Day#196

Vacation day 9

We packed up the van, complete with two nice souvenir rocks, said bye to noisy Petey, and left Wimberley late in the morning.

Not far down the road, we stopped at an outlet boot place in San Marcos where we found you can buy a plain black Stetson for $999, a pair of Luchesse boots for $949, and a leather belt for $350.  Where were our good deals for western wear in Texas?  We sure didn't find them.

We got some Chic-fil-a to go for lunch. For dessert, it happened to work out
well that we needed to eat the rest of the ice cream in the cooler that we had brought from the house, so we all took a turn with the vanilla or rocky road to get it finished off.

I had hoped for a picture of a longhorn during the whole trip so when passing through Midway, Tx, Gary spotted the opportunity and did a quick u-ie, pulling into the parking lot between the church and post office. There were two longhorns and a regular cow standing in a pasture. He and I left the kids in the van and approached each with phone camera in hand. Gary walked more directly and closer to the huge animal than I ever would have. And dang it, he wouldn't listen to me when I said "Gary, that's close enough. That picture's fine. Do not walk closer. GARY!" 

We had earlier noticed very tall, very well-fortified fences in other places holding longhorns because they are long legged animals and can hop a fence, but the fence here was just a typical few-strand type. I just knew that bull was gonna come through. Finally when the bull stomped and pawed the ground, Gary decided he had a good enough picture and retreated with me back to the van.

We focused then on getting across the rest of Texas, investigating briefly a cemetery in Nacgodoches, passing through an almost non-existent town called Gill, and nearly running out of gas before we pulled into Crockett where we discovered a cool bird, the scissor-tailed fly catcher.

We stopped at Porky's BBQ in Marshall Tx for supper. Grant had a sandwich and ended up ordering an additional order of ribs since the sandwich was really from his confusion with the menu. Jack and Gary had pulled pork and sausage, I had a hamburger, and Caroline had chicken strips. Sam had his two favorites: corndog and grilled cheese.

Our goal was to get to Texarkana which we did, but then decided to drive on a bit longer since it wasn't that late. We spent the night in Hope, Arkansas.