I first heard that term from a salty Flight Engineer in my first squadron, in response to “where are you from?”  He was (is) deeply Southern and sharp as a tack, with a thick accent that tended to belie, or at least distract you from, his depth of knowledge and skill.  I’m pretty sure he did it on purpose; he liked to keep people off guard.

“South Cackalacky” sounded to me like a deliberate play on the redneck thing.  Owning it and throwing it back at you with pride.  Or something like that.  It wasn’t his invention of course, I’ve heard it used by many people in various contexts.  On the other hand, it’s not that old a term either, probably no older than the ‘70s/’80s.  A brief internet search on the term didn’t net much, other than the fact than older North/South Carolinans aren’t familiar with it, and no one’s sure where it came from, but there’s at least one hip hop reference from the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, and a hot sauce named “Cackalacky,” whose owner said something to the effect of “there’s no single word that conveys the nature of the South better.”

Does it though?  I’m not sure.

In my mid-twenties and largely ignorant of the South other than my relatively brief stint in Florida, I didn’t know exactly how to take it at the time.  Brimming with my own West Coast quirks, northwest Florida (which is really southern Alabama) was essentially foreign to me.  Frankly I’m still not sure I have a handle on the South as a region, but I can tell you that the impression I refined on this trip is heavily positive.  Both Carolinas, especially, strike me as places I’d like to spend more time exploring, and that most everyone would find a way to fall in love with if they visited with an open mind and didn’t mind a bit of humidity.  Unfortunately we DO mind a bit of humidity, so other than an hour or so we spent entertaining the prospect of setting up shop in Asheville or Raleigh, this part of the county is off the where-do-we-settle list.

Anyway, the Carolinas didn’t seem very “Cackalacky” to me.  But I’m from Southern California and spent most of my adult life in the Pacific Northwest, so I’m not to be trusted.

Here’s an image you may have seen before.  Maybe not.  I can tell you that it was new to me, but I happened to see it on a pilot colleague’s luggage about 2 weeks before we entered South Carolina.

When I saw it, I asked him what it meant, because it looked somewhat mystical.  Like a secret society type of thing.  “uhhh, the South Carolina flag?” he answered, with more than a little befuddlement.

Of course it is.  And we saw it EVERYWHERE once we entered South Carolina.  There are states (most of them) whose flags aren’t particularly distinctive, and whose residents likely don’t have much knowledge of it.  Growing up in California, I knew vaguely that there was a bear somewhere on it, and I’m pretty sure the background is white.  Living in Washington I had no clue what my state flag looked like.  In fact I still don’t.  And then there are a few states who go absolutely nuts with their flags.  In my very limited experience (i.e. this trip), here they are, in decreasing order of hysteria:

•    Maryland.  (No kidding, the Maryland flag is everywhere there, and people wear Maryland flag socks, shorts, shirts, etc. and don’t seem to know that this is outlier behavior)

•    Texas.  (This is probably unsurprising.)

•    Colorado.  (This did surprise me. Coloradans, much like Canadians, seem very much to want others to know where they’re from.)

• South Carolina (see above)

There may be more.  I’m just saying that these four have stood out heavily.  I could also speculate that these states’ residents don’t realize that all the other states’ residents aren’t particularly state-flag-centric.  Coloradans might.  Actually, Texans might too, but don’t care.

Our drive up to Charleston from Savannah was pleasant, and not too long.  We ended up at a state park just outside downtown that was exceptionally well appointed, though the on-site water park was either not open yet, or just not open.  The kids loved it though, as did we.

We didn’t have much time there, so opted for a distilled schedule.   On night one we headed into town for a Ghost Tour, which seems to be a common draw for tourists, though the quality thereof, we’ve discovered, varies pretty widely by both city and tour guide.

First impressions:  Charleston is gorgeous.  Wow.  They call it “the Holy City” due to the concentration of impressive churches there, but that’s only a very small part of the story.  Most of the downtown is lit by gaslamps, and has an almost European feel to it.  It’s hard to come up with a comparison because I’m not sure I’ve ever been somewhere similar.  It’s entirely unique.  Great food scene too.

The Ghost Tour was not the best.  In fact it might have been the Ghost Tour that stops us from doing any more Ghost Tours.  But we did get to stroll through downtown at night and see some interesting sights; it’s a great way to see a downtown, if nothing else.

On the next day, after a slow morning, we headed to town in order to catch a ferry out to Fort Sumter in order to continue our Civil War education.  I hadn’t known much about it, frankly, before our visit, and the stories about how the Civil War began are enthralling.

Fort Sumter is actually quite a distance from Charleston, protecting the bay entrance from a small island between the long barrier islands on either side.  It’s tenuously connected to the barrier island to the south at low tide, which was another strategic stronghold, but it’s otherwise isolated.  It was commanded at the time of the Civil War’s start by a Major, which blew my mind a little, particularly when I read about the negotiations that went on before and during the active fighting.  While I certainly had some great responsibilities when I held the Navy’s equivalent of his rank, they pale in comparison to what he had to deal with on his tiny island in the Bay.  Interestingly, no one in the fort was killed during the 34 hour shelling.

What was most fascinating for me was to read about the extent of the tensions at the time, while trying to relate it to the present day.  It’s one thing to live in a time of dramatic political divisiveness, and (hopefully) quite another to live in a time when those divisions erupt easily into violence and outright warfare.  It’s difficult to imagine what would drive you to that, but I can certainly understand the “slowly boiling frog” aspect to it, where each step leads pretty naturally to the next and only very rarely does anyone step back to look at the big picture and ask the tough questions.

The girls powered through the Junior Ranger program, with a bit of help from one of the on-site Rangers.  Keeper, on the other hand, took notes for his History course, which Tacco recently discovered as part of the National Park Systems’ websites.

We also took a little detour to check out the dead horseshoe crabs on the sand bar.  I’ve only ever seen those on East Coast beaches – they’re downright prehistoric looking things and I wouldn’t want to have one crawl up my leg.

We opted for a Low Country dinner that evening, at a restaurant on the water.  Wow was it dense.  One staple is “She Crab Soup,” which takes its name from the fact that crab roe is mixed into the soup, which has a cream/sherry base to which crabmeat is added.  It was delicious.  No doubt.  We all agreed.  But it’s hard to imagine eating more than a “cup” of it.  In fact none of us was inclined to have more than a few spoons full.  That’s how rich it was.  Kinda like [spoon 1] “That’s GREAT!”  [spoon 2] “hm, still good, but man that’s heavy.”  [spoon 3] “uhhh…  I like that still, but I’m done.”

We enjoyed the dinner greatly, but it was one of the only times when not one of us suggested looking at the dessert menu, and we hadn’t even finished the food on our plates.  That’s telling.  If you’re going to live in the Low Country you probably need to ensure you’ve got a solid exercise program.

After another short stroll through Charleston’s quaint downtown in order to shake off some of our dinner-induced lethargy, we headed back to our campsite for our last evening.

Charleston, as it turns out, is another inflection point for us.  Though it’s not our furthest east point (that honor is reserved for our starting point in Annapolis), it is the point at which we turn west for the last time, which is somewhat poignant.  For so long this adventure has seemed more or less endless given how much more travel time we had ahead of us, but suddenly we have an indication that we’re approaching something resembling a final stretch.

Our next stop is Asheville, NC, which is only the second destination we will have found impressive enough to visit twice.  Technically our first visit was part of our “shakedown” trip and not the actual year’s journey, but it left quite an impression.  Tacco’s was different than the rest of ours (and is fascinating in its own right) but we all left Asheville the first time with a desire to return.

First, though, we stopped at Congaree National Park, southeast of Columbia, SC.  Never heard of it?  Neither had we.  This was another target of opportunity foisted upon me somewhat last-minute-ish by Tacco.  Remembering what I had resolved after our last minute agenda changes in Florida, I did my best to suppress my “BUT OUR PLAN WAS TO KEEP DRIVING…” instincts and assented to the stop.  And I’m glad I did.

Though it wasn’t the most impressive National Park we’ve seen (I get the impression it’s most effectively explored via canoe), we took a thoroughly pleasant hike on a raised, wooden path through the tidelands.  Amusingly, there is a “mosquito meter” at the trailhead which gives you an idea what to expect from blood-sucking pests along the way. 

Fortunately we hit it at the right time – the dial had been set to “Mild” for our hike.  I’m not sure we’d have gone through with it had it been higher.

It was an excellent way to break up our drive and spend an early afternoon, and we learned about skinks (one of whom is pictured below), crawfish chimneys, and cypress knees.  Entirely worth it.

Another factor is creeping into our travel decision-making, however, and it’s not a welcome one.

I suffered from a bout of sciatica a few years back that quickly turned me from feeling 100% fit and healthy to staring down the barrel of partial disability.  It was disconcerting, to say the least.  I began to notice a pain in the back of my leg that was exacerbated by getting into certain positions that I wasn’t always able to reproduce.  That wasn’t overly concerning, but it devolved relatively quickly into a searing pain down my leg and up into my lower back, which sitting for long periods (i.e. flying, driving) made significantly worse.  I was able to function, but I couldn’t really exercise, and once it got to the point where part of my foot began to get numb and a sneeze or a cough would just about bring me to my knees in agony, I took action.  My primary care doctor’s first response was “well ok, let’s get you on pain killers then.”  Um, what?!? That was not what I expected.  I wanted to fix it, not mask it, and I certainly wasn’t ready to be the old guy with the bad back yet.  I appreciated her desire to help me feel better, but no, that didn’t jibe with my plans.  An MRI revealed my L5-S1 disc bulging out to the right side (which was likely the cause of my pain, but not certainly), as well as considerable asymmetrical core muscle atrophy tied to the car accident that had nearly taken our (Tacco and my) lives back in 1999.  So I saw a different doctor, a D.O. this time, and opted to attack it from multiple angles, including diet, hydration, physical therapy, acupuncture, and rolfing.

And it worked!  I was only out of work for about 6 weeks, and the improvement came pretty quickly.  I was never certain whether one of the angles worked better than the others, but was thrilled with the results.  Never got the pain killers.

It did rear its head again once more about a year after the first time, but not nearly as severely, and with a few visits to the rolfer and some renewed attention to my posture and gait, it disappeared quite quickly.

Well, it’s back.  The good news is that it’s not as severe as the first time, and is only in my leg (not my back), so exercise and activity are still very much on the table.  In fact being active seems to be the thing that makes it feel the best.  The bad news is that sitting for long periods seems to be what’s bringing it back and making it worse, and this lifestyle doesn’t really provide me any way around that.  About 5 or 6 hours driving is all I’m beginning to be able to manage without undue agony.  Flying is better, as I’m able to adjust my position often and don’t need to use my feet except when on the ground or takeoff/landing.  But driving hurts.  Plus I can’t just make an appointment with my rolfer this time unless I want to fly back to Maryland.  I do have Tacco and her acupuncture needles and healing skill, however, which is a blessing.

