie’s favorite country songs from her childhood or over to the small town of Fredericksburg in Central Texas that is infused with German culture having been a hot spot for German immigration in the mid 1800s. Even though these spots all landed on our list of missed destinations, we still feel we took on Texas well, getting both a figurative and literal taste of Texas and even finding time for Ryan to have 4 days at home with family for Christmas and Julie to get her dream of 3 days in place on the Texan beaches.

From the most western spot in El Paso down to its most southern edge on South Padre Beach in the Padre Island National Seashore, we tackled the bigness of Texas and are here to tell the tale of it. We wandered the lower slopes of the Guadalupe Mountains in Guadalupe National Park where we spotted legions of tiny fossils from times long gone still embedded in the rocks that we hiked by. We took in tunes from the sidewalk walking through sixth street in Austin and ate the most delicious and expensive barbecue at Terry Black’s. We remembered the Alamo in San Antonio and picked up trash on the Gulf coast. We gawked at the sprawling size of Houston and even more so at the size of the rocket ships where Houston famously dealt with the problem it had up in space. We took in Texas history at the Bullock Texas History Museum and mingled among the largest crowd we’ve ever encountered at a capitol visit. We felt solemn in Dealy Plaza and reflected on America’s tangled and traumatic history in Vietnam and its long march through another chapter of Civil Rights at LBJ’s presidential library. We saw Texas Longhorns and Julie even sat on one. We saw cowboys rope bulls at the Fort Worth Stockyards. We saw as many Lone Star flags as we did ones with 50 stars on them. We were “howdy”’d and “y’all”d. We enjoyed the 75 and sunny Texas winter weather and the delights of an urban oasis watering hole to cool off from it. We ate Mexican food a stone’s throw from the border. We encountered the famed Texas friendliness and we both literally and figuratively had a blast and went out with a bang. We most certainly didn’t mess with Texas and we got a little infusion of that Texas spirit before we headed out of this storied land.