Texas, Our Texas
At the end of May 2008, we said goodbye to Virginia, threw the cat in the SUV and set out for Texas. After stopovers in Greenville, South Carolina and Mobile, Alabama, we arrived “home” in San Antonio. Craig spent the next four weeks in San Angelo, driving back and forth on the weekends to visit family and friends. Meanwhile, Laura hung out with her folks in San Antonio, and helped prepare for their first family reunion in over three decades.
Laura with her folks at Cibolo Creek
- Click here for more photos from the 2008 family reunion
- Or click here for earlier trips back to Texas.
As June came to a close, we again packed up the Murano and hit the road, leaving the cat in the care of Laura’s parents – we’d send for her after settling in up in Alaska. We had plenty of snacks and tunes for the long drive up to Amarillo, where we’d spend the first night. Along the way, we stopped in the charming Hill Country village of Fredericksburg.
Fredericksburg
The Adelsverein, a society for the protection of German immigrants formed in Mainz in 1842, founded several “colonies” in Texas in the 1840s. The first was New Braunfels, established between San Antonio and Austin in 1845. A year later, the Adelsverein commissioner general, Baron Otfried Hans von Meusebach, led a group of New Braunfels settlers to found a new town 80 miles to the northwest, which they named in honor of fellow Adelsverein member Prince Frederick of Prussia.Like many German communities in south Texas, Fredericksburg generally supported the Union in the Civil War. One notable excpetion was Charles H. Nimitz, a local hotelier who rallied to the Confederate cause, but is remembered principally as the grandfather of Chester W. Nimitz. Born in his namesake hotel in 1885, the younger Nimitz would go on to achieve fame as a Fleet Admiral during World War II. The hotel is now the Admiral Nimitz Museum, part of the National Museum of the Pacific War.
Laura in Fredericksburg’s Japanese Garden of Peace
- Click here for more photos from the museum.
Located just over an hour northwest of San Antonio, Fredericksburg is a popular getaway among the bed-and-breakfast and antiquing crowd. It also boasts a decent microbrewery, and there are several up-and-coming wineries in the region. Another draw is Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, an unusual granite exfoliation dome north of town. Craig used to love climbing Enchanted Rock as a kid, and he brought Laura here on a date shortly after they met in 1993. (Someday we’ll dig out our photos from that long-ago era!)
Amarillo
As our journey north through Texas continued, the Hill Country soon gave way to the flat expanse of the Llano Estacado (“staked plains”), featuring a whole lot of nothing as far as the eye can see (except for the occasional oil rig or wind farm). We passed through Lubbock, birthplace of Buddy Holly and home to Texas Tech University, on our way to Amarillo, where we stopped for the night.Founded in 1887, Amarillo soon developed into an important cattle marketing center, and the discovery of oil, gas and helium nearby guaranteed the city’s future. The city’s name, which means “yellow” in Spanish – a reference either to local wildflowers or the soil color – is (mis)pronounced by the locals as “am-a-RILL-o” rather than the Spanish “am-a-REE-yo”.
Laura at the Cadillac Ranch
Just west of the city, along historic Route 66 (now I-40), lies an unusual roadside attraction. In 1974, an eccentric local millionaire named Stanley Marsh 3 commissioned the Ant Farm art group to establish the Cadillac Ranch, an ironic tribute to America’s obsession with the automobile. Ten classic Cadillacs are buried nose-first in a field by the highway, angled to correspond to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. In 1997, Marsh relocated the installation two miles farther west to escape the encroachment of nearby Amarillo.
About 30 miles southeast of Amarillo, the monotony of the Great Plains suddenly gives way to the second-largest canyon in the United States. Palo Duro Canyon was carved less than a million years ago by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, and has been inhabited for about the last twelve thousand.
Lighthouse Peak is the iconic feature of Palo Duro Canyon
Early Spanish explorers dubbed the canyon “Palo Duro” for the hard wood (mesquite and juniper) in the area, but the canyon remained officially undiscovered until a U.S. Army expedition stumbled across it in 1852. This was the setting of the decisive battle of the Buffalo War of 1874, when the 4th U.S. Cavalry defeated a group of Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne natives taking refuge in the canyon. Four years later, Chief Quanah Parker led a band of Comanche and Kiowa back to Palo Duro to hunt buffalo, but found instead a cattle ranch belonging to Charles Goodnight. The native Americans soon returned back to their reservation at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, bringing to a close another chapter in the “taming” of the American West.
Between 1933 and 1937, the Civilian Conservation Corps developed road access to the canyon, which opened as a state park in 1934. In 2002, neighboring Cañoncita Ranch was added to the park, bringing its total area to over 28 square miles of spectacular scenery.
- Click here for more photos from the Cadillac Ranch & Palo Duro Canyon.