The celebration ends

The San Jacinto Monument

We stumbled into the 175th anniversary of Texas Independence. We're life-long Texans but had never really thought about it.

Fittingly, we found out about it at the celebration of the signing of the independence declaration at Washington on the Brazos, and though that was the only site we visited during a time when some sort of official event took place, our visits to key places in Texas history renewed our knowledge, and appreciation, of the state's past.

As a part of the state celebration, the parks service or the historical commission, or some other group came up with the brilliant idea to create a "passport" listing essential historical sites that tourists could visit. While there, tourists could have their passports stamped to show they'd visited. The idea appealed to us and became a great excuse to take a series of weekend vacations for the rest of the year.

We'd visited Goliad and Gonzales, the Alamo and the missions in San Antonio. All that remained was for us to visit the San Jacinto memorial and San Felipe de Austin. With vacation in Big Bend recently completed, paid time off was a bit scarce, so we decided to fit the last trip into a standard weekend.

We packed and headed out after work on the 12th. For a change, Alice, the voice of our GPS, didn't really provide a good story to be included in these musings. I had changed the settings on the device, so once we approached Houston, Alice wanted to shuttle us off onto toll roads, but I had preloaded a Google-map route on the iPod, so we avoided the tolls.

A stop in Corsicana provides the unusual story for the trip down. We looked for a place to eat along I-45 and found the pickings a bit slim. Seems we'd connected with the highway on the southern end of town and missed most of the restaurants.

We spied an Applebee's and headed that direction. We were greeted at the door by a man who asked us if we had a reservation. Now, Corsicana qualifies as a smallish town, but really, could Applebee's really be considered an upscale establishment or was it such a busy place that patrons would need reservations?

Alas, no joke could be found. Seems the restaurant was brand new, not officially open, and they were having an invitation-only night before the grand opening. We settled for Subway instead, where the guys manning the joint served us with somewhat less than a jovial attitude.

Another diner sought directions to a Holiday Inn just a stone's throw away, but the area is so new a road from the Subway to the motel hadn't been built, so no easy route was available. The diner was confused and the server irritated.

The bad part about traveling at night is that your perception of distance and time are distorted. The trip through Houston to our hotel in Baytown seemed to take forever. I worried a bit about staying Baytown because of the refineries. (We used to live in the Borger area, and the Phillips refinery could sometimes assault the senses.) But they provided a beautiful sight as we drove past, with the colored lights shining off the water.

The trip to the memorial took us across a bay, and we drove over a cool bridge that looked like a piece of modern art. I wished I could have taken a picture.

The memorial dominates the landscape. It's taller -- thanks to a star placed at the top -- than the Washington momunent, and the star, we discovered, was designed so that no matter what angle you view it from, you see the five-pointed star that is the symbol of Texas.

The museum at the base contains a theater where they show a short film on the battle of San Jacinto, narrated by Charlton Heston, or someone who sounds like him. The film is interesting enough, but the narration nearly drove me nuts. Heston would occasionally try to pronounce place names or people's names using their Spanish pronunciation. Sometimes he said it properly. Often, he did not. And at other times, he used Anglicized pronunciation. But hearing San Jacinto pronounced as Sawn Jo-seen-to gave me the shakes.

We took the elevator to the top and gazed out over the battleground and the city, a pretty impressive sight. Then we took in the rest of the displays in the museum, where I learned that my impression that his loss at San Jacinto had pretty much ended the career of Santa Ana was entirely mistaken.

View from the top of the memorial. The stands of trees at the end
of the pool are where the Texans encamped before attacking Santa Ana's troops.

I took Texas history many moons ago, and whatever I may have actually learned had long since dissolved into the mists of time. Santa Ana led a long life of making Mexico miserable until they finally ran him off to Cuba.

Another fact I picked up while there was that the Texans turned items captured from Santa Ana and turned them into to souvenir cutlery.

The USS Texas

The battleship USS Texas lies at anchor nearby, and we headed there next. The Texas is the only surviving warship to have served in both World Wars. We've visited the aircraft carrier USS Lexington in Corpus and were amazed at the spartan nature of the accommodations for the sailors and marines. Compared with the Texas, though, the Lexington was a cruise liner.

Crew accommodations. That's bunks for eight men, short men.

The ship was designed for a complement of 900 plus men but sailed with up to 600 more. As a result, you see bunks hanging everywhere. And the officers didn't have much better accommodations, just privacy.

By the time we'd finished crawling over the ship, we'd been touristing for most of the day. We'd discovered that the Kemah boardwalk was nearby and decided to go there for supper.

We'd visited Kemah a bit more than a decade ago, and then during the week. I don't remember it being quite as crowded and nuts as it was that night. We walked around for a bit, then headed over to The Aquarium, a seafood restaurant with an aquarium built inside. Seems a bit cruel to dine on fish while their cousins are swimming in giant tanks nearby, but I didn't let it bother me.

After dinner we walked around a bit more, checking the boardwalk in hopes that a boat would sail near by on its way to the marina, which had happened the last time we were there, but no luck.

We picked up a giant muffin to split for dessert and headed by to the motel. I was so tired that when I lay down, I immediately fell asleep. A good day.

Sunday we headed for San Felipe de Austin, about an hour's drive west of Houston. A small state park has been established at the site of Austin's colony, which was commonly called Austin.

Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas.

They have a statue of the man, some interpretive signs, a restored general store that serves as the visitor center, and a replica of the only home Austin ever owned -- a two-room, dog-run built in the 1820s. Though a reproduction, the cabin is supposed to contain some bricks from the original fireplace.

Replica of the only home Austin owned.

We were the only visitors at the time, so we had the full attention of the attendant. The park had a grand opening the week before, but she told us that it wasn't very grand. The interpretive signs arrived barely in time, and the visitor center wasn't completed. Not very many people attended. So, she said, we hadn't missed anything.

The final highlight of the trip came, of all places, at a Whataburger in Waco. Waco is the home of Dr Pepper, and the interior of the eatery was decorated in a Dr Pepper theme, including a display of bottles the company has used through the years.

This display explained to us that the company changed typefaces in the '60s, and the typeface chosen used an "r" in which the the little serif at the top that makes the letter an "r" was slightly separated from the letter's stem. When a period was added, it looked more like an "i" followed by a colon than an "r." So, the company dumped the period and never brought it back.

The anniversary trips are over now. I'm glad to have re-learned the history of the struggle endured by Texians and Texans that eventually resulted in a major expansion of the territory occupied by the United States.

From "Come and take it" to "Remember Goliad; Remember the Alamo," the story of Texas gives us a heritage worthy of the braggadocio we Texans are so fond of indulging in.