The Brothers’ Bike Ride

Despite an overly soft mattress, and despite sharing a room with a dad who snores, I woke up on Thursday from my best night’s sleep of the trip. I know this because my Sleep Cycle app awarded me 93% sleep quality.

Breakfast at The Round Top Inn is usually served at 9 a.m. (and usually not served on weekdays, I later learned. Maybe they did it for us because so much of the town was closed.) Anyway, 9 was too late for the bikers, who were usually heading out around then, so Tim, the most “ask-y” of us in Ask vs. Guess culture theory, asked the innkeeper — who also happened to be the cook — if we could push it back to 8. The answer was yes.

It was a delicious, filling, sugary feast of French toast, fruit, and bacon. I cleaned my plate as usual.

Probably about 1,500 calories, but who’s counting

Another cute building at The Round Top Inn

Last day, woo!

I didn’t stay at the inn much longer after the guys left. I heard the innkeeper cleaning Mark and Tim’s room next door, and, being a guesser (albeit one who’s trying to become more of an asker), guessed she’d want me to go soon so she could get that part of her day over with.

So I decided to drive to Navasota at a leisurely pace and stop for any and all photo ops. Here are a few selections:

True or False: There is a person in this picture

The bikers had laborethed all week and would soon enter into rest

Hey, a train

Hey, a painted building

I turned onto a side street to take the Independence Day photo, and I’m pretty sure that the guys passed me en photographiant, because I ran into them right after this picture was taken. Ginger and I pulled off to the side of the road as usual, but this time I felt the car — and myself — tilt pretty severely in the grass before settling onto flat ground.

The guys were all in good spirits but were concerned about whether I’d be able to make it back up onto the road. I, perhaps somewhat in denial, didn’t think I’d have trouble at all. “It’s steeper than you think,” Mark said, and the others agreed. Tim scoped out a spot a few yards away and advised me to build up speed and then pull up onto the road just before a signpost. But that seemed risky to me, because there wouldn’t be much of a chance to look for traffic, and in my nervousness I might hit the sign.

So I went with my own plan, which was to turn a little bit to the right and swing Ginger around so her tires would face the hill. This was risky in a different way, because I’d have to swing back into my lane to avoid oncoming traffic as soon as I got on the road. I didn’t think of that until later, though.

I got Ginger into position, looked both ways to make sure all was clear, and gunned it. The front tires cleared the hill easily. The back ones, to my surprise, spun on the edge. My heart lurched in a brief moment of oh shit, but I didn’t let my foot off the gas, and within a few seconds I was back up on the blacktop, the air misty and perfumed with burnt rubber. No cars were coming, so I stopped and rolled down my window and gave the guys a thumbs up.

I will forever lament that there is no video of this, my finest minivan moment.

Of course, after my triumph I started experiencing phantom car problems. Does something feel off? Did I hurt you, Ginger? But no, Ginger was fine, everything was groovy again. And within a half hour or so I’d made it to Navasota.

Brief aside: L4 was supposed to take place in March of this year, but we pushed it back after Tim started having eye problems. When I was canceling our reservations for The Best Western back in January, their confirmation screen delighted me with its great example of poor user interface design:

Wait…

Best Western, Navasota, TX

The Navasota Best Western looks like it was probably moderately nice in 1972. And it was okay in 2014, I guess, though my bathroom floor was dirty and the pillows were too puffy. And apparently Tim’s and Mark’s toilets were installed at an angle. Our other option was a Comfort Inn, and I suspect it was of similar quality.

I checked in, then headed out to pick up beer when the GPS app showed the bikers nearing town. I caught them just as I was pulling into Walmart.

Walmart, Navasota, TX

This was nothing like most Walmarts; it reminded me of a run-down Clover, a beloved discount store from my youth. The inside was cramped and dingy and looked as the outside suggests: a slightly disturbing 1988 alternate reality. Everything just felt a little wrong in there. There was no refrigerated beer, so I picked up a warm six-pack.

The guys had not followed my laboriously pecked out Google bike instructions and so had to approach the hotel from the wrong direction (meaning bike into oncoming traffic) rather than add three miles to their trip. The thought of this gave me some heart palpitations on my drive back. Thankfully the distance they had to cover going the wrong way was only a couple hundred yards.

We hung out at the pool for a bit, and Brian accidentally swam a lap with his Fitbit on (typical!). But he was lucky that day; it came back to life after the hot sun dried it out.

