USA Road Trip: 875 miles of Texas

Dear Texas, you make me cry. Sincerely, Lauren

Yes, we drove through all 875 blistering miles of Texas. Miles and miles and miles. Of Texas. This was supposed to be the part of our trip where we hit our stride, we had a week off of traveling while at camp so we were all ready to go and we were supposed to cover lots of land, do awesome stuff, take lots of pictures, you know, live the hippie dream! Well, this is the part of the trip where everything decided to go wrong and then wronger. Yes, Wronger. We were supposed to be in Houston around dinner time. Our plan was to storm the city, to have dinner, watch sunset and gather our bearings for the NASA museum and decide what else we were going to do with the next day. We left our fun and successful day in Baton Rouge and headed to Texas, but then. we. hit. traffic. So we did this:

Yes, the people beside us were terrified. Well, around 10pm we pull into the MOST CONFUSING CITY IN AMERICA. That is what Houston should change its name to: MCCA. Well, we missed about 800 turns and my GPS starting cussing at us, did you know they did that? Well, they do. So needless to say, our plans were scratched for the night, so we start googling for parks with picnic areas, we got lost 100 more times and finally ended up in Hermann park and saw lots of people walking toward this big lawn, so we took our picnic dinner and followed them and we found the Houston Symphony giving a free concert on the lawn! It was such a great end to our terrible night…..or so we thought.

This is a really terrible picture of the symphony, but it was such a perfect moment for us to be concert crashers. Literally, best moment of Texas.

So, we thought this awesomeness would continue, but oh no, Texas had other plans for us. Apparently no one in Texas camps. So, it’s around 11:30 at night and we have nowhere to camp and everything in the city is a mess and we cant find anything to do, so we just decide to drive all night to San Antonio and just sleep when we get tired. Well, we drove for a while and decided to stop at a rest stop, where lots of other crazy people were sleeping in their cars and we thought, we can do it! Well around 3 or 4 am I am sweating uncontrollably, we have to crank the car every 30 minutes so we don’t die (this is why they tell you to not leave kids or animals in cars-it’s true), I am almost in tears and I am looking at Hotels near us to see if we can afford them. Finally we slept off and on for a few terrible hours and when the sun came up and inside our car reached 130 degrees we started driving again, just to have air conditioning. Oh, did I mention that somewhere between Louisiana and Texas our car started making funny noises?

Yep, we spent 8 hours at Pepboys. More tears in Texas.

Our CV shaft went bad and wore out our wheel bearing on one side of the car. So, 600$ big ones later, it is 4:30 and we are racing to see the Alamo before it closes at 5. But, Texas smiled down on us for a few hours….

We made it! The Alamo actually stayed open late that night, so we got to tour all 50 square feet of it, with plenty of time to spare. There were no pictures allowed inside, but it is a small room, with some smaller rooms attached. It was really interesting though to read all the information about the battle and see the paintings on the walls the women and children had done while inside waiting on the battle to end. We did the River Walk, which was beautiful and had lots of shops and restaurants and boat rides and history to see.

This is their Saint-in-Residence, Saint Anthony, who is the city was named after.

Cathedral by the River Walk.

We attempted to go to some of the Missions that San Antonio is so famous for, but we were too late and they were all closed. This is definitely something I would love to do if I even return to Texas (not likely after this trip).

The coolest thing we found were the Chinese Tea Gardens. This was beyond beautiful and apparently it started only as the pond, but grew to become a full-out garden. I feel like our pictures cannot even do this justice.

We left this beauty and set out for the Botanical gardens and they were also closed. Fail 100000 Houston. Again we have nowhere to camp, havent showered in quite a few days and are exhausted. So we set out to GET OUT OF TEXAS. We drove all night, slept in our car again (better this time because we were so tired) and finally around 10AM arrived in one of our favorite places so far: New Mexico! Look for that post coming soon! Does anyone have any good stories from Texas, I think I need to hear them or I will be biast forever.