We’re both watching this closely and hoping it’s something we’ll be able to beat back.

Now it’s back to the other Cackalacky, and cheery, beery Asheville in the hills.  Or the mountains, depending on who you’re asking.  We’ll see how Cackalacky they are.  I’m ready!

Think “country” and “living” though.  This post has zero barbecue in it.

One of the many things I envisioned in the daydreaming phase of this trip’s planning, way waaay back when, was discovery.  I was about to write “hidden gems” but that’s not it – there’s nothing hidden about these places, I just had no experience with them.  And then came the actual planning, and I noticed a tendency to want to visit places I had already seen, in order to “show them to the family.”  Granted, my current and former careers have made it such that there really aren’t as many places I hadn’t visited as most folks.  Still though, my default setting when route planning has been a gravitation toward a greatest hits list of places I’d already been.

That thinking would have caused me to miss Savannah, which would have been a horrible shame.

In fact, we still almost missed it anyway.  When we added Tampa to our itinerary we talked about cutting the corner on the rest of the South in order to get back closer to the schedule we had originally envisioned, but wisely decided that it wasn’t that big of a deal to be a week or two behind.  (Behind what?  Exactly.)

It was an OK drive up made a bit more interesting by Tacco’s insistence that we stop at a few of the national historical sites along the way, which in this case happen to be forts.  We’ve now seen a few of those in the South, and are learning much more about the Civil War than I had ever bothered to.  If you sense in my tepid wording some resistance to the stops on my part, you are correct.  At this point in our journey I don’t like to make long drives longer, and I bristle when my hard-planned-for expectations of a day’s travel agenda are violated by a “hey, let’s just do this real quick.”  It’s one thing if it’s been in the plan for a while and quite another when a “real quick” several hour stop is tossed my way two hours into a six hour day, particularly when it involves maneuvering Davista through a crowded city with narrow streets and very little parking.

One byproduct (or maybe consequence?) of traveling in this sort of close quarters with, well with anyone probably, is the discovery of conflict modes, often exacerbated by personal quirks, some heretofore unknown.  This is one that Tacco and I have discovered of late.  My relevant quirk, as described briefly above, is that once I get a short term plan in mind, I develop a completely unreasonable resistance to changing it.  Hers is that she tends to grossly underestimate how long things will take.  Put those together in this scenario, and BOOM!

That said, and I want to make this clear, I’m wrong here.  I need to get over that resistance and go with the flow, especially on a trip like this.  Annoyances over long days and difficulty with parking and traffic fade within days if not hours, but visits to historical sites don’t.  I’m so glad we stopped.  We can and have discussed in the interim how to minimize frustrations inherent in last minute changes of plans, and that was both necessary and productive.   And yes, it’s important that we plan ahead with respect to maneuvering and parking our rig, lest we manage to maneuver ourselves into a position we can’t get out of, or worse.  But at the end of the day this trip is about doing things, not avoiding inconveniences.

Here’s our drive, and we stopped at forts in St. Augustine (Castillo San Marcos) and Fort Matanzas to the south.

The two forts are related, as they were both built by the Spanish to protect an approach via water to St. Augustine, which was of course one of the earliest European settlements on the continent.  St. Augustine’s fort is much larger and protects the mouth of the bay right in town, and Fort Matanzas covers the next inlet to the south, which had been used for sneak attacks previously.

Castillo San Marcos flies the old Spanish flag, and the rangers do an enthralling recreation of a cannon fire into the bay by Spanish soldiers, complete with everything but the cannonball.

I knew vaguely, when living in Pensacola, that many country’s flags had flown over the city over the years (I want to say five?), but I found it fascinating to think anew about Spain, England, and France (and others) squabbling over the land and the various cities that we now take for granted as ours, with the Native Americans of course watching warily and probably wondering how best to navigate the situation.

Whew, that’s a can of worms.  I’ll close that right back up and move on to Savannah.

Despite living in Jacksonville for six months or so for flight training, I never really ventured north into Georgia, and assumed that the coastline up there looked similar to Jacksonville Beach, which I wasn’t particularly a fan of.

Wrong again.

We stayed at a place called Skidaway Island State Park, just south of Savannah among the wetlands, and it was drop dead gorgeous.  Basically it was the stereotypical Low Country scene, with the Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks, cypresses dotting the wetlands and throwing up their “knees” everywhere, and water creeping in and out of various passages with the tides.  It was lush in a way that felt almost tropical.

Skidaway Island used to be isolated from the mainland until a bridge was built in 1970-ish, and is now a relatively affluent suburb of gated communities, golf courses, and our State Park.  We set up camp and hung the hammocks immediately – it had been quite some time since we had such a perfect hammock-lounging campsite.

In addition, Firebolt asked that we pitch the tent that she had asked for (and received) for Christmas, so that she and possibly her sister could sleep out.

I had initially pegged Keeper as the family member with the biggest survivalist streak, but of late Firebolt has been taking over that mantle.  She’s been asking me whether she could do a “survival skills” class as part of her homeschooling for months, and I keep assenting but then not finding a good way to implement it.  It doesn’t help that I don’t know much.  Her Christmas list consisted almost entirely of camping / outdoorsy / survival related items, and one of her most dog-eared books over the last few months has been a Boy Scout outdoor skills reference title.

She and Woodsprite did end up sleeping in the tent, but I was scolded by Tacco for encouraging two under-10-year-olds to do an unsupervised sleepout in a place with which we weren’t familiar.  Though I clearly wasn’t as concerned, I did find it to be a reasonable objection, so I dragged our big body-sized beanbag and a blanket out there after we’d said our goodnights and joined them.  It was surprisingly comfortable, with the sounds of the frogs and various noise-making insects lulling us to sleep.

The next day Keeper and I started the day with a ride through the trails.  Completely flat of course, but beautiful.  I’ve been attempting to stay on track with my master plan of making a mountain biking lover out of him, but it hasn’t been as easy as I envisioned.  Lots of places where we’re staying don’t have decent trails nearby, and his bike is working against him to an extent.  I say “his,” but in truth he inherited mine, a 23 (!) year-old Gary Fisher hardtail from back when suspension was a new thing.  It’s a “limited edition Grateful Dead” version of one of Fisher’s first mountain bikes, which is amusing since I could only name two or three Grateful Dead songs, if pressed.  Anyway, she served me very well through four years of pounding the muddy trails in Whidbey Island and Anacortes (with the occasional jaunt to Hawaii via P-3), three more in The Netherlands, a blissful high-elevation year in Park City, and then the rest of my adult life thereafter.  I got a new mountain bike for Christmas two years ago, and was thrilled to pass my old beater on to Keeper once he reached my height on this trip – which by the way I absolutely did not expect at age 12, but that’s an entirely other story – in truth, though, she’s about dead.  The front suspension, an elastomer type (you can’t find those anymore) has lost all elasticity.  The shifting is sloppy at best, and the brakes are getting dangerously close to not doing their job at all, with no easy fixes available.  You just can’t find those parts anymore.  Plus she’s heavy.  Countless hours of criss-crossing the country on top of the Toad can’t be helpful either.

He’s been game to ride with me every time I suggest it, but the writing is on the wall – assuming we settle in Bend, we’re going to need to invest in new bikes for all three kids, and Tacco too likely.  That’s ok, though, feeling justified in maintaining a stable of outdoor toys is one of the things I’m secretly looking forward to.  Shh..

So yes, a gorgeous ride through the island’s trails was a perfect way to start the morning, and from there we moved on to exploring Savannah proper.

I hardly remember “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (the movie – I didn’t have the pleasure of reading the book), but the one scene that stuck with me was John Cusack, playing a New York reporter who has traveled to Savannah to investigate a murder – I think?? – excitedly calling back to his home office and telling them how awestruck he was by this place, and then concluding with “…and everyone’s drunk!”

I am in full agreement with his awe.  The second part I don’t quite buy but I do see where it came from.  I’ll get back to that briefly in a sec.

It’s a stunning city.  The downtown’s hallmark are it’s “squares,” which are found every few blocks and serve as lush mini parks.

They’re a little hard to pick out from the satellite view, but basically they make the already charming downtown even more so, and extremely strollable.

We didn’t have a game plan for the day, so parked the car somewhere central and stroll we did.

One thing that stood out immediately, and here I’ll return to Cusack’s quote, is that Savannah is somewhat of a party city.  It took very little time to lose count of the bachelorette parties in progress, and this was the middle of the day.  There are quite a few of these mobile bar on wheels things, which I had first seen in Bend by the way, and every one we saw had a group of women yelling “wooooo!!!!” every time they were acknowledged or saw something they appreciated.

Keeper was a little befuddled by that, having not been in this sort of environment before, and I had to try to figure out how to explain that yes, that seems to be what women in a party situation do — they yell “woooooo!!!” a lot — and no you’re right, men don’t tend to do the same thing in the same situation, and no, I don’t have a better explanation than that, but just roll with it and don’t think about it too much because it’s fun.

We had our observations confirmed soon thereafter when a tour guide informed us that Savannah is far and away the number one bachelorette party destination in the South.  The “carry drinks around in the open” rule helps too I’m sure.  Interestingly that stat doesn’t hold for bachelor parties, however – my guess is that the guys tend to head west to New Orleans.

At any rate, it does contribute not only to a celebratory atmosphere, but also to Savannah’s vaguely feminine character.  It’s difficult to explain, but it makes sense when you see it.  She’s like a classy, well-dressed Southern belle with a deeply (and maybe darkly) playful sass driving everything along just below the surface.

We opted for a horse-driven carriage tour of downtown in order to get a little insight on things and give the kiddos a break from walking.  Despite Keeper’s initial resistance to the mode of travel, it proved to be an outstanding way to see the city, as well as to scout out restaurants for dinner.

Reasoning that we’d go with full-blown Low Country cuisine in Charleston and that our bodies could only handle so much of it, we went for a highly recommended Asian restaurant instead, and it was a hit all around.

Upon our return to Skidaway, we discovered that we were in time for a Ranger-led nighttime walk through the tidal marsh, which was a perfect bookend to Keeper & my bike ride across some of the same trails that morning.

She explained at one point that she had just returned to Skidaway after several years living in Maui, and had been yearning to be back.  She then added that “that should give you an idea about how special a place this is…”  It did.