No Fitbits were harmed in the making of this picture

After the pool we all rested or worked or whatever for a couple of hours. I researched the three restaurant options in Navasota and decided on the barbecue joint, because we had not yet enjoyed barbecue on this leg.

And alas, we were still not to enjoy barbecue on this leg, because the place was lousy. I didn’t ride through the center of Navasota as the guys had, so my impressions have fewer data points, but my sense of this city is that it’s pretty poor. Having just skimmed the Wikipedia entry for it, it seems like it does have some charms, though, so maybe I missed something in my restaurant research efforts. Anyway, nobody likes to have a crappy dinner, least of all the SAG lady, so our last day unfortunately ended on a less than perfect note.

Birds on wires

Back in my room, I was hoping to watch some postseason baseball, but the games had been played earlier in the day, so I turned on an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and half-watched it while I packed. He happened to be in New York City, and I naturally reflected on how different Navasota is from New York, and isn’t it weird that I’m here but watching a show about home, and I can’t wait to sleep in my bed again. But I also learned an obvious yet valuable tip: when in New York and in search of a bathroom, go into a bar and order a beer. Then you get a bathroom and a beer. Last weekend, after a long and quickly-turning-desperate search for a restroom in lower Manhattan, this advice flashed into my head, and within five minutes my problem was solved. Thanks, Anthony.

And most of all, thanks, Tim, Brian (Dad), and Mark for another experience that I will remember forever.

And, of course, thank you, Ginger, for your reliability and fortitude!

Hotel Art of the Day

We have an unusual piece today: a very damaged but likely real work of art by artist Maurice Utrillo.

Winter Scene by Maurice Utrillo, probably 1920s-30s
Watercolor, ~20″x16″
Round Top Inn, Round Top, TX

In searching for information about this I found this listing from 2005 from a site selling a reproduction of the piece (photo below). It’s quite a good reproduction, too, as far as I can tell. What a shame that the version at the inn was not better preserved.

Reproduction of Winter Scene

Now, is it possible that the inn’s version is also a reproduction? I suppose so. But I suspect that the owners, at least, believe it’s the real thing, because otherwise why hang something in such poor condition?

Scores will be based solely on the version I saw in person.

Hotel Art Score

6/10. The fact that it’s damaged adds some romance to it; it’s clearly quite old, and has been around — who knows what sort of life it’s had? And it appears to be a cozy street scene. It certainly looks French. So it’s ticked off a number of B&B art boxes. But it is really in quite bad shape, which makes it somewhat unpleasant to look at. It’s difficult to experience any real feelings about it through those water stains. And in a certain frame of mind, late at night in your dim, remote Texas bedroom with no cell signal, it might just seem spooky and sinister.

Art Art Score

6/10. It’s clear, even through the stains, that there’s real technique and confidence at play here. The composition, with its curving, inviting street and roofs of different heights, is pleasing, and it’s easy to imagine that this was an accurate depiction of a day in France long ago. But the color, which is crucial to understanding its festivity and warmth, is gone. So much has been lost, and it makes me a little sad.

But I don’t want to end with an expression of sadness, so here’s the art from the Best Western. It’s a bad photo but you don’t care:

Bouquet on scrap paper background
Mixed Media, ~14″x18″
Best Western, Navasota, TX

Hotel Art Score

5/10. This seems like an older version of the mass-produced art chain hotels have now. It seems like it might have come from the same alternate reality as the Navasota Walmart. The funniest part about this is that the words in the background scraps are not at all legible. You’d think they’d be little bits of wisdom, like, “love is where your story begins,” or maybe snippets of Robert Frost poems, but they could be obituaries for all I know.

Art Art Score

2/10. Why am I giving it a 2 and not a 1? Because a I promised a happy ending. And the flowers in the foreground are nicely executed.

Are you familiar with GeoGuessr? It’s a game that drops you in the Google street map view of a random place, and you have to guess where you are using any clues at your disposal — types of cars, vegetation, architecture, signage. Once it put me in Australia and I thought I was in Florida. But once it put me in New Mexico and my guess was very accurate thanks to my having been there in L2.

There have been times during this trip when my surroundings have felt very comfortable, when it’s as if I’m on a drive through a familiarly rural part of Pennsylvania. If GeoGuessr plopped me onto a two-lane road in central Texas I might think I was in Bucks County, at least for a few seconds. But there are definite differences in the roads and surroundings. The distance between double yellow lines is wider, for instance, and I always want to push them a few pixels together because I have trained myself to think in terms of screens. (You can see the yellow lines on the guys’ recent entries.) There are also way more buffalo.

