xtcian

1/24/03 Day 34 of the

1/24/03

Day 34 of the Y'All Come Back Now, Y'Hear Road Trip of Once-Roaring Rivers

Center Point, TX

No trip to the Hill Country is complete without a stop in charming Fredericksburg, Texas, where the quaint jalapeo jellies and weird German Cowboy figurines flow like Americana ambrosia. We checked out the Five & Dime store and found that everything there was considerably more expensive than that. A pair of generic socks for $8.99 here in the middle of nowhere? No thanks, ma'am.

I will say this, though this is the most courteous place we've been to on this trip, and we've been almost everywhere. At the drugstore, the pharmacist answered his phone "thanks for waiting – can I help you?" Presumably he was apologizing for not answering on the first ring.

Even more niceties were to be had at the Ford-Dodge-GMC dealership where Tessa's mom Sandy works; we stopped by to test-drive a bunch of cars just for the American thrill of it. We're particularly interested in the Escape, which will be the first SUV to be manufactured as an electric hybrid. It gets 40mpg in the city, which ain't bad, but we're still pretty sold on the Toyota Prius or the new Focus, both of which get 60(!)mpg slogging around Manhattan.

The Escape was okay, and certainly good enough for what we do, but it had rough edges inside, and you could feel every piece of gravel in the road. The pice de resistance, however, was the bling-bling maxed-out pimp-daddy YUKON that I got to floor at 80mph on the Texas highways for ten minutes or so. After a few minutes in that thing, you start craving red meat and virgins. With a DVD player, a lumbar support balloon, full leather interior, a dashboard that looks like the cockpit to a 747, and enough seating space to carry an orchestra on its way to Mahler's 8th Symphony, it was a study in unshakable excess. And at 14mpg, it's guaranteed to keep us propping up corrupt Middle Eastern governments for at least another decade! Yay!!!

Sandy plays a DVD inside the cavernous Yukon

One thing is great about Tessa's mom, though: tell her what you don't like about a car, and she totally agrees. I bet she engenders so much trust just by being honest. One thing that she and my mom both share is a positive attitude and a fearlessness that should keep them both young into their later years. Sandy manages to be incredibly generous, happy, gregarious - and also utterly uninterested about what anyone might think of her.

With the sun waning into a bitterly cold evening (coldest in these parts in years), I jumped down the river bank just off Sandy's porch to commune with Verde Creek. This is a river that flooded so badly in July that entire houses, lives and animals were swept downstream in one of America's worst floods on record. This very patch of land was hardest-hit; if I were on this guest bed in July, I'd have been two feet under water.

at water's edge note the felled trees along the bank. The trees that survived are all tipped at a 20-degree angle, pointing downstream

Chopin the dog followed me and then belly-flopped into the water, no doubt desperate to get his ya-yas out before we stick him in the car again. He chased sticks into the creek for 45 minutes and then tortured us with his new plastic squeak toy inside the house for another hour after that. I don't know what got into him, unless it's the 4 pounds of ham that Sandy threw off the porch last night.