The rangers’ info made the tidelands even more fascinating to me, and one of the interesting things we learned was how to spot spiders in the underbrush at night.  Much like the back of animals’ eyes will reflect a blueish light at night, a spider’s eyes reflect green.  But they’re tiny of course, so you need to get the light to reflect directly, and the way to do this is to hold a flashlight tightly next to your eyes, shining out at the same area you’re looking, while being careful not to kill your night vision by shining the light in your own eyes.  What you see as you look around are hundreds, thousands even, of these tiny green twinkling dots, each one of which, upon closer inspection, sports the remainder of a spider hanging out trying to eat and not be bothered.  Even arachnophobic Keeper found that cool.

So far this trip, we have yet to have a park ranger-led program be a “miss.”  They’re not something I would’ve sought out in the past, but as I’ve said many times now in this blog, wrong yet again.

Chalk that up to another benefit of this year.

Tomorrow we head up to Charleston, and I’ve heard amazing things.  Evidently there’s somewhat of a long running Savannah / Charleston rivalry in place; I’m very much looking forward to gathering the data to weigh in personally.

And here we reach the southernmost point in our journey.

Our plans have morphed too many times to keep track, but one of the most major changes was our decision to return to Maryland for the Winter and leave Davista in California, rather than heading deep into Florida for the Winter.  We had originally toyed with getting all the way to Key West before turning around and possibly parking the rig in South Florida while we went elsewhere for a while, then returning to make our way slowly up Florida’s Atlantic coast.  Losing the Winter and staying west caused us to essentially chop Florida from our plans altogether (though we figured we would still hit Pensacola).

But then my cousin and aunt/uncle made contact and asked if we would see them in Tampa, and we thought “why on Earth would we not do this?”  So fortunately we cast aside our feeling of “gotta get back moving west!” and did.

My cousin – she needs a callsign… I’m going to go with ‘FunStep’ – is my only first cousin on my Dad’s side, and we’ve lived far from each other for most of our lives, which is a shame.  We were lucky enough to attend her and her husband’s wedding in Fort Lauderdale back in 2012, and they’ve since moved a few times and had two gorgeous, blond kids, who my kids hadn’t had the opportunity to meet yet.  Tacco asked me about the age difference between FunStep and I, and I instinctively answered “oh, just a couple years.”  She looked at me oddly, and I simultaneously realized I was way off.  “Wait, I remember her birth, and I’m pretty sure I was in High School.  That’s not ‘a few years,’ is it…”  “Ummm, no.  It’s not.”

I assume it’s not just me who sees people far younger than I and mentally pegs us as the same age.  Or at least “pretty much” the same age.  Peers at least.  Definitely not with me as the old guy though.  And then I see a mirror.  Or a picture.  Yikes.  Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m pushing the upper end of middle aged, and you’re in your twenties or early thirties.  Oops.  This phenomenon has only gotten more exaggerated as the years pass.

Anyway, I’ve got about 15 years on FunStep.  Her parents, my aunt and uncle, did figure into my childhood pretty significantly as they lived fairly near us in Southern California.  He’s my Dad’s only brother, and inherited 100% (maybe more?) of my grandmother’s fun-loving and magnetic personality.  He was always the one who made the family gatherings more fun and bought me cool stuff for Christmas.  Tacco commented that FunStep is the perfect mix of her parents in that she mixes her mom’s liveliness and beauty with her dad’s impish sense of humor and play.

I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to get to know her husband, either, and I always enjoy catching up with my aunt and uncle, who by the way never seem to age. Wait, am I the only one aging around here??

Anyway, as a bonus, my parents decided to take the opportunity to fly out to Tampa and join in the festivities.  Excellent!

The drive from Miramar Beach was a long one, and mostly inland.  I would have been tempted to take the coastal route down to Tampa if that existed; unfortunately beaches on the Gulf side give way to swampland not too far east of where we were, and the coast doesn’t really become “beachy” again until just a bit north of Tampa.  There’s no real coast to drive down!  What there are, and I wish we had had a bit more time to explore them, are lots of rivers and crystal clear spring-fed pools.  Alas though, we had a campsite to get to, after a late start no less, and I had a work trip to fly the day after we arrived.  I still find it almost unfathomable that we often feel rushed on this year-long trip, yet we do.  If we ever do it again (just Tacco and I this time!), we’ll take two or three years…Tampa is huge, and not particularly flush with RV campgrounds, but fortunately MacDill Air Force Base is near where my cousins live and sports a massive “Family Camp” on its southern flank.  When I called to reserve a spot I was told that we would just be missing their high season, and as such would have pretty much the run of the place.  Evidently these are prime overwintering grounds for military retirees.

The gentleman I talked to was correct, by the way.  We pulled in just at dusk and had at least a hundred spots from which to choose.  We took the one nearest the beach, made some dinner, and went to sleep.

I would like to say that the beach there gave the one we had just departed from a run for its money, but, well… It’s probably not a fair comparison from the get-go, as it’s deep into Tampa Bay rather than on the actual oceanfront.  But it was also just a little unpleasant within those constraints.  When we walked over to take a look, we were first confronted with an educational sign that described the importance of leaving the rotting algae and bits of seaweed in place, as they served as a vital habitat for the various insects and crawling things.  Ah.  So that explains the smell.  It wasn’t that bad overall… but it wasn’t really nice either.  The sand’s consistency was closer to dirt than to our last few beaches’ sugar, and the water looked a bit muddy and seaweedy.  Plus lots of little crabs near the waterfront.  Like enough to freak Tacco out a little.  It’s not often you see that many of them skittering away into their burrows when you approach.  I had hoped for another day of beach play there with FunStep and family, but after our morning walk we opted not to suggest it to her.

Also – it turns out it was love bug season!  I had forgotten about these entirely from my time as a Florida resident, but definitely noticed more than the normal amount of bug splatter on Davista’s front (and my windshield).  Once we stopped, I saw them everywhere.  Basically they’re these little black bugs that resemble fireflies without the glowing part, and they fly around in mating pairs, attached at the bug-genitalia.  Not only are they prolific, but they’re far less maneuverable than your normal run-of-the-mill insect due to their chosen flight configuration.  They.  Get.  Everywhere.  And what I had forgotten was that they only come out for a few weeks in the Spring (possibly Fall too) to do their thing, so our timing was impeccable.  But that’s not all!  I was informed by my uncle, who worked at an auto auction for a while, that their innards are acidic and will eat through your car’s clear coat if you don’t clean them off.  So I spent a good 45 minutes wiping and scraping and scrubbing lovebug remains from Davista’s front on one of our first days there, with only marginal success.  It fascinated me, while I was cleaning, to watch new mating pairs land on top of the field of body parts and semi-liquefied remains of their friends to keep on mating.  Seemed kinda hard core.  Goth even.

Tampa is quite a large city, and has an interesting Cuban section as well as a good bit of history associated with it.  I had hoped to be able to do a bit of exploring, but work was of course there ready to thwart my plans again.  That whole paycheck thing…  So I left the family behind to do their own exploring / visiting, and returned to join them a few days later.

They had already spent some time with my family in my absence, but we planned a few more get-togethers upon my return, one of which involved a rented boat, some cruising, the beach, and a yacht club, which FunStep and family had recently joined after their relatively recent move to the area.  We noted that their social strategy upon moving was quite different than ours had been in Maryland, in that they made a concerted effort to “put themselves out there” and develop a friends network.  Tacco is certainly the more social of the two of us, and did do quite a bit of networking in Annapolis, but I always felt like I had one foot out the door during our time there, and never really made the effort to connect.  I like their strategy better, I realized, and made a mental note to remember this when we eventually settle.

One of my uncle’s many talents, aside from cooking in general, is the creation of simple, yet ridiculously tasty Italian appetizer platters.  No matter where he is, he seems to be able to sniff out the best Italian deli almost immediately, and he knows exactly what to buy in order to craft his tasty wares.  Many times I’ve told myself that I needed to pay better attention when he pulls one of these out, and this time, after asking the appropriate questions, I think I might have gotten it nailed – mine have never been as good as his in the past.  Though what I should have done, I now realize, was take a picture… ah well.

The boat / yacht club day was fantastic, and exactly the type of family visit you never get enough of.  We got to see Tampa from the water, the kid-cousins got better acquainted, we did some stand-up paddle boarding, and just socialized.  Such a great day.

And then we converged on an old-school-ish Florida seafood place on the beach and tied things up nicely with some excellent food.  I realized at some point during the meal that I had eaten more oysters in the past couple weeks than I had eaten in at least the previous five or maybe even ten years.  As a huge oyster fan, that’s a travesty.  But to be fair, west coast oysters, which I do prefer taste-wise, have gotten preposterously expensive.  Long gone are the days of shooting up to the oyster farm near our house and snagging a bag of 5 dozen Kumamotos for $30.  *sniff*  The oysters are still reasonable in the Southeast, though, and I remembered how much I like them.  Chalk up another one for the South!

Overall this has been a fitting inflection point for us as we turn north (and soon west).  It was great to visit loved ones and remember that this is part of why we chose to do this trip, and it felt like it was time to begin our return to our chosen coast.

But we’re not quite done with the South yet – several never-visited cities and at least one National Park still to come this Spring.  Looking forward to it!  Now, would someone please buy our house?

Actually now that I think of it, maybe we haven’t.  Images of a planet’s worth of stunning beaches leapt to mind as soon as I typed that title, and I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t ever tire of them.  But for this experience, this year… maybe.  I had wanted to find an East Coast competitor to our experiences in Carpinteria (Santa Barbara) and Coronado (San Diego), and I’m pretty sure our beachfront site in Miramar Beach, just east of Destin, FL, fit the bill.

There don’t appear to be many places on the Gulf Coast where you can RV camp right on the beach.  In fact even at this campground, a good 90% of it is shoehorned into the narrow quarter mile between the beachfront and the road; the 10 or so sites on the sand represent the entire width of the campground’s footprint, while there are probably a hundred more sites inland of where we had booked.  Obviously in a situation like that you’re gonna pay for it.  But I figured this was it for the year – we had so much enjoyed our month creeping down the Oregon / California coasts last October, and looking ahead, there weren’t any more sandy destinations on the agenda.  So yeah, we went for it.

Only a few things to write here, as the pictures speak for themselves I think.

The weather did cooperate, in that it improved during our entire 3 day/ 2 night stay.  By our departure it was absolutely perfect.  Reading between the lines you might surmise that it wasn’t exactly perfect when we arrived, and you would be correct.  A bit cloudy and enough wind that setting up The Clam was impossible, even when staked.  It did make for some small waves though, which played into Firebolt’s new hobby – Boogie Boarding!

If you remember, she had been reticent about even getting in the ocean last go around, preferring to set herself up with a beach chair and a good book.  While she’s no less voracious a reader now, she has developed a distinct adventurous streak over the past month or two that had previously not shown itself, which we love.  She was the first to grab the Boogie Board and see what sort of wave trouble she could get herself into, and though it was a choppy mess, she did a bang-up job putting herself into a few waves and riding them to shore.