Relatedly, I have felt very safe throughout this leg. On each of these trips I think about what I would do if the car broke down on a deserted road and I didn’t have a cell signal. The answer would pretty much always have to be wait for someone to drive past and try to flag them down, though I’d also pop the hood and check levels of fluids because that’s the only thing I know how to do. And then maybe I’d bang my head on the steering wheel because it worked for Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. But whereas at times on L2 and L3 I felt vaguely unsettled at the hypothetical idea of having to rely on the help of a stranger, this time I never felt like the potential stranger could be a psycho just waiting to run across a helpless lady on the side of the road.

Destination: Round Top, TX

Realizing my lunch options in Round Top might be limited, I decided to pick something up in Bastrop, which had a bunch of fast food chains near its cluster of hotels. Is there a name for the part of a small town where all the hotels are? Hotel Plaza? Hotel Park? I wasn’t going to go back to Schlotzsky’s and satisfy charm robot. After driving in a six-mile loop I opted for Taco Bell because I’d eaten a lot at the Hampton Inn breakfast (a muffin, an omelet, a banana, and something else I think) and wanted to eat light. I have trouble not eating all of the food in front of me so the best thing is always to put less food on my lap.

I went through the drive-thru and ordered a chicken taco. The guy taking my order asked what kind of sauce I wanted. “I never go here so I don’t know what my options are,” I said, annoyed at being the person who tries to explain things about myself to waiters. There was mild, hot, and fire; I chose hot. The taco was a 5/10.

Coulda been worse

Here are a bunch of photos I took while driving:

Road sign for munchkins — there was another one at this height a little before it

Hard to see, but this water tower has a happy face on it. I passed a couple of these and they lifted my mood, because they are cute and seem beneficent

What?

Not Pennsylvania

The trees in this field were in small groups, as if at a cocktail party

I arrived at our B&B exactly at 3, having learned from past mistakes. The Round Top Inn is a former cigar factory and is quite lovely inside and out. Round Top (pop. 90 as of 2010) is an interesting little town — it looks like a haven for artists, though much of it was closed when we were there. We’d missed their big yearly event, a week-long antique fair, by just a few days, and the owner of the inn told me she was still recovering from it.

The following may or may not be a reenactment:

Tim reads a lengthy but interesting installment of Crossing the Borderlands at the Round Top Inn

Building at the Round Top Inn

Utensil fiesta, and our first and last Mexican meal of L4

The cowboys had mustaches, too

The brothers walking back to the inn after dinner

From the Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Round Top

Hotel Art of the Day

Flowers on a textured background
Digital print, 16″x16″
Hampton Inn, Bastrop

Hotel Art Score

6/10. It’s completely inoffensive and just fine for hotel art. Its objective is to make you feel cheery, to remind you of actual flowers and the nice feelings nature can give you. It’s inspiring very neutral feelings in me but certainly not bad ones.

Art Art Score

3/10. It’s completely inoffensive. There is no soul. But hotel art doesn’t really need soul.

There is not a lot to say about Day 5, which began in Kyle and ended in Bastrop. But I’ve been feeling guilty this whole trip for not giving a cosmic shout-out to Jan Hooks, who died on October 9, with a clip of her tour of the Alamo in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. We’ve been close to San Antonio for most of the trip, and Big Adventure is, after all, about the love of a bicycle. So here we are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYfjq3ZYZbA

I also want to give a shout-out to Tim, who has been writing out directions for me every morning. They were especially handy on day 3 (Bandera to Blanco) and day 5.

I like to compare the Sullivan siblings’ handwriting. Tim’s is the most like his mom’s, I think, though I don’t have samples of Ted’s, Denise’s or Kevin’s. Their scripts all look like they come from the same family, whereas mine and Chris’s bear no similarities.

Sunrise in Kyle

Rerouting, rerouting

See no evil, hear no evil, and Brian

The ride was fairly short, and I figured the riders would want lunch when they were done, so when I got to Bastrop I stopped at a Schlotzsky’s Deli for turkey sandwiches.

