A spring break jaunt to Texas so we could remember the Alamo
Saturday, April 3
We left Cincinnati on I-71 at our usual 4:00 a.m. starting time. In Louisville we caught I-65 and took it to the lightly-traveled Western Kentucky Parkway. After a doughnut breakfast at a service island we continued on to the Purchase Parkway which took us through Tennessee to I-55. Rather than fight the traffic in Memphis we crossed the Mississippi River into the bootheel of Missouri and had a picnic lunch at a rest stop on I-55. The Mississippi had flooded fields for a couple of miles into Missouri. The trees were still leafless, the wind was cold, and this part of Missouri was as flat as a pancake.
We continued south into Arkansas and were immediately reminded by signs along the road which state produced President Clinton. Cotton fields stretched to the horizon as we headed towards West Memphis where we swung onto I-40 and drove through mile after mile of land so flat it made the Dakotas look mountainous. There was a small break in the flatness – one hill on which we found some dogwoods in bloom and a bit of greenery. The relief was short-lived and we were soon back down in the delta region. We drove through Little Rock where we switched to I-30, happily losing the J.B. Hunt trucking fleet which seemed to form half the vehicles on I-40.
We took U.S. 70 from the expressway through pine-covered hills to Hot Springs. After booking a room at the Super 8 we played a chilly round of Gator Golf. They offered us a second game free, but we were about frozen. We thawed out by eating barbecue ham at Vee’s (the ham was okay but the beans were fantastic). We drove through part of Hot Springs National Park on Hot Springs Mountain, then headed for bed.
This was the first visit to Missouri and Arkansas for Scott and Michelle.
Sunday, April 4 – We drove downtown and parked a block over from the bath houses. The kids splashed their hands in a hot-water fountain. It had clouded over during the night and began to rain while we walked down Bath House Row but at least all the trees had leaves and the grass was green. We watched a film about the history of Hot Springs and toured the Fordyce Bath House with its stained-glass ceilings, marble floors and hospital facilities. We walked behind the bath houses to see the display spring that still flows naturally, then walked along the Grand Promenade, a brick-lined walkway behind the bath houses which took us back to our car.
We drove back up on Hot Springs Mountain (Scott was incensed that the springs had been capped, and vowed to write to the Secretary of the Interior to protest) to the observation tower which gave us an interesting view of clouds streaking by below us as the tower swayed in the wind. After the obligatory souvenirs we took U.S. 270 to I-30, stopping in Arkadelphia for lunch. The town of Hope once again reminded us where the President was born.
We stopped at the welcome center in Texarkana to get a picture of the kids in front of a map of Texas but the rain convinced us otherwise. Texas’ travel brochure had assured us the welcome centers would be founts of information, but they didn’t seem to offer much more than a few pamphlets. As we continued on I-30 we saw some magnificent ranches and experienced the thrill of driving past an open-pit sulfur mine.
Texas lived up to its reputation for wide-open spaces. We managed to miss the worst of traffic in Dallas by hitting it on a Sunday and still had plenty of cars to deal with. We took I-35E south and stopped for the night in Hillsboro at the Best Western. The kids, who had previously never eaten anything more Mexican than Taco Bell, got their first taste of real south of the border cuisine at a restaurant down the street from the motel. Naturally, they didn’t like it.
This was the first visit to Texas for Scott and Michelle and the first time Lynne had been in Texas other than a 45-minute layover at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.
Monday, April 5 – Once again, a cloudy beginning to our trip. We headed south on I-35 and passed through Waco while the siege of the Branch Dividians was still going on but could not see anything from the interstate. As we neared Austin the clouds began to break up at last and we had beautiful, warm sunshine. We walked around the grounds of the capitol building and went inside to see the rotunda. This was the first time either of the kids had been in a capitol building. We continued south, planning to stop for lunch somewhere between Austin and San Antonio but both kids fell asleep.