One thing that became clear pretty quickly is that this is Alabama’s beach.  Florida owns it, yes, but the big Florida cities are down south in the main part of the state, and if you travel due south from any Alabama city, you’re going to end up somewhere on this stretch of shoreline.  The vast majority of the license plates we saw backed this up.  Lucky them – it’s gorgeous!

Alabama beach culture differs from California beach culture fairly significantly, in ways that I’ll leave to mostly to the imagination.  But suffice it to say there were no scenes of hoodie-clad thirty and forty-somethings sitting in around a low beach table, shucking fresh oysters and sipping from multiple bottles of Sauvignon Blanc that they pulled, along with the wine glasses, from their mini-cooler.  No judgment here (though I’m not at all shy about stating a preference for which scene I’d rather be a part of), it’s just different.  Haven’t yet worked out why you would cut the sleeves off of your perfectly good T-shirt yet.  Better farmer’s tan maybe?  Better than mine at least.  And lots of Bud Light.  Which I’ve been trying to get my head around for a while, as I’m clearly in the minority in not wanting to waste any of my limited beer drinking on it.  I get it – it’s me, not everyone else.  Still though, the best I can come up with is that it’s sort of a hybrid between beer and sparkling water, in that it satisfies the carbonation itch, keeps you reasonably well-hydrated if you drink it throughout the day, and gives you the faint taste of beer and maybe a slight heady buzz if you have enough of it before you get full.  And honestly, it’s probably the same price as sparkling water (or soda) would be if you shop well, so I guess the trade off is having to down all those calories vs getting to be pleasantly light-headed.  Certainly better than soda, where you’d get twice the calories and no happy feeling at all…  Makes more sense when I look at it that way!

Here’s something I discovered.  Quick background, before I meander to my discovery — if you grow up in Southern California, at some point in your life, if not several points, you’re required to utter some variation of the following line: “I could never live far from the beach.  Ever.”  You’re also required to mean it.

I faithfully executed my Southern California duties several times in my late teens and early twenties.  But things evolved.  I wouldn’t say that moving up to Northern California changed my view entirely, as its beaches are stunning.  But they also tend to be remote, chilly in comparison to their neighbors to the south, and most importantly, they’re really not The Main Thing up there.  At all.  And I found myself surprisingly OK with that.  Fast forward to living in the San Juan Islands in Washington state for 15+ years and The Netherlands for 3 – both near beaches, which I did still enjoy on occasion, but what I gradually realized was that it was water I was interested in living near, and that lakes and rivers (and in The Netherlands’ case, canals), as long as they were clean enough to play in, could scratch that itch even more thoroughly than could the ocean.  So I changed my tune.  I would smile and nod knowingly when fellow Southern California folks would say the line, but then I would tell them what I had discovered about my own preferences and I’d watch them unconvincingly try to contort their face into a reciprocal knowing nod.  Or they’d just say “Dude.  Sorry, but you’re crazy.”

What happened this week in Florida was that I found myself entirely in my element while watching the rest of my family be somewhat less so.  Each morning I would make my cup of coffee and go sit with my feet dug into the sand.

I inflated one of the kayaks and tried to get a partner in crime to join me in a long paddle up the beach.  No takers, so I went solo for just about an hour.  At one point I spotted a school of dolphins swimming toward me and positioned myself right in front of them in hopes that they’d want to “play” a bit.  I didn’t quite get that, but I was thrilled to watch them submerge a few feet before reaching me and then swim right underneath me before resurfacing a few feet away and moving on.

I swam every morning (and usually late afternoon / evening) as well, making sure to go out far enough that I couldn’t touch the bottom so that I could get a little full-body exercise.  It felt great.  Better than great.  Primal.  Vital.  I remembered that I felt the same last October after having swum in the ocean most days that month.

So I’m circling back a little (and this was my discovery) — maybe there’s something far deeper to that Southern California sentiment…

That is not to say that we’ll now be moving to the beach.  There’s the price of course.  But more than that, as I mentioned, I seem to be the only family member with this connection to the ocean – the rest enjoy it but get “beached out” pretty quickly.

It was an interesting discovery though, and may lead to an annual beach vacation from Bend or, why not, maybe two or three.

I’ll leave you with a few more pictures, as really our activities were few.

This is pretty much all we did, and it was glorious.

Let me take you back to the late summer of 1991.  I’ve just graduated college with a BS degree and a commission as an Ensign in the Navy, and had been able to spend the early part of the summer doing not a whole lot while staying with my parents, who had recently moved up to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, as the Aviation Training Command wasn’t yet ready for me.  They’ve now informed me that they are (ready for me, that is), and I’m driving across the country for the first time in my red Jeep, having lived my entire life in California.  Though going to college had been a quantum leap in freedom, this was yet another.  Arguably, this leap was even bigger than the last.  I’m twenty-two years old, and I look like this.

I don’t remember where I stayed along the way across the country, but I do remember approaching Pensacola and that very first time pulling off I-10, bathing in the waves of heat and humidity as well as the somewhere-between-ocean-and-swamp smell that permeated everything and struck me as sweetish and fertile.  My anticipatory excitement was off the charts.  Pensacola is technically Florida, but more akin to Alabama, being right at the end of the panhandle and surrounded by its neighbor to the north and west.  It was a world away from California.

Here’s the geographical setup in Pensacola, as I think it provides a little insight.  Note the thin barrier islands, with Perdido Key to the west, Pensacola Beach in the middle (but far from the Pensacola Naval Air Station, which sits southwest of downtown), and Navarre Beach out to the east.  Whiting Field (the flight training base, where I was stationed after my initial indoctrination training was complete) is way up to the north of Milton, aka the middle of nowhere.

On my first night there, I contacted some friends from college who had come out for flight training a year prior and were still making their way through the program.  We met at their place on Perdido Key and headed out to the Flora-bama, an enormous beachfront bar/liquor store complex (in P-cola vernacular: a “lounge and package”) that straddles the border between the two states.  At the time they had about a half dozen sub-bars within the main bar, and were semi-famous for an annual “mullet toss,” which is exactly what it sounds like, and a huge event.  Incidentally, the hairstyle is named after the fish, not vice versa.  It became clear very quickly that my friends had settled in deeply over the past year, as they comfortably disappeared into the crowd, acknowledging greetings from various bartenders and fellow bar-goers.  Later in the evening I was surprised to see one of my friends on stage, playing his guitar and singing some country standards. [Side note:  He’s really good, and just released an album.  Check it out.]  The end of my first night in the South found me wandering into a decidedly slower paced room in which there was a booming sing-along in progress.  It took me a second to recognize the tune, but I soon pegged it as “Dixie,” but at half speed, maybe less, for maximum emotional impact.  A look around me at the tear-stained faces of my new neighbors, one arm around the person next to them and the other raising a tightly held beer in a plastic cup while they sang their hearts out, told me that the emotions ran deep.  This wasn’t a jokey sing-along, they really meant it.  Wow.  I truly had left California behind.

Soon I linked up with some college / Naval ROTC friends and rented a house right on Pensacola Beach, which surprised me by having the whitest sand I had ever seen.  I had seen “white sand beaches” before but they always disappointed me by looking just a shade or two lighter than the beige I was used to from Southern California.  This beach was white.  Like sugar.  The house was a no-frills hunk of cinder block, but it had a second-floor balcony which overlooked the sand and water.  I don’t remember how much rent I paid, but it was no more than $200/month.  In fact I think it was $150.

And here it gets even better.  Whoever’s job responsibility includes deciding how many Student Naval Aviators to accept into the program at any given time has a tricky task.  The complexities of balancing the constantly changing “needs of the Navy” with the number of incoming students (as well as several other uncontrollable variables I’m sure) result in massive training tempo variations for individual flight students, anywhere from immediate entry into the program and two training events per day until graduation to stopping training altogether and just waiting around to start again.  They were even occasionally doing what they (or maybe just we?) called “bottom blows,” where the lowest performing XX percent of students are simply cut from the program and either sent to other Navy communities or just freed from their commitment to the Navy altogether.  As luck would have it, I arrived in Pensacola during a student glut, even after a fairly recent “bottom blow.”  I wouldn’t be beginning flight training for quite some time.

Some unfortunate Navy Lieutenant was assigned as “Student Control Officer,” and his job was essentially to manage and find, um, “gainful” employment for this massive pool of newly commissioned Ensigns while trickling them slowly into the front end of the training program.  Fortunately I only met him once or twice, but he always looked harried and more than a little annoyed.  How that situation looked from my side of things, however, was a mere 3 days per week for a couple hours per day of doing things like demonstrating the obstacle course to the current crop of students or riding around base on a tricycle (I’m serious) with a Wet Bulb Globe Thermometer (the “whib-jit”) and taking readings to determine whether it was too hot to conduct various types of training.  That was the extent of my responsibilities.

I also discovered, once I started making friends with other student-pool dwellers, that while we were enjoying the euphoria of newly found freedom, our Naval Academy graduate friends took that concept into the stratosphere owing to their previous four years’ excessive / oppressive control over their lives.  They were an intriguing lot, and running around in the same circles as they did made an exciting time even more so for me.  A few became dear, lifelong friends, and a few nearly beat my friends and me into a pulp when we showed up at a party we hadn’t been invited to (actually we had, but the potential pummelers didn’t know that) and didn’t quite fit in.  Interestingly, there ended up being some overlap between those two groups.

So OK, let’s recap quickly before I move on.  I’m just out of college, I’m living on the beach with friends in a new part of the country, I and a few hundred of my soon-to-be colleagues are about to enter a Naval Aviator training program in a city that’s all about its Naval Aviators, and I’m making a Naval Officer’s salary for working (sorry, “working”) about 10 hours per week.  I did this for almost a year.

What could possibly happen?

I should add that once I finally did start the program, the student glut hadn’t dissipated, resulting in an average flight event rate of about one every week and a half.  You would call to listen to the recording of the next day’s flight schedule early in the evening, and if you weren’t on it (and generally you weren’t), that was it – you were off the next day.  Didn’t even have to call in each morning to verify you weren’t face down in a ditch somewhere.  Now I did mention in a previous post that my living situation became less favorable once I moved off the beach and up nearer to Whiting Field in an attempt to be responsible.  Bad call.  Still though, that’s a lot of paid time off, and once I moved back to the beach for the last two months or so, this time a half hour to the east in Navarre, my living situation exceeded even the Pensacola Beach salad days.

