What I Did on My Summer Vacation -- Part 3, Seeing new things in old places

Aug. 24-26

We’re up, fed and on the road at a reasonable time of the morning. The trip to Lubbock will eat up most of the day, but we’ve discovered that leaving fresh in the morning -- and not encountering DFW traffic -- seems to make the journey feel shorter than a comparable journey that begins after lunch. Having more towns to travel through makes a difference as well.

The flatness continues most of the way to Lubbock save for a brief period north of Amarillo. But it's flatness I’m familiar with, and it feels like home. After all, we did spend a number of years living in the Panhandle/South Plains.

Tonight will be mostly devoted to catching up and hearing about Brandon and Aaron’s vacation to Bend, Oregon, which is decidedly not flat, and by all accounts is a great vacation destination.

We look at all of Brandon’s pictures, then all of my pictures. We would have looked at Sharon’s, but a series of silly events caused her pics to be scattered across three memory cards -- yes, we still primarily use stand-alone cameras, not cell phones, and would have been more complicated to view..

A long time ago, when film cameras ruled, we used to gather with friends and sit through slide shows projected on a screen. (I still have my projector and screen, BTW.) Now we hook a computer to a large-screen TV. No telling what we’ll doing next.
Brandon works from home on Friday, so Sharon and I can go roam the mall and some shopping centers and not have to bother him about getting back into the house. We’ll join Bran for a very nice supper at a restaurant up the street and generally enjoy not being in the car for most of a workday.

Lubbock skyline from the Wind Power Museum

Saturday we’ll go to the American Wind Power Center, off E. 19th Street. We’ve known about this place for years, but none of us have ever been there. Just about every type of windmill and wind turbine is on display. The place overwhelms with the sheer number of devices on display. The museum also features a model railroad set in the kind of landscape you’d find on the Texas plains, but it's not running.

The train is to scale, but the landscape isn’t necessarily. Makes for some funny displays. For instance, in one part of the display a collie is nearly the same size as an adult cow, and both stand near a farmhouse and appear to be nearly at tall as the first story of the house.

Just one of the halls of the museum filled with windmills

Did you immediately guess that this is a wind-powered

washing machine?

A long time ago, in rural areas, you could address a letter to

someone using a farm's windmill designation for an address.

The rural postal carrier would put the mail in a box like this.

The two types of wind-power devices that interest me most are some wind turbines that have to be started by a motor because the unusual vanes don’t catch wind in a way that will crank the windmill up from a standstill and a large windmill that looks like those old Dutch windmills you see in pictures.

These windmills had to be spun up using a motor. Once they

were spinning, the force of the wind would be sufficient to 

keep them going.

The large front part is a wind-powered grain mill. The smaller

unit on the back kept the mill pointed into the wind.

 In fact, It’s not Dutch but a type of wind-driven grain mill that was developed in England and used in early colonial America. A large, vane assembly in the front of the building drives the mill machinery. Attached to the back is a smaller vane assembly set on a circular track that keeps the building pointed into the prevailing wind. Quite impressive.

Most of the outside displays lack signage to explain what type of device you're looking at. But they're obviously either pump mills or turbines for generating electricity. (I know that occasionally farmers would rig old windmills to perform both functions. If you live in the area or visit Lubbock ever, the museum is worth your time.

The time comes to hit the road for home. We’ll travel through old, familiar territory -- past cotton fields and wind turbines, over rolling plains, and past mesas and hills, a welcome and comforting change in scenery. The weather threatens to dump rain on us, but we only have brief encounters with small showers. It's good to be home -- you know the feeling.

Labor Day weekend

I’m counting this as part of our vacation, even though six days separate the trips. We head to Austin on Saturday to visit Aaron. I rely on Google Maps and the time of our departure to make the decision to travel there by way of I-35, aka Our Road of Perpetual Construction, and it works out this time. But I won’t take the same route home.