The guy behind the Schlotzsky’s register was like a charm robot. He was tanned, muscled, and buzz-cutted, and he talked quickly, clearly priding himself on his ability to work efficiently and make people smile at the same time. Snippet: “What’s that name again? You can tell me your name six times and I’ll forget it but I never forget the face of anyone I’ve met. Now are you gonna share that with a friend, should we upgrade to medium for a dollar?” He was training another cashier as she looked up at him with a dreamy smile and stars in her eyes. “Anything over $24.99, they use a credit card, they have to sign. $24.99 and under, no need to sign.” Swoon. As I was walking out, he said, “Thanks again ma’am hope to see you again real soon,” and I thought, “You really won’t, you won’t see me ever again in your life.” And now my face is seared into your memory. Sorry!

Greasy, delicious sustenance

After I checked in to the Hampton Inn in Bastrop, I promptly locked myself out by leaving my key cards in my room for the third time this trip. I’m not sure whether that has to do with being more distracted or more relaxed. Whatever the cause, people were always nice about it.

The guys arrived a little after two and spent a long time in the hot tub ribbing each other and telling family stories. I’ve probably already said this, but family stories are one of the best things about these trips for me. This was the day that they were officially halfway done with the journey across the country. They had definitely earned their marathon hot tub session.

Everyone thought the pool would be outside

Tim, an important lawyer, takes a call in the hot tub

We drove into quaint downtown Bastrop (pronounced with a short “a”) and had a very nice dinner there. I wish there’d been more time to explore this place.

Historical marker!

Baxters Fine Dining, which began life as abattoir

Fancy feast: Blackened redfish with chile mashed yams, zucchini and tomatoes

Hotel Art of the Day

Sorry for the glare once again. I do my best, I really do.

Textured collage
Mixed media, 16″x16″
La Quinta Inn and Suites, Kyle, TX

Hotel Art Score

4/10. What you unfortunately can’t tell from the photo is that the off-white slips of paper appear to be stock market listings from a newspaper. Why? Why not, I guess. But seriously, why. We’ve got starbursts and circles and dots, all indicators of playfulness, and we’re going to overlay them on the stocks page. Maybe it’s to indicate that when in La Quinta, work is fun. The stock market? Just a game! Splash blop bloop. Wait, but it is a game, isn’t it? Everything is, when you get down to it. So I guess actually this is pretty existential.

It’s interesting to note, too, that all of the art in the rooms features open circles, which correspond to the bedspread design. So this piece was commissioned specifically for La Quinta. That’s more branding unification than I’m used to. Nice job, La Quinta?

Art Art Score

1/10.

The Blanco Best Western is an unusual property. Its reviews on TripAdvisor are remarkably positive — a 4.9 rating and comments like “best Best Western ever!” and “Greatest hotel!” — so I was excited to stay there. It certainly had the most expensive and ornate loveseats of any Best Western I’ve known.

The loveseat: a solid piece of furniture

And it had a robust collection of Southwestern art in the elevator, halls, and rooms. Some of the paintings in the first-floor hallway had rotating colored LEDs shining on them, adding a gratuitous but appreciated oomph (sadly not captured on camera).

Herding in a thunderstorm

Intimate moonlit cowboy chat

And there were two TVs in my room, one facing the bed and another in the office area. And it had a nice garden outside.

It wasn’t the best Best Western ever, though, because breakfast was horrible: half-frozen tater tots, instant scrambled eggs (which weren’t replenished when they ran out, maybe to the benefit of future guests), and even worse, instant coffee. How is instant coffee still a thing? Isn’t making coffee one of the simplest tasks man can attempt? The internet likes to tell you you’re doing everything wrong, but as far as I can tell it hasn’t tried to tell you that you’re making coffee wrong, because you aren’t. You’re just making coffee and it’s coming out fine. You are, however, drinking it wrong. See below. This video is an annoying Buzzfeed production but it actually has some good tips. I recognize that posting it makes me complicit in the propagation of our detestable internet culture and I am sorry:

Here, watch this to cleanse your palate. You’ll never look at a Twinkie the same way again:

In conclusion, if you’re a hotel owner, don’t scrimp on coffee. I know it’s cheaper, but your savings are not worth the bad taste in everyone’s mouths.

A storm struck right as the guys were prepping to take off, so they hung out in the lobby for half an hour and waited for it to pass.

Not really in the mood to pose

Their ride was wind assisted and therefore speedy. My drive was short and entirely forgettable; it’s two days later and I have already forgotten it. The bikers actually beat me to the La Quinta in Kyle by a few minutes, all of us arriving a little after noon.

