Archive for December, 2009
Posted on December 3, 2009 by angela
Backing up a bit and picking up where we left off in Florida….
After swimming with the manatees, we drove up the coast and stayed on Saint George Island. A forgettable town, but they have a state park. Then, we drove west along the coast through Apalachicola. Great name and a nice little town on the ocean. While driving through, we picked up some country radio and coincidentally the chorus of the song at that moment was constructed around Apalachicola. Tough to rhyme. It had to be some serious work to write that song, so it must be a great town.
You really can’t get better than driving to white sand beaches on a sunny day in November, can you? Jason found a beach bar/restaurant on Google Maps in Mexico Beach, Florida that looked interesting, so we found it along our way and decided to give it a try .
It had a playground on the beach, service in the sand, college football on 10 TV’s and fried pickles. All of us were happy. It was a nice day and we were feeling pretty lazy, so we stayed here most of the afternoon. Long enough to hear from one of the employees who just got fired – but was still expected to work the rest of the day. Not smart.
This guy went around and spewed venom about the owners all afternoon, telling other employees where to set a match to the thatched roof if they wanted to burn the place down (seemed pretty accurate) and telling us about how the owners are laundering drug money. Apparently, all the bills being deposited into the local bank are over 10 years old – something that just doesn’t happen since U.S. money is taken out of circulation fairly regularly. Anyway, his dad heard all this from the local banker, who was alerted by the FBI. All of this from a jilted employee making the rounds on his final afternoon. Check, please.
We stayed a little further down the road at Saint Andrews State Park. There was a playground at the campsite and lots of kids, so we were pretty much set for entertainment. This was also a bit of a local surf spot. The problem was (as I saw it) that the break was right on the beach. You had to hop off your board before you were stuck in sand. If you wipe out, you’re in 1 foot of water. Not much effort to paddle out, I suppose, so you take the good with the bad.
Posted on December 2, 2009 by jason
Our fifth and final Thanksgiving meal was at my mother’s house on Lake Conroe just north of Houston. Now nearly immune to tryptophan, we dove right into another great Thanksgiving meal and spent the afternoon catching up with everyone. Pumpkin, apple, and pecan pies capped off the final feast of the week.
From another room, we heard Bode explaining to someone that he visited Kitty Hawk– where the Jonas Brothers invented the first airplane. Not sure where he’s getting his facts.
Somehow the short drive up to Conroe led us through redneck country. Growing up near Houston (the 4th largest city in the U.S.) and living in Austin for 10 years, we managed to avoid inheriting some of the Texas stereotypes. We both grew up in relatively small towns*, but this still seemed a little over the top. Or, maybe we’ve just forgotten.
When we moved to California, I recall people being surprised to learn that we were from Texas.
“Where’s your accent?”
“Do you have a horse?”
The only evidence being our occasional use of the greatest word ever: Y’all.
Anyway, it didn’t take long before we were off the interstate and saw horses frolicking, cow skulls on fence posts, washing machines for mailboxes, and met some characters with accents so strong we could barely understand them. One guy who liked the bus said “Nice wagon there, boy!” with such a Texas drawl that it literally took me 1 minute of re-playing it in my mind to interpret what he was saying.
A neighbor came over to check out the bus. He was driving some hot rod with a 502 engine and apparently no exhaust system – it was LOUD – and said something like “every neighborhood needs a rooster!” again with a serious drawl. He was textbook. Big 50′s greaser bouffant hair, loud shirt tucked-in around his enormous pot-belly. And, the belt buckle. A gleaming ornament to draw everyone’s attention to a world-class beer gut.
Maybe it’s our long absence from Texas that makes this seem so foreign. We come back to visit every year so that doesn’t explain it.
Maybe our recent “travel-eyes” perspective brings it into more focus. Sometimes we find ourselves feeling like anthropologists trying to understand the locals – and we haven’t even left our own country!
Travel is the enemy of bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and prejudice.
-Mark Twain
The old VW bus brings out the curious strangers. Of all the explanations I can think of, that’s probably it.
Random folks wouldn’t walk up and talk to us and share a conversation if we were in a Toyota. I think there might also be a neo-redneck revival of sorts thanks to the the Jeff Foxworthy and NASCAR types. There seems to be a misplaced sense of pride associated with this now sought-after marketing demographic… but I digress.
Welcome to Texas, y’all!
*my old hometown of Alta Loma, TX (now incorporated into Santa Fe, TX) was literally featured on Hee Haw. You know, the part where they say the town and population and then yell HEE HAW! Johnny Lee of “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places” fame was the guest. He grew up there too.
Posted on December 1, 2009 by jason
The next day it was off to Spring, TX to see Angela’s family and another great meal. Bode was really excited to see Grammy and Granddaddy, Aunt, Uncle and cousins. It wasn’t long after we got settled in that we got a call from a familiar voice – Franck and Iris. They were still in Houston, but were having some problems and leaking oil everywhere. Franck sounded pretty exasperated, so we invited them over for another round of Thanksgiving dinner and spent some time inspecting their engine.
Franck suspected it was coming from behind the pulley but it was wet everywhere. We cleaned it up and removed the pulley and had a good look around. We pulled out their distributor and it was wet underneath and the o-ring was pretty flat, so I gave them mine. We ran it for a bit and couldn’t find the leak anywhere. There’s not much we could do about a case leak, so I think we did what we could and we’re just going to hope for the best.
We got to share more travel stories over dinner and took it all in for future reference. Shipping the car up the Amazon. Being burglarized in Caracas and losing their passports, car documents… everything. But mostly, just finding really amazing and great people all along the way in every country.
The next day we sent Iris and Franck off to see a good friend of ours in Austin and we’re sure they will have a great time.
UPDATE: they made it to Austin with no oil leaks. The new distributor O-ring did the trick!
We’ve only been parked in Texas for a few days, but it hasn’t taken long for us to start dreaming about our next destinations and getting moving again.
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