The big fear for this weekend is the availability of gasoline. Hurricane Harvey devastated the Gulf Coast of Texas, dumping unprecedented amounts of rain in the Houston/Beaumont area, and the prospect of gas shortages looms because refineries have been forced to shut down. Some car owners panic and drain some stations dry. This is dutifully reported on the news, which leads to more folks making gas runs, and more empty gas stations.

In a day or so, a railroad commissioner assures the public that plenty of gas is available -- the problem lies in distribution, he says, not supply, also dutifully reported. But the damage is done. Stations receive a new shipment of gas only to be met with cars ready to suck down whatever’s delivered.

I manage to fill up at our new Walmart convenience store before leaving, which will be enough to take us to Austin, drive around a bit and come most of the way home. (BTW, when it opened, this store was the only one of its type in the U.S. Not sure why they picked Crowley, Texas, for the location, but it seems to be doing a bang-up business.) 

If we can buy gas in Austin, or at least somewhere along the way back, we'll have no problems, I figure. On the trip down, many of the smaller towns seem to have at least regular gas, and I expect the Buc-ee’s in Temple will have gas somehow or other.

After our previous trip, the jaunt to Austin seems short. We hit town and head for Aaron’s place, checking for gas availability at the stations we see along the way. Pretty much everyone is out. 

Cedar Park Art Garden with community center

in the background.

After lunch, Aaron takes us to the Cedar Park Sculpture Garden. Sculptors agree to loan the city their artwork for a year, and all but two are for sale. Visitors follow a path that begins adjacent to the city’s rec center, and signs provide information on each sculpture. You have to look online to find out which ones are for sale, though.

Most of the works look like what they're supposed to be. I'm not much for abstract and modern art, so I really enjoy the pieces. Perhaps the most whimsical is Koala-T of Life. Although the other works sit on a pedestal in the center of a circular site, when you approach this section, nothing stands on the pedestal. The sculpture is a metal koala mounted in a tree next to the viewing area. Just where you’d expect a koala to be.

Something supposed to be here?

There it is -- in the tree, of course.

I check gas availability the next morning before heading to Aaron’s. An H-E-B not too far away shows to have some, and when we arrive, they do, but regular only, Not a problem. The pumps all have cars at them, but one car leaves just as we drive up, and we don't have to wait..

We’ve planned a trip to Inner Space Cavern for Sunday morning. Aaron’s never been there, but we had visited on a previous trip to see Michelle before Aaron moved to Austin. The unique feature of this cave is that it runs under the interstate, and you can sometimes hear trucks rumbling overhead.

The tour of the cave takes about an hour, and our guide this time is a young man who I believe is a local college student. He’s pretty entertaining, and we have a fairly small group, so it’s a pleasant tour. Now I have way too many pictures of one cave.

Look at this formation from the right angles, and it looks

like a human.

Underground pool of water.

Our guide has said something funny, judging from the

expression  on the kid's face.

We grab breakfast out Monday morning and visit with Aaron until after lunch. Most of the trip home will be off  the interstate -- one back road to Temple, another to Waco. At the intersection of the road we took and I-35 just north of Temple, we can see that traffic is backed up for quite a way on the interstate, so the choice was a good one.

We do stop off at Buc-ee’s, where the lots and the gas pumps are nearly full. We know it’s a giant concrete blot on the landscape, but they can push hundreds of people through the store at an amazing pace while maintaining clean bathrooms. We’re supposed to hate it, but …

By taking the backroads we should only add a bit of time compared with the trip down, but given that we miss a major traffic jam, we’ll arrive home sooner than if we stayed on I-35, and the whole trip feels more relaxed.

We haven't spent this much time traveling in a car in a long time. Our journeys will add up to a bit more than 1,900 miles, which in the old days would have been a mere hop, skip and jump taking no more than two days. Ah, the good, old days.

Even though we saw a lot of flat land -- you know, that “plains” thing -- we've seen and experienced places we've never been and things we've never seen, making this, for us, another great vacation.