As much as I really, really want to just go entirely off the rails right now and write about the stories – SO many stories – from that time frame, I actually am attempting to go somewhere that brings us back to here and now in Pensacola…  Memory lane.  Nostalgia central.  I spent almost two years making the best kind of memories in Pensacola, and save for one evening at a friend’s house in the early 2000s, I had not been back since.

So how does a visit to city 26 years after you left it live up to that?  Everyone knows you can’t go home again, and there must be a corollary that says something like “you can’t go back to Pensacola again.”  I knew this.  Something I hadn’t entirely known was that Tacco’s experience in Pensacola was not even remotely like mine.  I thought we were seeing this visit similarly.  Not so.  You’d think we would’ve covered this ground at some point in our 16 years of marriage, but somehow we managed not to until just about the Alabama border, as I was babbling about some of the things I was looking forward to seeing and giddily alluding to 20 of my 200 flight school stories (again), and she offered “you know, I really don’t have many memories here.”

Sccrrraaattttccchhh… um, really?

“I mean, I appreciate that you do, but you need to understand that I got here, went straight into training, did two events per day until I finished this phase and then I left.  I didn’t have any time to play.”  Wow.  Makes sense of course, but it was somewhat mind-blowing, both the difference in our experiences and the fact that I hadn’t really ever asked her about this.

So I guess Pensacola is my place, and I would be the sole parent pointing out the various “here’s where x happened…” sights to my almost-pretending-to-be-interested family/audience.  That’s good to know.

I had split the visit into two planned segments – the first a two-night stay on Pensacola Beach and the second a longer stay (including a work trip for me) at the RV park on the Naval Air Station.

My first impression tracked somewhat with my impressions of driving through the bayou south and west of New Orleans.  Namely that Pensacola has grown up.  The town in which it once took maximum effort to even find an OK bottle of wine to buy (Actual quote, more or less: “son… I dunno about no Cab-yer-nay, but we got reyed, we got waaht.  Rat there in them boxes.  They got a spout in the bottom even…”), now sports a thriving downtown with more solid-looking restaurants than I could count, arts festivals, and Portland-style food trucks.  Crossing the bridge onto the beach revealed the even more surprising sight of dozens of high-rise hotels and condos, multiple restaurant row / entertainment-type areas, and scads of beachfront mansions.  When I lived there our cinder block cube was pretty much the standard, there were about a half-dozen restaurants total, and I think there was a miniature golf course with water hazards dyed an unholy red and a large Paul Bunyan.  They’ve done an excellent job classing the place up!

Our RV park sat on the Intracoastal Waterway side of the island, but was just a short walk to the beach, and we wasted no time setting up camp and prepping for some beach ops.

First though, lunch at Peg Leg Pete’s, a once-sleepy little place on the sand which had served as a backdrop to several of my Pensacola Beach stories and served up some memorable baked oysters of various styles to boot.  True to form, it had about tripled in size as well, and appeared to be quite popular.

The oysters were every bit as tasty as I remembered, though the eccentric guy on the acoustic guitar playing “Harvest Moon” was sadly nowhere to be found.  Ah well.

The beach was maybe not quite as white as I remembered, but still impressive, and the kids marveled, as I once had, at how the sand squeaked under your footsteps due to the uniformity of the grain size.

Sometimes it’s difficult for me to remember that technically school is still in session for our kids;  fortunately Tacco does a better job of being diligent in that respect than I do, and she tempered my vision of an utterly unproductive full day playing on the beach with a suggestion that we visit Fort Pickens at the western end of our island and part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore.  So glad she did – I learned quite a bit there that I had never been interested enough to seek out when I lived just down the street years before.

Fort Pickens is one of three strategically positioned forts which served to defend the narrow entrance to Pensacola Harbor.  From any of the three you can see the other two, but the range circles of their guns fell just shy of each other, while overlapping in the bay’s entrance, so they were able to set up an effective crossfire.  I suspect TACCO will go into more detail about the various forts, but one of the tidbits of knowledge that really stuck with me was the fact that, had it not been for inclement weather, Fort Pickens and not Fort Sumter would have likely been the site of the Civil War’s first shots fired.  It, too, was held by government (Union) soldiers at the time and a group of Confederate soldiers had an attack planned and ready to go from further east on the island, but weather prevented it.  And then hell broke loose in South Carolina.

More beach play followed our short history lesson, and we were able to get together with some friends for dinner out on the beach right next to our RV park.

The next morning greeted us with threatening clouds and a good bit of wind, but we figured we’d be remiss if we didn’t take the opportunity to do a bit more beach walking / exploring.

We actually walked up the beach to the aforementioned cinder block cube that once housed me.  I’ve gotta say, it was pretty ugly.  And the large expanse of sand that led to the water was now fenced off and overgrown with beach plants that protect the dunes from erosion.  There was also a massive mansion between the house and the water – where’d that come from?  But it was entertaining to see, even if no one wanted to hear me talk about throwing furniture off the balcony, trying to use a large inflatable island to surf, or putting holes in the neighbor’s guitar.  In place of that I texted a picture of it to the old roomies and got to reminisce a bit via text message.

Another surprise – that house came up on Zillow as being worth $800K… what?!?!?  I think it was worth a tenth of that at most when we were there; if only we had known.

Our campsite on the Naval Air Station was a bit more rustic, and we were met upon arrival with a classic Florida-style thunderstorm that turned the whole place into a temporary pond.

The location was good though, with a short walk to the Bayfront beach, another of the forts nearby (on the base), a historic lighthouse within walking distance, and the Museum of Naval Aviation just up the street.  On top of that, it sat essentially at show center for the almost-weekly Blue Angels practices, making this the second time the kids were able to see a Blue Angels show this trip.

I missed most of the time there due to my work commitments.  My only thing to note from the going-to-and-from-work experience: Pensacola is a DIFFICULT city to get to, at least as a pilot.  There aren’t many flights that serve it, and there are a ton of other pilots who live there.  Getting to work was tricky – getting back was almost impossible.  I made it as far as Atlanta and then was bumped off of four successive flights.  I was just about to give up and go find a hotel room for the night when a Hail Mary passenger no-show allowed me to slide into a seat and get back to my family.

We rounded out our Pensacola time with another beach walk and one more nostalgic night out to eat at McGuire’s, which is another of the classic P-Cola restaurants, particularly for the aviation crowd.  If I recall correctly, it was known for a few things: Huge food portions; signed dollar bills stapled to just about every inch of the ceiling and walls (to which you were encouraged to add your own); confusing bathroom signage that tended to incite hilarity; and a big moose head behind the makeshift “stage” (usually hosting sloppily singing patrons rather than any actual talent) which you were supposed to kiss, but I forget exactly why.  The kids were surprised to hear that for a short time I donned the McGuire’s green vest and tended bar for their catering division while in Flight School.  THAT was fun.

McGuire’s itself was a little bit disappointing, but not the sad kind of disappointing.  More like the confirmation I hadn’t realized I needed that this Pensacola was not the Pensacola I once lived in, that that time and place are securely bygone and have been properly celebrated, and that I could definitively close that book.  It’s a much bigger restaurant now, with lots of little sub-rooms, one of which we were tucked into.  I couldn’t even find the moose initially.  My kids didn’t find the bathroom signage that confusing or amusing (basically each door has the opposite gender’s name with an arrow pointing to the other door)… guess that only incites hilarity after a few drinks.  And the food was just ok.  Big portions in themselves just don’t do it for me.  Kinda the opposite actually.  The sub-room in which we were seated happened to be Blue Angel themed, and I found myself sitting across from the flight suit of a classmate of mine from back in the P-Cola days.  He had been not just a Blue Angel, but the Commanding Officer of the Blues, and this was a long enough time ago to have his flight suit displayed on the wall in commemoration.  That officially makes me old I’m pretty sure.  If nothing else, I can see “old” from here.

Yes, this was an excellent visit.  I like Pensacola and always will.  It’s a fun and dynamic town with an extensive history both military and otherwise, miles of gorgeous beaches, and a laid back Southern charm.  I’ll always associate it with a time of my life in which I had it so incredibly good, and I even knew how good I had it while I was in it, yet still I wasn’t able to fathom just how insanely memorable it all was.

And with that it’s time to move on.

Approaching the Louisiana bayou meant approaching memory lane for me, as I spent my first few adult (read: out of college, on my own, and therefore memorable) years in this part of the country.  Not in New Orleans per se, rather a few hours down the road in Pensacola.  But road trips to New Orleans were a fairly common thing due to the pace of Navy Primary Flight Training at the time.  More on that later though…

I wanted to take the off-the-beaten path route to New Orleans from Houston; here’s how that looked.

That area has always fascinated me for several reasons.  One is the way in which the landscape so gradually becomes the Gulf of Mexico.  Miles upon miles of swamp / bayou with what I would imagine to be essentially un-mappable shoreline due to the tides and continually shifting mud and sand.  And then there’s the whole Cajun culture that’s so different from anything else in the country.  I had read a few books in which people were plopped into that region through various circumstances (one was an ejection out of a fighter jet if I remember correctly), and basically found themselves in another country, almost completely cut off from anything familiar.  I wasn’t sure we would be able to get a taste of that through traversing the area by road, but I was hopeful.  And part of me was eager to convince the family to buy a whole mess of crawfish to boil up with some corn and maybe some andouille, to feast on that night.  (Spoiler alert: nope.  I’m the only crawfish fan in our clan.)

The drive ended up confounding my expectations, both for the scenery and for how not backwater it seemed.  I was expecting to find an area frozen in time, and it didn’t appear that way at all.  I also remember from previous drives, signs like this everywhere, advertising various things: chicken fried steaks, mudbugs, girly shows, bail bonds, gumbo by the gallon…  This time I’m not sure I saw even one of them.  Evidently they’ve fallen out of favor.  Bad luck for whoever makes them, but probably good luck for the rest of us.

Really, it was just a pretty drive.  Green and lush, cypresses, vines, lots of water, people fishing on the side of the road… One thing that stood out was how every building, from houses to schools to libraries, was built on high stilts.  You’d imagine that flooding was common, but it did make me wonder exactly how common.

The one section of road that sat right next to the Gulf’s coastline was a bit underwhelming.  The water was brownish, multiple oil rigs loomed just offshore, and there was no real beach that you would want to hang out on.  It was our first ocean sighting since the Pacific and as such was slightly momentous, but the actual sight of it netted only a half-hearted “oh yeah, right, cool” from the kiddos, likely due to the scene I described.  So I didn’t make a big deal of it.  I also remembered that the prevailing current in the Gulf flows counter-clockwise along the shore, which sends the runoff from the Mississippi (along with God knows how much fertilizer and random pollutants) in this direction, creating a massive “dead zone” along and out from Louisiana’s western coastline.  So the water’s being brownish and unvisited made sense.

