The typical early breakfast grind greeted us in the lobby. Courageous pointed out the spot where the fat boy gave him the stink eye. We were up so we decided to pack up and hit the road early. We were slated for a 3pm arrival to Galveston. Tennessee Whiskey once again played in the car as we once again crossed the Texas-Arkansas border. There was no straight interstate from one place to another, so it was all Texas highways, none longer than 100 miles without switching to a different highway.
The landscape was similar to East Tennessee at first, but quickly changed to the types of landforms seen in South Carolina when you are nearing the coast. We spent most of the time in the car having a MoTown influenced sing along party. Once we bored of that, I cracked open my laptop and started working on my writing.
As we approached Houston, we started noticing signs of flooding. Ditches on either side of the highway were filled with water. Many people had died in Houston due to the flooding that started on our last day in Austin.
Palm trees started making their self more apparent. I knew Houston was close to the coast, but I didn’t know how tropically influenced they were. We hit major traffic between Houston and Galveston.
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This trip is all thanks to something that happened last September. It was one of the craziest two weeks of my life. I was slated to go to a real estate conference in Memphis, on September 14th, and to an APCA College Programming conference on September 17th in Little Rock. My colleague Eric picked me up in Maryville early that morning and we carpooled out to Memphis. We did our thing in the Peabody Hotel for a few days, learned a few exciting real estate tidbits, and then I was off out into the distant and cold feeling west, all by myself.
I hopped a cab to the airport, and then a Greyhound to Little Rock. Why a Greyhound? Well, it was a touch cheaper than renting a car, but more importantly to me is that it was a bit humbling. I’d been hanging out with real estate moguls for a few days and I loved the idea of being reconnected with my roots.
I got to LR. Courageous got to LR late that night. We rocked our showcase and got tons of bookings.
Afterward, we were hanging out in the hotel bar talking to the staffers. The sound man named Eric told us how amazing our set was, and he was anxious to hear if we’d gotten any Texas gigs. He gushed and gushed about how fantastic the restaurants in Texas were. He said that if we were in Dallas there were two spots we needed to go to, Twisted Root for burgers, and The Pecan Lodge for BBQ. I took a mental note of it, Eric was a trustworthy guy who worked for a trustworthy company, I’d be sure to visit those spots when we had some time in Dallas.
The next morning, before the ink on the contracts had dried, I was on a flight to Gulf Shores, AL to spend a week with my family. I sat on the beach and basked in knowing that we had an act people wanted to book. I say all that to say, I feel like I have a special connection with the gulf.
We got into our beach condo and hung out by the pool and walked down the beach before heading back to Houston for some baseball. It was the Astros and Red Sox. It was about as exciting as you might picture an early season baseball game to be.
Houston seemed starkly different from what we’d seen in Texas thus far. People felt different, attitudes felt different. Not worse.. Just different. Obviously different than the people of El Paso, but even different from the people of Dallas. I was only there for a few hours, probably too small of a sample size to make even a moderately accurate assumption at that point.
We made it back to Galveston around midnight. We wanted to go to Walmart to get some snacks for tomorrow’s trip to Schiltterbahn, world famous water park. Walmart was closed. It was strange; lots of trash in the parking lot, and employees loitering outside, some of them smoking, some of them sitting on motorized carts that they’d apparently driven outside the store.
We went to Kroger about 20 minutes later. Similar story, lots of little pieces of trash in the parking lot, employees kind of loitering outside. We were beginning to have weird thoughts about Galveston. People seemed strange, not necessarily unfriendly, but certainly not as nice as the people in the rest of the state. Store was torn apart being renovated, but even the parts not under construction were a mess. Beginning to think this is a theme in Galveston.