Texas was just mile after mile of scrubby plants and mesquite interrupted by occasional towns. We woke them up when we saw the skyscrapers of San Antonio on the horizon. We parked in a garage downtown and had lunch in a food court overlooking the riverwalk. We walked past the Menger Hotel, where Robert E. Lee was staying when Texas seceded from the Union, to the Alamo, the focal point of our trip. The visit inside the mission there was extremely moving and beyond the scope of words to describe. The Alamo was fairly crowded, but the gardens on the grounds were peaceful.
On the way back to the riverwalk the kids spotted some stuffed armadillos in a souvenir shop but we decided to hold off buying that sort of thing for another day. After pricing a David Robinson Spurs shirt in a mall there, we decided to put off buying that as well. We took one of the sightseeing boats along the San Antonio River with Captain Dave for our guide. One of the other tour boat operations supplied their passengers with San Antonio’s unofficial official drink and we would be serenaded by chants of, “We have margaritas!” from passing groups.
Captain Dave quickly became a favorite of both kids with his humorous descriptions of landmarks along the river and the line which followed them all, “Any questions? No! Allright!” delivered without pauses between words in his Hispanic accent. However, their finest moment came when the skipper of another boat told Captain Dave that he had a hole in his pants. Captain Dave’s reply of “Aw shaddup” may not be in the history books with the quotes of John Paul Jones and David Farragut but the kids have never forgotten it.
After the boat ride we drove over to the Tower of the Americas but we got their just after a busload of senior citizens and decided the line was too long so we hopped into rush hour traffic instead. After a couple of U-turns and Jim’s comments on Texas, the roads there, and the insanity of picking a city for a vacation destination, we finally made it to a hotel — a very nice looking La Quinta Inn on the nice looking Vance Jackson Road. The kids had to go swimming although it was cool but at least it was sunny.
We started driving around looking for a place to eat and discovered that the houses and businesses all had bars on their windows and doors a block over from our nice hotel on the nice street. Ha ha. There was a billboard alongside the expressway advertising Carlsbad Caverns – “Straight Ahead 700 miles”. Distance just doesn’t mean the same thing in Texas as it does in the rest of the lower 48.
Tuesday, April 6 – So much for sunshine. We went to Breckenridge Park to see the sunken Oriental gardens. They were beautiful, full of colorful flowers, ponds, and a waterfall. The gardens were built in an old cement quarry with only one exit so the kids got to scamper around the trails unescorted which they enjoyed immensely. There was a horde of cats at the tea house overlooking the gardens and turtles in the pond so Michelle was in heaven. Down the road a bit in the park we took a train ride on a miniature railroad and the kids got to pose for pictures on the engine. The engineer was a friendly and talkative fellow who gave us some pointers on places to eat and things to see. The kids took a ride on a carousel and then we drove back downtown to El Mercado, the old Mexican market. We had lunch at a place there called the Margarita which featured outstanding fajitas and another big first for the kids, Coca Cola served in bottles.
We browsed a couple of shops and found more stuffed armadillos but the kids got busy fighting so we didn’t get them any, figuring we would find them later. We drove back over to the Tower of the Americas and rode up to the top of the 750 foot structure for a bird’s-eye view of Texas, then drove south to see the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. The missions were in varying states of repair with San Jose being the high point. By the time we got to the fourth mission, Lynne opted to stay in the car, and the rest of us just took a snapshot and headed back to the parking lot. The road crossed the San Antonio River atop the Espada Dam which served as a ford rather than a bridge and the kids were impressed that we got to drive through the river.
Returning to the motel became an adventure and we took a rather circuitous route through more uninspiring neighborhoods. San Antonio was the only city we’d ever seen where the downtown was nice but the suburbs all looked like slums. We had dinner at Grady’s barbecue near our motel and it was awful. The kids went swimming again after dinner even though the sun had not peeked out all day and it was cool and clammy.