We did cross a river on a ferry at one point, which was unexpected.  Fortunately it was free in our direction and they’re used to taking big semis across, so our 50’ of RV/car was no big deal at all for them.  I did not want to have to backtrack.

We stayed in a state park just west of downtown New Orleans called Bayou Segnette, and it looked the part due to our arrival after a full day of torrential rain.

I learned a few days later that the various airboat tours through the bayou that are advertised in New Orleans take place right next door on the waterways along which we walked and jogged, fortunately uninterrupted by gator sightings.  I found it gorgeous, and loved the fireflies and the sound of the thousands of frogs that night.  The bugs weren’t bad yet, nor was the heat/humidity, allowing us to spend maximum time outside.  We had to walk on a raised wooden path over the swamp and through the woods to get to the bathroom/showers.  As luck would have it, the mulberry trees were hitting peak ripeness as well, and any bathroom walk resulted in shoe soles stained dark purple.

Unfortunately I had a trip to fly, so had to abandon my family to the bayou for a few days the morning after we arrived.  When we returned, though, they picked me up at the airport and we drove directly to the French Quarter.

I love the French Quarter – who doesn’t?  Sure, there’s the sleaze factor and by no standard could you call it “clean,” but that’s all part of the charm, and the live music, food, and general vibe are unmatched.  I’ve had many, many great days and nights there.  But that leads to sort of a predicament: How do you do New Orleans with kids?  It is definitely one of those places where what you do as an adult, particularly as an early-twenty-something adult, bears no resemblance to what you would do there with young ones.

Fortunately one solution presented itself almost immediately when we parked – we exited the car to find that the riverboat Natchez was departing for an hour-and-half-long cruise on the Mississippi within 15 minutes.  We considered that a target of opportunity and quickly jumped aboard.

That was undeniably cool.  After touring the whole boat and checking out how the huge paddlewheel works (as well as introducing the kiddos to Cajun red beans and rice – hit!), we found some chairs on the lower deck and listened to the live New Orleans jazz band playing upstairs.  Woodsprite and Firebolt launched immediately into energetic dancing, with Firebolt in particular appearing to feel the music deep in her bones.  It’s so satisfying to see her in her element like that.

We followed that up with a stroll through the Quarter and some Cajun food (More oysters!  More jambalaya!  More red beans and rice!) before heading back to Bayou Segnette.

Our accommodation plan was actually to spend our final night or two there in the French Quarter; it turns out there’s a slightly swanky RV park right at N’awlins Ground Zero, or at least just outside.  Location location location indeed, with the price to match.  It must be quite the place during the various festivals.  I couldn’t justify staying there for more than two nights (and actually it turned into one, which was just fine), but wanted to be able to amble into the fun.  That also turned out to be less important than I’d anticipated – I suppose I was conflating memories of New Orleans with present realities.

The truth is, we ran out of things to do pretty quickly in the Quarter.  There’s certainly more than a little crisis of creativity involved therein, but what we realized before long at all was two-fold: many things there start up after sunset (and continue until sunrise), and the kids had no business being there after sunset.  We brought them by Pat O’Briens at 4PMish, hoping that they could get a whiff of what the French Quarter can be about without having to be immersed in it, but the doorman intercepted us before we even got close, letting us know that this was 21-and-over only and there was an associated restaurant down the way that we might enjoy.  Of course it’s 21-and-over, what are we, nuts?  Preservation Hall next door for some live heritage jazz was another bright idea we had, but passing by it reminded us that oh yeah, you need to line up at least an hour ahead of time to get in.  Plus the venue just isn’t that kid friendly.

Firebolt does complement the scenery though!

So yes, in hindsight we would have put more focus on some of the other neighborhoods – the Garden District, etc… and maybe done a bayou tour or something like that.  There’s also an extraordinary World War II museum there, which we missed.  Next time.

Miscommunication played a bit of a role as well, though, and led to a bit of frustration – the first real “pressure cooker” moments of this latest phase of traveling.  Tacco and I haven’t quite been on the same page with respect to planning.  During the first phase of travel there was no concrete “planning” page for us both to be on… we were both equally clueless.  This time we know to reserve ahead religiously, most crucially over weekends and at popular destinations.  Consequently we now tend to have our accommodations teed up for at least a month.  She’s been much more busy than I with ongoing commitments, and I’ve had the advantage of a few work trips in which I didn’t have much to do other than plan our travels.  That’s good and bad.  Good in that I can handle it and have the planning/reserving done before she has to be concerned about it, less good in that if we don’t brief plans for a particular visit thoroughly, it becomes easy to have widely varying visions for what a particular stay will look like.

We didn’t brief New Orleans particularly well.  The details are uninteresting (and actually a little vague), but ultimately we left a bit unsatisfied that we hadn’t “done” New Orleans as well as we could have.  I came back from my work trip assuming that they had seen and done everything they wanted to in my absence, and more or less took over the agenda.  I got my crawfish boudin in the French Market (which they had already visited) like I had envisioned, but in general the execution and coordination were sloppier than they could’ve been.

We did have an amusing experience in the French Market.  The girls found a vendor making personalized name bracelets and we had one made for Firebolt (Woodsprite’s was already pre-made).  While we were waiting for it, Keeper and I decided to check out some hats.  As I’m always attempting to make him cooler than I am/was, I suggested he try on a few that I figured he could make work, including a pretty snazzy-looking black straw fedora (it looked better than it sounds).  As he reached for it, the vendor, a middle-aged, slow-moving African American woman who stood about 4’9”, began to butter him up a little like only a lifetime N’Awlins denizen like her could: “naah, that, son… that looks sharp… here naah, take a look in this heah mirruh…” [slowly holds up the mirror]  “Ya see?  …  But…  wait naah just a second… if you REALLY wanna kill the ladies… whatcha need ta do…”  [reaches slowly toward his hat, at which point Keeper, already rosy cheeked but quickly reddening further and trying to stifle laughter, also realizes that he looks pretty killer in the hat, but is slightly embarrassed at the attention and not sure how to deal with this] “Now son… I’m gonna need ya to relax for me heah…” [she then slowly and deliberately slides the hat forward and slightly off-kilter on his brow] “y’all take a look now…”  At the same time, another guy who appeared to just be walking guy stopped and remarked “you know, he really could pull off a fedora…”  Perfect.  Why we didn’t buy the fedora I have no clue – if I had it to do 10 times over again, I’d buy it every single time.  But ah well, Keeper does have the story, which may be just as good even without the fedora.

I’m pretty certain our kids will be back to New Orleans some day.  Hopefully we planted a few seeds that will allow them to enjoy it responsibly and in moderation.  Or, you know, something…  (ha!)

And hopefully we’ve learned to align our expectations a little better as well.  We really only have a few months left of this; it would be a shame to leave more cool cities saying “we could’ve done that better.”

This will be quick.

Not to say I didn’t enjoy our Johnson Space Center tour in Houston, I did.  It was a bit crowded, but that’s to be expected on a weekend.  I learned a few things, too.  I hadn’t realized that we (as in we, the USA) were fully engaged in an eventual mission to Mars.  Learning about how that’s planned and being fleshed out was fascinating.  It was also entertaining to watch the kids get wrapped up in Apollo 13 and have them seeking out the pictures of the various astronauts whose actor counterparts they gravitated to in the movie.  I had wanted to watch The Right Stuff with Keeper in order to round out that period of our history before we moved on to other things, but it’s a three hour movie, and uninterrupted three hour chunks of time that don’t involve sleep are almost as tricky to come by on the road as they are at home.

Two more things stood out for me at NASA.  Firstly, that Saturn rocket is enormous.  I mean, absolutely massive.  The engineering involved with not only guiding that thing into space, but keeping it from tearing itself apart under the forces involved is mind-boggling.  Secondly, the Mercury-Redstone rocket is tiny!  I picture the scene (from The Right Stuff) of Alan Shepherd sitting in his capsule at the top of it, first wetting his spacesuit and then telling them to “fix [their] little problems and light this candle!” and I imagined another massive rocket.  It’s not.  It’s not that much taller than a telephone pole.  For some reason that struck me too – the idea of riding this little Mazda Miata of a rocket into space. (My dad’s quote on Miatas upon first in-person viewing: “That looks like you should have one for each foot!”)

 

The kids enjoyed the tour as well.  No new astronaut candidates in the group, but I do think Firebolt took to the idea of working on the engineering / mission control side of things.  She’s great that way – she has added at least three or four more future career paths on this trip to her already impressive list of “things she’s gonna do” (teacher, soccer player, “science person,” and president of the USA, just to name a few).

Otherwise Tacco covered Houston well, and I don’t have anything to add, other than the fact that it, too, is massive.  Most reasonably large cities that aren’t geographically constrained tend to have a major interstate or two that run through the middle of them and then another that rings around the metro area.  Houston has four such concentric rings.

Heading from the west side to the southeast side of the metro area, we managed to spend a solid hour and a half on one of these rings in heavy, lane-weaving traffic (not at all fun in Davista), never once seeing anything that looked like a city off in the distance to our left, as it remained too distant in the haze.  I’ve determined that I prefer the 2-to-4 lane secondary roads to interstates, and if I absolutely need to drive through a city, I want to do it either with the car and RV disconnected, or in the middle of the night.

And then we arrived here.

I had done considerable research before booking here, and of the many “RV parks” in the area, this had the best reviews.  Parking lot, busy highways on two sides, power lines… there ya go.  At least it wasn’t hot and humid yet.

All good though, we had only planned this to be a quick stopover on the way to New Orleans, and for that it more than served its purpose.

There are gators.  On walk about.  In Houston.  I thought gators were conscious of not crossing state lions with illegal porpoises (that’s punch line of a terrible joke I once heard, I’ll spare you…) and mindfully kept to Florida.  Not so. Our accommodations in Houston boasted one benefit, and pulling the kayaks out to paddle about the non-swimming hole (aka “the lake” as in the Willow Lake RV Resort) was not it.  I took a stroll around the lake and learned it was not a place to kayak or swim.

Duly noted.

What was befuddling, was the use of the additional signage about a quarter mile down:

I though maybe posting a “Beware of Gators – Please do not feed the wildlife” sign would have been sufficient because the unwritten follow on “with yourself” immediately came to mind. But perhaps the lawyers were unwilling to allow Darwinism to potentially streamline our gene pool, lest any hypothetical survivors of any alleged gator attacks try to sue.

In preparation for our stop at the Houston Space Center, Flight watched Apollo 13 with the kids while I was in DC for my Navy Reserve work.  As we rolled into the RV resort, Firebolt sidled up to the driver’s seat and offered up, “Houston, we have a problem.  We are out of toilet paper.”  I turned around to ask, “Seriously?” when she giggled and said, “Just kidding! I just wanted to say ‘Houston, we have a problem.’”