Mark and Tim didn’t invite Brian to the hot tub because they knew he would just be bugging them to hurry up to leave for the LBJ Library. After the secret hot tub session everyone convened in my room and we decided on pizza for lunch. I thought we were going to try a local place, but the guys had passed a CiCi’s, a buffet-style franchise with which you might be familiar, on the way in, so that’s where we ended up.

It looked like this this photo from the Cici’s website, but less appealing

Notes from CiCi’s, Kyle, TX, 10/13/14:

• The all-you-can-eat buffet is $5.60.
• The pizza tastes like high-quality cafeteria food. If you were in high school and they served this on pizza day, you would look forward to it all week.
• The place felt a little unclean, but not enough to make me not want to eat.
• They had on a Sirius ’80s station and it was playing good stuff.
• There was an opinionated teenage girl sitting behind us. Here is a sample of her conversation, typed on my phone in real time: “The music I listen to? They don’t want it played on the radio because the bands don’t want white trash to listen to their music. They don’t want people like Valerie to go to their concerts. It’s not racist. It’s not racist.” Then she listed the inferior music that does get played on the radio with a sneer and a laugh: “Nicki Minaj, heh!” She also shared her thoughts on abortion: “If you want to take care of it for eighteen years when it comes out of her, be my guest.” And I learned that she once thought she was pregnant because her period app mispredicted her start date by two days. Oh, apps! It seemed like she was the only person talking in a group of three. On my way back from the restroom I satisfied my curiosity about the rest of the group: one of them was clearly her mother, and the other I supposed was her boyfriend, who was getting through it by staring blankly to his left. Poor everyone.

Next up: the LBJ Library and Museum!

The brutalist building seems to suit LBJ’s personality — which is not to say he was brutal, just forceful

Its feature exhibit was on sixty influential people from the 1960s. I thought the museum did a nice job profiling people you (or at least I) might not already know much about, like David Ogilvy and Berry Gordy, along with more well-known names like Charles Schulz and Kurt Vonnegut.

One neat interactive feature was a free jukebox with a selection of influential recordings, again with a nice mix of popular and lesser known.

(from the LBJ Library website)

I waited till it was free and walked up to take a look at the songs, planning to choose a crowd-pleaser for the guys. I noted they had an obscure Led Zeppelin track on there, which pleased me. But before I had a chance to pick my song, a guy, 40ish, came over and stood next to me. He asked how to do it and I explained it to him: “I think you pick a letter and then you pick a number.” You know, like on every jukebox you’ve ever seen. I should have said, “Um, I was about to pick something,” but when I feel uncomfortable I usually try to make the situation end in as quick and conflict-free a way as possible. I’m working on this.

He pushed a letter and hesitated. “Okay, now you pick a number.” He put on Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” — a fine choice, but I wasn’t about to say so after he usurped my turn — and kept standing there, so I walked away. I have no idea if it was an idiotic attempt to hit on someone in a museum or if he was just clueless. Maybe standard jukebox etiquette doesn’t apply in a presidential library.

Doofus aside, I enjoyed the museum a lot. I particularly liked listening to LBJ’s phone conversations and could probably have spent a few hours doing that. I listened to one he had with Jackie Kennedy just a couple of weeks after JFK’s death in which he tells her that she should visit whenever she wants, and she must still be in shock because she’s breathless and coquettish and giggly the entire conversation. It was fascinating.

I also learned that he founded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

LBJ’s “I will not seek another term” speech — I enjoy thinking about what the tech on the floor is thinking

Teleprompter page from the speech

Replica of Lady Bird Johnson’s office. She would sort her files by making piles on the floor. I do this, too.

After the museum, we ate a quick but delightful meal at the nearby Salty Sow, then drove back to Kyle in rush hour traffic. I used the Waze app (which I downloaded after Laura recommended it on her blog — thanks!) and while it couldn’t do much for us that day, it is a cool tool.

The Salty Sow, a top-notch dining establishment

Back at the room, I performed blog assistant duties and half-watched “Dancing With the Stars.” Carlton is pretty good, huh?

Hotel Art of the Day

Cows on a mission
Color photograph, ~14″x10″
Best Western, Blanco, TX

Sorry about the poor quality, it was tough to get a good, non-glarey shot of this.

Hotel Art Score

7/10. This is like if Michael Bay were a cow and made a movie about other cows. It made me smile every time I saw it.

Art Art Score

3/10. Same goes for Armageddon while we’re at it.