Wednesday, April 7 – The weather forecast called for cloudy, rainy skies for the rest of the week so we decided to leave San Antonio a day early and take a slightly different route back to Ohio. We took a stroll along the Paseo del Rio, sipped coffee at a riverside café, and walked to the shops of La Villita. They weren’t open yet but we could see the infamous stuffed armadillos through the windows of one store. We took a last drive past the Alamo, then caught I-10 and headed east through rolling country filled with Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush.
It rained quite hard at times as we headed for Houston. Texas has its own purveyor of hamburgers, Whattaburger, and we had lunch in one outside of Houston. We had hoped to visit the Astrodome but it was pouring and traffic was miserable so we settled for seeing it as we passed by on the expressway. We took U.S. 59 through the heart of Houston but low clouds kept us from seeing the tops of the skyscrapers. We did gain an appreciation for the reputation of Houston’s highways being a plate of spaghetti.
As we continued up 59 it rained even harder than it had before Houston, making driving a real challenge. It quit raining near Lufkin and we were able to stop in Nacogdoches under cloudy skies. We stayed at the Holiday Inn there and enjoyed an indoor pool and hot tub and discovered that this part of Texas does not have stuffed armadillo souvenirs.
Thursday, April 8 – Breakfast came in the form of room service, and the kids decided they really liked it. We left Nacogdoches on 59, taking U.S. 79 at Carthage. Along the way we saw a cow get arrested – actually, a cow had gotten outside a fence, and a police car pulled up with its lights flashing to corral it. 79 took us into Louisiana under gray skies and it started raining on us in Shreveport on I-20. Northern Louisiana is not particularly scenic and there was little to delay us.
We had lunch in Monroe, then drove on through to Vicksburg. The visitor center there was very impressive. It was an ante-bellum building on a bluff overlooking the river and a pair of bridges. The rain had turned into drizzle and it followed us to Vicksburg National Military Park. We toured the museum and cannon collection, then drove along the siege lines in the park and saw the national cemetery and the ironclad Cairo and its museum. We continued on I-20 to Jackson where we stayed at the Howard Johnson, again featuring an indoor pool and hot tub.
This was Jim, Scott and Michelle’s first visit to Mississippi and everyone’s first visit to Louisiana.
Friday, April 9 – We left Jackson on the Natchez Trace Parkway. The woods along the parkway were much more scenic than the pieces of Mississippi we saw on the way to Jackson. We walked through a cypress swamp on a boardwalk and took in as much greenery as we could. We saw several deer alongside the road. We ate lunch in Tupelo, then stopped at the Tupelo National Battlefield Site (a one-acre park commemorating the battle there), but for once we didn’t act like typical tourists and skipped seeing Elvis Presley’s birthplace. We took the Trace a little ways north and followed U.S. 45 to Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site.. Although the park there was also only an acre in size, markers along the roads traced the flow of the battle.
We continued north on Mississippi 2 which turned into Tennessee 22 and took us to Shiloh National Military Park. We visited the museum there and the kids got to put on replica Civil War uniforms that were a few sizes too large for them. We took the auto tour of the battlefield which took in such landmarks as the Shiloh Church, the Peach Orchard, and the Hornet’s Nest. Bloody Pond was particularly moving. Although we were there at the same time of year as the original battle, there were no blossoms in the peach orchard. We spent the night at the Savannah Lodge in Savannah, Tennessee.
Saturday, April 10 – We left Savannah on U.S. 64 and got back onto the Natchez Trace Parkway. Most of the trees were once again bare and the grass took on a more yellowish hue as we continued north. We stopped to see Meriwether Lewis’s grave, then drove to Nashville. We woke the kids up there because they had slept through Nashville on our previous visit and Scott was interested in seeing capitol cities. We continued on without any more stops for attractions to Louisville and I-71, then home to spring Snipper from the kennel.
Milestones on this trip: First visit to Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi for Scott and Michelle; first visit to Louisiana for Lynne, first visit to Louisiana and Mississippi for Jim.
States and provinces we visited: Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi.
Capital cities we saw: Little Rock, Austin, Jackson, Nashville.
