Texas!

So the family and I flew down to southern Texas for four days to celebrate and participate in my wife’s sister’s wedding.  I still haven’t looked at a map, so I remain non-blissfully ignorant (shame on me!) about the geography of the visit.  All I know is we flew in to Austin, drove in our rented VW Beetle to the San Antonio area, partied at a ranch for two whole days, drove back to Austin, flew to Dallas, and flew back home.

The mini-vacation was really for the wife and our girls.  The girls, especially.  The first day, after six hours of travel, after locating and checking into our hotel, they spent the entire afternoon gallivanting in the pool under that hot Texas sun.  Me, I stayed under shade and continued devouring my book.  When I returned with them to our room, the two Coronas I drank (of the six pack the wife bought while I was on lifeguard duty) were the most deliciously refreshing beverages I ever had up to that point in my life.

That night we dined at a local eatery per my sister-in-law’s recommendation.  O! the awesome lobster tacos!  Plus, I quaffed a super tasty dark microbrew beer.  Forgot the name, unfortunately, but as I’m not normally a partaker of dark ales and lagers and whatnot, this struck a strong chord within me.  Within my liver, I mean.

The next day, Friday, we drove out to the ranch where the wedding was to take place.  When I say “ranch,” I know you’re thinking, like, dude ranch, with images of Hopper roping a calf and shearing sheep.  Well, that may be the case when we entered the first gate.  But a mile’s drive to the second gate and the ranch transformed itself into a lush, fertile paradise.

Two quick observations – there’s a lot of open space out in Texas – a lot.  More than I’m used to at least.  The ranch itself seemed to be ten square miles, and that was just the winding dirt road we took to get to the oasis of paradise.  Also, I kinda dug that both gates automatically opened at the approach of a vehicle (the outermost after you keyed in a code, of course).  Made it seem like the entire ten square miles – or a hundred square miles, hard to tell – was under secret observation, like the guvment allegedly does out in Nevada near those secret air bases.

That first day at the ranch was probably my favorite day of the trip.  Certainly it was the girls’.  There was a playground of a merry-go-round, an in-ground trampoline, swings, a treehouse, a slide and a teeter-totter.  Adjacent was a basketball court and peacock cages.  A main house in classic southwestern Tex Mex décor held a game room and a teevee room.  Two hammocks hung off to one side in the shade.  Down the hill was a partially roofed-in dock on a … lagoon? lake? pond?  I had trouble defining it all weekend; whatever it was it was three football fields long and one wide, a few feet deep at the shores and maybe ten feet deep in the center, surrounded by stone slabs the ranchers put in place.  Along the far shore was a waterfall and a small cave, and a small island sat in the middle.  Fish and aquatic vegetation called it home.

That body of water was the girls’ main focus that day, although they were conscientious enough to sample every item in the playground, more than once.

Me, I spent most of the day with one eyeball on the girls, the other on my book, and made a valiant effort to remain in that hammock as long as possible.

The girls, Indian Jones style, explored every nook and cranny of the lake, canoeing all about, wading in the shallow ends, picking flowers for the wedding on the far shores, oblivious to my worries over rattlesnakes and tarantulas.  (Didn’t see any of those critters, but did see four-inch lizards that moved quicker than squirrels.)  They spent six whole hours there, pausing only for sandwiches around 1 o’clock.

We went back to our hotel but returned in the evening for the rehearsal and dinner.  The girls were in the wedding procession and carried a hand-made sign Here Comes the Bride.  I had a bunch of beers that night, but mostly in situations like these (a hundred strangers chit-chatting away), I’m never one to wanna stick around in the thick of things. 

Saturday morning after a breakfast buffet at our hotel, the wife and girls went to get their hair and makeup done with the bridal party.  They let me stay at the room where I put away another third of my book.  Truth be told I did get a slightly-more-than-minor-but-not-exactly-major sunburn on my lower arms, knees, and calves, so I soaked in a lukewarm bath for an hour.  Then a shower and into my suit, and they whisked me up and brought me to the wedding.

While not my cup of tea, the wedding seemed to go off without a hitch.  Everyone seemed to have a good time.  Chairs were set up off to the side of the main house under a large willow-y tree where vows were pronounced.  The actual party a short hop away, over the dirt road and under a large tent.  I had some spicy food which later repeated on me, but overall the eating experience down in Texas was pretty darn good.  I danced with Little One briefly, but that was the extent of my wedding activities.  The girls hit the playground with the other little children there, and Patch nearly rumbled with a boy and a girl twice her age. 

All in all, a great introduction to the Lone Star State for me.  Who knows? – maybe Hopper might find himself full-timing it down in a cubicle in a San Antonio / Austin / Dallas / Houston suburb sometime in the near future.  The wife has the infrastructure down there, family-wise.  You never know, and you never say never.

Oh, and the book I read while down there: John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, a wonderful book, which has now led me to my latest obsession – the Riemann Hypothesis.