That kid is as witty as they come.  Meanwhile, her jesting brought about immediate flashbacks to last August when liberal use of that precious resource (specifically created for rapid decomposition in marine and RV usage) had temporarily clogged our black water tank and we had to creatively flush it using a dump station hose fed through the window above Woodsprite’s bed and into the open commode to force out the lingering clumps of yet-to-deteriorate TP.  Fortunately, we were able to unclog the mass of tissue collecting in the tank, which necessitated implementing the general* rule “No more than six squares per visit.  Total.”  (*Okay, okay, wipe until you’re clean, but please don’t us half a roll in the process as you might break our house…)

I had known our RV-specific TP supply was running low and already briefed the kids that we were on ration status until we could procure more, but didn’t think we were yet at General Quarters.  I have come to learn that lack of TP is nearly as mission critical as a free-flowing black water tank.  I wonder how they handle that at the International Space Station.  Do they use Charmin?  Never mind, I saw The Martian…

Our only full day in Houston was spent paying homage to NASA’s efforts, which was the singular benefit to staying here as it was nearby:

Although entry to the museum is free, the thing to do is the 90-minute tram tour that has three stops across the NASA Houston complex and that thing, sadly, is not free, not even for Navy Space Cadre personnel (Flight suggested it’s because I haven’t yet learned the secret handshake).

Before we jumped on the sightseeing tram, we spent some time touring the museum.  We practiced our docking skills at the International Space Station.

We had a physics discussion and practiced weightlifting on different planets of varying gravitational pull.

We saw where they faked the moon landing.

Kidding! Everyone knows they used a sound stage in Area 51.

We counted our blessings that my Naval Flight Officer path was cut short before entertaining getting into any of these tiny capsules.

Okay, maybe that was only me.

When I saw the below mockup of a space station, all I could think about was how vertigo inducing space travel would be for me and how it would be about two hours sans gravity before I went cray-cray.

I’m happy to know two astronauts, am glad they are excited about what they do, and even more delighted to know my Space Cadre role relegates me to a desk (I think).

Our budding scientist was equally excited (can’t you tell?) to see the elemental breakdown of the moon’s soil composition.

Once we’d canvassed the museum, we made our way to the tram-line and waited through innumerable games of “Cowboys” before we boarded our chariot.

Our first stop was at Mission Control Center.  Firebolt was pretty stoked to see Mission Control, and upon entering immediately observed, “Wait, I’ve seen this before – this was in Apollo 13!”  WoodSprite was less excited about all the stairs and waiting.

After leaving Mission Control, we were taken to see the astronaut training center full of stationary mock-ups of all sorts of space gear.

Center front was this contraption, which I was pleased to see was named for the mighty hunter, Orion.

The woman who briefed us at Mission Control told us that the Orion was bound for Mars in a few decades and that would be piloted by astronauts who are now six to eight years old (that got our girls’ attention!), whereas the future Mission Commander is probably now 12. Keeper perked up at that tidbit as well. Always keen to support STEM activities, I was delighted to see that NASA was hosting a FIRST Robotics competition at the other end of the training facility.

The last stop on the tour was to see the rocket hangar.

It’s tricky to truly understand the magnitude of these beasts until one actually sees them, and especially mind-blowing to note how small the actual vessels are compared to the engines and fuel tanks that serve to propel them into space.  Firebolt posed with one like the five engines that were used in stage one to get SATURN V into orbit.

Each engine fires for only 2.5 minutes before burning through all the accompanying fuel and separates from the main pod.  !!!

To put it in perspective…  These things are ginormous.

Through our time at NASA’s Houston Complex, I was reassured that I am not a good candidate for exploring the final frontier, as neither an astronaut nor a rocket scientist. Once we got to the car, our kids enjoyed sharing a package of Astronaut Ice Cream and I had a few moments to reflect on our brief peek behind the outer space curtain.  Listening to the kids compare taste sensations while savoring their freeze-dried morsels and wonder aloud about potential culinary choices during space travel, I recognized how happy I am to instead cultivate the grass right here.

Semi-secretly, I had been very much looking forward to bringing the family to Austin.

Austin and I have a bit of a history.  When I was stationed in Corpus Christi, TX for flight training, I didn’t enjoy it much.  There were several reasons for this, not all of which were Corpus Christi’s fault.  Primarily, my good friend and roommate there got into some completely preposterous trouble that wouldn’t have been out of place in the pages of Catch-22.  That’s a hopelessly convoluted and miserable story that I won’t tell here, but the upshot was that he was confined to the base for a month of our Corpus time, after which he was unexpectedly railroaded out of the Naval Aviation training program, though he was kept around for several months doing busywork while that process worked its way through the system.  It was a time of much frustration, punctuated by the helplessness of railing against a massive bureaucratic organization to which you are ultimately insignificant.  With hindsight it worked out extremely well for him, but of course none of us knew that at the time.

On top of that, I didn’t like my living situation (bland apartment complex) and found Corpus itself, well… unpleasant.  Coming from my house directly situated on the whitest sand beach I had ever seen with close friends who owned a jet ski and a catamaran, respectively, Corpus may have never had a fighting chance, but still I had to work hard to find the bright sides, which I never quite did.  What I remember first was the brutal weather.  I had acclimatized to heat and humidity in Florida, but Corpus upped that a notch by throwing in both a steady 20-knot-plus wind, and a vast and very shallow bay over which that wind blew, picking up the stink of the rotting algae and seaweed along the way.  It wasn’t a refreshing wind, it was a wet, sticky, foul-smelling wind.  And then there was the beach near where I lived, which I had heard was great because you could drive on it.  Excellent in theory.  In practice, you could drive on it because the sand was concrete-hard, and when I drove out there to check it out I was surprised to see the beachgoers laying out not on the sand, but on the hoods of their cars, contorting themselves and squinting against the wind, which was blowing up bits of the chopped up seaweed and brownish seafoam that lay everywhere.  Nahhh.

To be fair, Corpus has/had some nice parts, I just didn’t make a strong enough effort to seek them out and given the situation with my friend, didn’t feel especially inclined to.

What we did instead (once he was out of his base-confinement month) was look northwest to Austin, where his newly minted fiancée was working on her Doctorate in English at the University of Texas.  We escaped Corpus pretty much every weekend and crashed at her apartment.  In my mind Austin was everything Corpus wasn’t – the heat was palatable and not sticky, there was an unparalleled music scene, the food was excellent, a river ran right through town, and of course there was the college and all that entailed.  It felt like a laid-back oasis to me.

I had been back a few times in the 25+ years since (what?!?) on airline layovers, and had found that vibe largely intact each time, even while what I appreciated about the city morphed with my age.  The foodie scene is alive and well there, the hills to the west are scattered with high quality breweries, and still there’s a feeling of everyone relaxing and doing whatever they want to do.  It’s very live-and-let-live.  Several cities have adopted similar mottoes, but I believe Austin was the first to use “Keep Austin Weird.”  I’ve heard it said that Austin is a very non-Texan city in the middle of Texas due to the diversity and the “weirdness,” but I don’t think it’s non-Texan at all.  In my mind Texas at its most ideal is all about individuality and personal freedom, and it seems to me that Austin personifies that.

And then there’s the Hill Country, which most people will say is the most beautiful region of the state.  And with the possible exception of Big Bend National Park (which I haven’t seen), I have to agree.  Rolling hills, green grass, spring-fed rivers, swimming holes, waterfalls over limestone formations, ranches…

It’s not that I thought my family would necessarily want to move there, as I didn’t either, but it was something I was looking forward to sharing with them, as I hoped it would be as pleasant a surprise for them as it had been for me when I first started spending time there.

Here was our drive (including the aforementioned pre-dawn, future dystopian slog through oil country).  It was a long one, made somewhat more interesting by the transition from the very brown, solidly arid western half of Texas to the steadily greener east/central region of the state.  Transiting the region in the Spring probably helped as well, but by the time we departed I-10 and entered the outskirts of the Hill Country it was all grass, wildflowers, and trees, many of them evergreen.

Pedernales Falls State Park was our initial destination, at which I had only managed to book one day.  Though it’s still a reasonably long drive to downtown Austin from there, I had seen pictures of the waterfall after which the park is named, and it looked like the kind of place you could easily spend a few lazy days hiking, biking, and swimming.

Our campsite there was a mixed bag.  It was a bit farther from the river than I had hoped, and we watched as our cell signal dropped from a solid four bars at the check-in station to a grainy one bar in the site.  I wish I didn’t care about this, but I do.  Between wanting to be reachable due to our home sale situation, wanting to be able to research and set up future legs of our trip, and knowing the extra stress that not having a signal puts on the kids (ok, really just Keeper), it makes a difference.  On the up side, it was spacious and gorgeous, with several lanky junipers from which we were able to hang the hammocks.  Though the staff informed us soon after our check-in that we would be welcome to stay a few more days due to some cancellations, I opted to stick with the original plan and move us to a private campground near Lake Travis to the north.

Though it wasn’t quite swimming hole warm outside, we took an afternoon hike down to the river to check it out.  We discovered that the actual falls were significantly upstream of us and would require a car ride to reach, but the area we were able to walk down to had a somewhat sandy beach and opportunities for wading. 

Keeper and I noticed the small fish darting around near our feet and decided we would see if they would participate in creating our own free spa experience – the kind where you put your feet in a pool with a bunch of tiny, hungry fish and they nibble on the dead skin.  It took them a little time to warm to the idea, but they came around!  Mmmm, dead foot skin.

Originally I proceeded directly from the previous paragraph into one about really good food, and upon re-reading, that struck me as a horrible idea.  So I’m adding a filler paragraph here to get your mind moving toward more savory images.   Clear streams, trout, salmon, campfires… sometimes I’ll even cook salmon over a campfire before making s’mores!  Ok, there.

Nurturing my foodie soul was one of the aspects of our Austin visit that I was most eagerly anticipating.  Unfortunately, a few weeks earlier we determined that Tacco would need to fly back to DC for a few days during this part of our journey, making activity and eatery planning a bit trickier.  I had a few places I had wanted to take everyone to experience, but needed to be more choosy and deliberate.  Which brings me to barbeque…

Under no definition of the word can I claim BBQ aficionado status.  It is not something I would seek out normally.  What I do have is a great appreciation for BBQ as a cooking style and as a uniquely American element of cuisine.  I love how hyper-regional it is, and how each region finds the others’ style downright heretical.  And I greatly respect the commitment involved in crafting quality BBQ.  We are very much a slow food family, not a fast food family, and the idea of a food specialty that takes 8, 10, 12, 16 hours to prepare it right holds great appeal.  I have two college friends from San Francisco who cash in marital/significant-other chips to do sporadic (possibly annual?) weekend long BBQ pilgrimages to various cities / regions.  They research the best places and then drive around and eat nothing but BBQ for a weekend.  If I remember correctly, they’ve done North Carolina, Austin, Kansas City, and Memphis to date. Though I’ve never been fortunate enough to participate, I greatly respect that kind of passion and commitment.  As tasting local foods is both integral to a sense of place and part of what we’re attempting to do with this journey, I figured the least we could do in Austin was seek out some decent brisket; Texas BBQ means beef, and brisket is of course the cut of choice.

