Deep In The Heart Of Texas

A Good Morning

Despite the day that I had yesterday, somehow I managed to get the best sleep that I’ve had since the beginning of the trip. Perhaps I’m just getting used to sleeping in some new, weird place every night, or maybe I was just exhausted. Regardless, I woke-up at 5 AM and immediately got a yoga routine and work-out done, before packing-up most of my stuff in the car. Then, I got into re-writing the blog post from the previous night, along with some work and planning for the trip.

A Surprise

A project of mine, that I put together specifically for this trip, hit a milestone yesterday. It combines a couple of different ideas: the Kindness Rocks Project and Where’s George. During the pandemic in early 2020, I began painting stones, primarily because it was a new creative medium, but also to simply cheer people up. There was no ulterior motive: I didn’t add my Instagram handle or a website URL or anything like that. All I did was paint stones and leave them along the trails I hiked for people to find. But, when I decided to go on this latest trip, I got the idea to combine the painted rocks concept with the tracking concept and developed the Roaming Stones project.

In a nutshell, I decorated 26 stones in a variety of ways, most having some kind of story behind them, and on the back of each one I included a link to a website I built and a custom code. When a person finds a stone, they can goto the URL and enter the code. A valid code tells them about the stone and allows them to share their discovery and upload an image. The person then has the choice to keep the stone or hide it again for someone else to find, the latter of which would produce a trail of discoveries around the state… maybe country… maybe world?

Decorating the stones and building the website contributed the majority of the stress I experienced leading-up to my trip, but it all got done and the only question was “Will it work?”

Well, I got my answer this morning when I checked my website and found that someone did indeed find the stone I left while hiking in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and shared their discovery with me, along with a photograph. The person said their family is taking hiking trips around the country and will re-hide the stone for someone else to find. So, that was a big boost to my morale and has me excited and motivated to hide further stones during this trip.

Waco Mammoth National Monument Revisited

Which brings me to this part of the story. Since I found myself all the way back in Waco, due to the situation with the motel in Marlin yesterday, I decided to take a quick trip back to Waco Mammoth National Monument and hide one of my stones on the trails that frustrated me so badly. In the chaos of the day, I’d completely forgotten to hide one in the park. My reasoning for hiding the stones in these places is that people from all over the world are visiting National Parks and Monuments, so if I hide the stones in those places there’s a good chance they’ll travel a further distance. It wasn’t out of my way to return to Waco Mammoth NP and I felt like I got a bit of revenge on the trails in the process.

A Relatively Short Drive To San Antonio… With A Blast From The Past

Once again, the day was completely overcast in the morning and it had me down a little. Then a track by Iron Maiden popped-up on the radio and it reminded me of an important moment in my life. In the summer of 1986, my parents loaded-up my brother and I in our Chevrolet Celebrity station wagon and took us on a road trip to Phoenix, Arizona, and then back to Ohio through the south of Texas, all the way to Harlingen as a matter of fact, so further south than even I’m going tomorrow.

During the return, we stopped to visit a family in Houston, whose oldest boy was seriously into heavy metal. At the time of the trip, Iron Maiden had recently released the album “Somewhere In Time” and I remember being fascinated by the commercials for it featuring their mascot Eddie on stage with the band. So, on the day we left Houston, I asked him if he would dub the album on a spare cassette tape that I had on me. He obliged and I listened to that album the entire way home, and to this day, whenever I listen to the album, I remember watching Texas roll by from the back seat of that car.

So, I’m happy that I was reminded of that story, because it was “Somewhere In Time” and then everything else Iron Maiden for the rest of the trip to San Antonio. (Really, I can’t believe I hadn’t planned it that way.)

San Antonio Missions and The Alamo

Again, keeping with my, er. mission to target National Parks and Monuments on my trip, the reason for visiting San Antonio was to visit the San Antonio Missions and The Alamo. From what I’ve discovered today, The Alamo (or Mission San Antonio de Valero) was the first mission on the San Antonio River. Later on, four more missions were built further south along the river. Today, I visited two of those: Mission San Juan and Mission San Jose. This gave me my first dose of Texas heat, as it clocked-in at about 91-degrees, but it didn’t bother me because it was accompanied by a wicked wind, which was apparently blowing-in some storms that began hitting later this evening.

After visiting the two missions in the San Antonio Missions collection, I checked into my hotel in downtown San Antonio (which is thankfully very nice) and then went to visit The Alamo on foot because was only about a ten minute walk away. A lifetime of “Don’t Forget The Alamo!” and “Everything’s Bigger In Texas” led me to believe that The Alamo would be huge, so it sort of shocked me to discover how tiny it is in real life. Despite my desire to do so, I resisted the urge to ask an employee when the next tour of the basement would begin.

Relaxing With Top Chef

Another thing I got into during the pandemic was watching Top Chef with my mom via Facetime. Watching Top Chef with her was one of the main things that motivated me to seek out a job working in a kitchen again, and watching via Facetime during the pandemic worked-out so well we’ve kept doing it over the past couple of seasons. We’re in the midst of the latest season, which coincidentally takes place in Houston, and this week was “Restaurant Wars” (the biggest episode of each season besides the finale) so we got together to do that this evening. It was good to catch-up and tell her some of the bad parts in-person so her imagination wouldn’t go wild reading these posts.

Preparing For A Campground

The end of the night was spent preparing for my first camping experience of the road trip in Big Bend National Park. This basically amounted to making sure I had my driving routes to Big Bend and then to Roswell saved to PDFs (because I’m not sure what kind of connectivity I’ll have down in the depths of Texas), recharging anything with batteries (including batteries and battery packs) and getting the things I think I’ll need organized to the top of the bins I’m traveling with. Unfortunately, the forecast for tomorrow evening is mostly cloudy, so I’m probably not going to see many stars, which is something I’m dying to see. If it doesn’t work-out tomorrow night, I’ll have another chance next Monday when I camp in Joshua Tree National Park the day before I get to San Diego.