Travel Story: There and Back Again

Driving through Texas is a fascinating and frustrating thing for a photographer, even an occasional, highly amateur photographer like me. Any one-lane country road has enough visual interest to fill one of those coffee table books on Weird Trees or Sexy Rust or Cattle With Huge Horns. Small towns have interesting store fronts and signs; the smaller the town, the more interesting the decor. But I can’t just stop on the side of a small road or spend an hour wandering around all the small towns from Texas City A to Texas City B. Life doesn’t let me do that.

I have this dream of exploring small-town Texas with a van and an electric bike. My spotter/exploring partner drives the van. She finds an HQ where she can set up camp, write emails, that kind of thing. I take the electric bike and my camera and explore. We eat BBQ when I’m done, and then we move on to the next town. Repeat until death.

I’m thinking of this as we drive the relatively short way from our home to a cabin/camping location for a family birthday weekend. As we drive, we pass an almost-deserted parking lot where one old old car sits under the only car port. It looks poignant and lonely. Further down the road, a golf cart is abandoned in the middle of the field. More poignant. More lonely. We have places to be, no real opportunity to stop, so the opportunities for my Texas coffee table book, Poignant Texas, Lonely Texas, are lost.

As we near our destination, my exploring partner declares, “A dead snake in the road!” as if it was an interesting landmark. “It was a big one too,” she adds, unnecessarily, in my view. Soon after, we pass one of the worst-named mountains in the history of mountains: Spider Mountain, next right, the sign says. At least, I suppose, you couldn’t say you weren’t warned…

I turn around and check on the dogs, timing it perfectly to witness the full majesty of Jed throwing up every last part of the dinner he’d eaten two hours before. I close my eyes and hope the three of them just get on with “tidying it up themselves.” When I open my eyes again, it’s still there, except for the bits that have slid down between the seats. Jeanie delicately points one paw at it, her meaning clear: Can you do something about that, human?

Ten minutes to destination.

The cabin we have rented is, I’m fairly sure, an exact replica of a Scandinavian open-prison room, one of four such rooms in a block. This is a problem as we have three highly reactive (read: poorly trained) pugs who will take every whisper, chair squeak, and suitcase zip coming from the other rooms as a threat to our safety and welfare. There are two beds, a microwave, and a not-Keurig. I wonder how long we’ll be here before we’re kicked out for noise issues.

While the room itself is a little spartan, the view is pretty good. Even though the lake is dangerously close to becoming a puddle. We unpack and try not to think about the mess in the back of the car. My traveling companion’s urgent quest is for an ice bucket that we had apparently been promised. Maybe the Thirsty Penguin roadside ads really made an impression on her. She hunts for that while I reheat a baked potato and then attacked it with plastic cutlery. No cutlery or dishes in the room, but they are available for purchase in the little shop on the grounds. Nice touch.

Once refueled and hydrated, we take the pugs out for an explore the environs, which are mercifully empty. We head for a spot that is apparently a good place to watch the sunset. There is a sign that says so.

An older man is there, reading the signs and looking a little lost. Jeanie immediately identifies him as dangerous and lets him know. He is able to convincingly pretend he is not terrified and comes over to see us. “You can sniff me but you can’t chew me,” he says, which seems a little forward.

The dogs calm down.

I photograph the sunset.

The man wanders off and we do that thing where we keep bumping into him as we continue to explore. Most memorably, he’s passing as I announce, “Poop! Poop!” as my wife has not noticed John Henry is duck-walking along the path, allowing poop just to fall out of his behind. I hope we are a nice anecdote for him and his family.

We find the room with the WiFi and the coffee to discover it actually has neither. Which is a problem as I have work to do this weekend…

The compound, as I’m sure they don’t call it, continues to be mainly empty. Just a smattering of people, the occasional bird out on the water, and ants…ants everywhere. Well, if not everywhere, everywhere a dog (who is not John Henry) would choose to poop. My feet are soon covered in little red blotches.

Back to the room and bed. There’s no way 5 of us are going to fit on one bed, so my life-partner and I sleep in separate beds for the first time in 10 years. Lots more room, but…

I keep my clothes on because Jed likes to wake up after midnight to powder his nose. (Poop.) At home, this just means remembering to turn off the house alarm and letting him out the back door, then staying awake long enough to let him back in. On vacation, it means being fully dressed with a lead nearby so we can explore the strange outside in the near-perfect darkness.

So, 2am, I have Jed and Jeanie on leads, wandering the pitch-black compound with just my phone’s flashlight for company. I’m watching for spiders and snakes. Anything that might drop from the trees or rise from the ground. Behind one of the other buildings, it sounds like we set off a large group of puppies, who howl as we get closer. Cute.

I’m out again at 6am with all three of them before their breakfast. Once they’ve eaten, I collapse back on the bed and don’t move for three more hours.
I wake up to see my soul’s reward being busy. “The floors are sticky,” she says, putting things in bags, taking things out of bags.

“Do you want a coffee?” she asks, looking at the not-Keurig. I wrinkle my nose, thinking about the horror stories I’ve read about travelers boiling their socks in hotel kettles or of bugs living inside coffee makers. I make my face look like I’m just too cool for hotel-room coffee.

My exploring partner nods. “You have that thing about motel coffee pots,” she says. Then she calls me a hero for doing the night-shift. I heartily agree. When I tell her about the puppies howling, she says, “That’s probably coyotes.”

I am not a natural traveler but I would go almost anywhere with her. She’s my perfect companion when taking on anything that would otherwise have the potential to overwhelm me: airports swarming with people, being in a car with three dogs for two days, spending days at a time around strangers, being lost in a strange town/state/country (almost certainly because we read the map upside down or she refused to take the GPS’s word for the correct off-ramp). And we both mostly agree that I should be the car DJ.

This is one location that beat us, though. Spartan rooms, sticky floors, thin walls, reactive (read: poorly trained) dogs, no WiFi, and late-night coyotes. But being only an hour or so away meant we had a solution.

“Let’s take the dogs home,” she said. “I’ll come back for the birthday.”

And, wow, there were so many photo opportunities on the way home.