While I’m pretty sure The Salt Lick in Driftwood, TX generally won’t break into any serious BBQ fan’s top ten list, it held a soft spot in my memory as a place I had visited Back in the Day and been blown away by.  It had actually been my first foray into the Hill Country, and what I remembered, though hazily, was a massive, grassy hilltop on a hot, lazy afternoon with picnic tables scattered widely around a central smokehouse.  It was BYOB, and the Texans seemed to take that instruction seriously, up to and including kegs.  The smell of the smoking meat was of course divine and permeated everything, and we dug in for at least a few hours of chilled-out eating, drinking, and laughing.  I had the impression everyone else was doing the same.

At Pedernales Falls we were as close to the original Salt Lick as we would be during our Austin foray, so I talked the family into making the drive down to Driftwood.  Keeper made a point to inform us that he’s not a fan of BBQ, but I did my best to convince him that this was more about the experience than the actual food, and if he wasn’t convinced, he at least played along, though he refused to order brisket.  Fair enough.

I will say that it was very little like I remember. Whether my memories or progress and development in the intervening 25 years are to blame, it struck me as much more of a “restaurant” this time than a wide open, come grab some of our food, then spread out and do what you like kind of place.  There’s even a winery right across the street.  Pretty certain that wasn’t there before.  Our dinner was enjoyable, don’t get me wrong.  But not epic.  Our choices for brisket preparation were “moist, lean, or burnt,” and I wasn’t prepared for that.  We got a mixture, but heavy on the “moist,” as that sounded the most appetizing.  That turned out to be backwards, at least according to my palate (and Tacco’s).  The “moist” turned out to be just a bit too chewy for me, whereas the “burnt” tasted delicious.  Ah well, next time.

In the morning we took Tacco to the airport, stopped for some breakfast and “local kombucha” (which turned out to be delicious) at a little store just back into the Hill Country on the way back, then broke camp and made the drive to our next campground.  Though not a particularly long drive, this one turned out to be quite scenic and more than a bit sporty, given our rig length and weight.  I made the potential mistake of following Google Maps’ advice on the most efficient routing, and that turned out to be small two-lane roads through the hills.  The first thing I noticed was that we crossed many, many stream beds.  The second was that in almost every one of these stream beds there is a flood gauge next to the road at the low point.  Evidently flash floods are very much a thing in Hill Country, and they arise quickly.  Though there were indeed a few apparent rain clouds scattered in the distance, I calculated the probability of their producing floodwaters as low and chalked it up to adventure.  Still though, when you see something like this out your windshield, you probably hope you’re in a 4 wheel drive truck and not a 32’ motorhome towing a car.

We made it of course, and the kiddos were thrilled when we pulled into a fully stocked (read: pool, playground, wi-fi, full-strength LTE signal) campground.  It wasn’t my favorite, but it was comfortable.  That evening we drove down a short distance down the road to another restaurant that I hadn’t heard of, but looked to be heavy on Texan charm with a view of Lake Travis to boot.  It was called Lucy’s Fried Chicken, and it far exceeded both my expectations and its name’s implied lack of ambition.  Gorgeous deck, stunning views, outstanding food (I opted for a smoked trout / roasted beet / spinach salad, and the hunk of trout I got looked more like a salmon and nearly overflowed the plate)… and oh by the way, inexpensive and with a huge playground for the girls within sight of the outdoor eating area which overlooked the lake.  We arrived right at sunset and were treated to the breathtaking sight of active thunderstorms marching across the sky in the north.  Perfect.

Sixth Street is Austin’s main downtown artery and center for live music and associated fun.  I can remember strolling its length on an afternoon in which they had closed it to vehicular traffic (again, Back in the Day), stopping for a beer at a rooftop bar, and looking down to see a band playing, only to discover that it was Big Head Todd and the Monsters.  And this was not before they were popular.  They just happened to be playing in the street, or so it seemed.  I was hoping to introduce the family to some facsimile of this experience / vibe, but wasn’t sure if it would be possible, or even advisable given the kids’ ages.  It is a college town after all.  I also remember riding a mechanical bull in one of the bars.  I wasn’t as keen to introduce them to that.

I opted instead to take them to Rainey Street, another food/drink centric mini-neighborhood where a restaurant I particularly like sits among the dozens of lively bars and eateries converted from old houses, as well as Portland-style food trucks.  It’s called Bangers, and it specializes in upscale sausages and has some solid beer-geek cred due to its extensive and eclectic tap list, not to mention a massive outdoor eating area with industrial sized fans to attempt to cool off the clientele.  Though we didn’t need the fans (it was no more than 60 degrees, probably less in the shade where we found ourselves), the kids dug it and we stopped at food truck for some mini doughnuts for dessert after walking the crowded street for a bit.

Though we drove down Sixth and across the Congress St Bridge, which is famous for the bats who live underneath it and swarm out at dusk on summer evenings, neither was able to display their uniqueness and charm especially well to the heads-in-their-screens passengers of my car.  No worries, another time.

We relocated Davista one last time to McKinney Falls State Park right near the airport just south of town, and picked up Tacco that evening.

Prior to that, however, we were able to take another hike to see the falls and get a little exercise.  I was struck once again by how much I enjoy hiking with the family and how it has become the backdrop for our best conversations.  We need to keep that going.

Returning to foodie-ville, we opted to do another iconic BBQ experience the morning after Tacco arrived.  Unlike the Salt Lick, Franklin BBQ in downtown Austin does land at or near the top of any respectable BBQ freak’s all-time-best list.  It has the line outside to prove it, too.  It opens at 11AM and closes when they’re out of food (generally 2-3 hours later), and people start lining up at about 7.  I was told that if you’re not in line by 8-8:30, don’t count on getting any food.  My previously mentioned BBQ loving friends wrote briefly and in superlatives about their visit to Franklin, and honestly, I was skeptical.  I just could not imagine how one place could do brisket so noticeably better than anyone else.  But they were adamant and they know their food.  So we packed up our homeschooling materials, a couple blankets, and some chairs, and headed into town at 8AM to stake our claim in the line.

Before I get to the food, I’d like to address the waiting experience.  It’s likely a popular view that there simply is no food worth waiting four hours for.  That’s reasonable, and I get it.  I’m here to tell you, though, that even had the food been so-so, there are far worse ways to spend a morning than hanging out in line at Franklin.  Essentially we had the choice of doing homeschooling in the RV or doing it outside, picnic style, in line with a couple hundred people sociably killing time.  We had a blast, and met all our neighbors.  We made friends.  Some set up game tables and played cards, others brought coolers full of beer (yes, at 9AM).  It was a scene, and if I found myself with a morning to kill in Austin, I would absolutely, positively do it again.

Now the food.  A whole new level, is all I can say.  My friends were absolutely correct; this is by far the best brisket I’ve ever tasted.  Not only was both the flavor and texture downright perfect, but it somehow managed to be impossibly tender while holding itself together.  I don’t know how it does this.  We tried ribs, brisket (of course), and the girls got pulled pork.  While that’s probably heresy, they’re 8 and 6 and cute so they get a pass.  And it was really good too.  But the brisket!  Our choices this time were “lean or fatty.”  Remembering our Salt Lick experience I asked for lean, but the server, God bless him, said “let me just give you a few extra pieces of fatty too, just so you can try it.” Unbelievable.  I mean, both types were, but the fatty one wasn’t the least bit chewy.  It was as if the meat was marbled with butter.  Meat flavored butter.  Even Keeper liked it.  And he had put up resistance to this entire evolution, with an adamant “OK Dad, have I not been clear in saying that I don’t like BBQ??”  I informed him that he had in fact been crystal clear but that this was supposedly the best on the planet, and if he didn’t like this then he could legitimately, for the rest of his life, confidently proclaim his dislike for brisket.  I also tried to sell him on the lore and culture aspect, but his eyes glazed over for that part.  No matter though, after the meal it got the coveted Keeper thumbs up.

I was asked later whether, after waiting all that time for lunch, we had bought some brisket to go as well.  We did not, and for the life of me I don’t know why we didn’t think of that, but in hindsight I’m ok with it.  The experience was exactly right, and any attempt to add to it might have somehow backfired.

After this it was my turn to depart for a few days for work, so I missed another couple days of Austin, but we did manage to visit Barton Springs just before I departed.  The Colorado River, or I guess I should say “a” Colorado River since this Colorado River bears no relation to the much larger one which flows from the Rockies to the Gulf of California, flows through the middle of town and is another center of activity in Austin.  It’s known as Town Lake in the middle of Austin (and does resemble a narrow lake more than it does a river) and is dammed upstream of Austin, forming Lake Travis.  It also has some spring-fed tributaries, of which Barton Creek, which happens to sit right in the middle of town, is one.  They’ve erected a small dam of sorts that turns the spring area into a large, urban swimming hole.  The water is clear and cool year round, and it’s a fantastic place to swim, particularly in the 100+ degree summers.  In the 72ish degree spring it’s more shocking and eye-opening than refreshing, but we did get to do some swimming, and Keeper even stepped up to use their meter diving board a few times.

So, did I succeed? Did the family “get” Austin the way I hoped they would?  Yes and no I think.  No one was blown away.  The kids enjoyed themselves quite a bit but there was no talk of its surpassing Bend in future living situation desirability, nor did I expect or want that.  Yet I think it planted seeds in them, the type that will make them one day have a hazy memory of a great meal or a good time or a fun vibe, and they’ll want to come back.  Much like I did.  Tacco was a tougher nut to crack, as I just don’t think Texas is her place.  And that’s fine.  Yet several times she let on that she was pleasantly surprised by what she was seeing and experiencing.  I haven’t grilled her on it as, well, first of all it’s not particularly important, but secondly I think it will take some distance before she’ll be able to fully articulate her views on Austin, but I suspect she was softened some by how pleasant and expectation-defying it was.  Ultimately it didn’t matter to me whether anyone in my family adopted my “I really dig this place” views on Austin, but I did want them to understand why I feel that way.  And in that sense I think I did succeed.

So let’s go to Houston.