I joked last night to Tracy that Austin, Texas, seems just like Washington, D.C. but with different hats. He looked around, at the hordes of sweaty soccer players and the hipster parents with feral children—all at the brewery where we were sitting—and he totally agreed. Except that the only cowboy hats around were on the […]
Month: March 2023
It Keeps Happening, for a Reason
Shana and Marcus are regular contributors to GDTRFG; this is the first time I’ve put their writing here in my personal series, Wish You Were There. In truth, this post connects to several themes throughout this blog. It was written by Shana. At this point, you might suspect that I was referring to the rain […]
What 10 Million Bats Looks Like
They don’t look like anything I can describe, is what they look like. There is no way to capture in a photograph, or even a video, the enormity and beauty of this many animals moving all at once, together as a colony and individually as mammals, feeding. They fly together, and they fly into each […]
Living Intently
The last time Shana and Marcus wrote for us was back in July, when they were outfitting their van, Black Betty, to live in full-time. Since then they’ve experimented with other living situations, and now they’re back in Black Betty, plus a huge, kick-ass tent, traveling the southern coast of California. An undercurrent to all […]
Hiking Texas’ Hill Country
My Texan friend, Karen, told me that this central region (the Edwards Plateau) is lovely, and right she is; it’s unlike any part of Texas we’ve seen. Not to imply Texas is generally unlovely, but this area is special. We’re in Garner State Park, along the Rio Frio, west of San Antonio. Right now it’s […]
I’ll Meet You at the Gator, But First I Gotta Get Around This Turkey
I texted that to Tracy yesterday afternoon while we were both hiking here at Choke Canyon State Park in south Texas. He was up ahead, and he’d found an alligator in a shallow part of the lake, so he texted me a heads-up in case I wanted to see. I did! In my rush, I […]
Crafty Nomad (kind of)
It’s a chilly, rainy day in south Texas, so I’m looking around inside for something to do that’s moderately productive. This is where “craft” enters my vocabulary; in my before life I used that word only after “beer.” Another oddity: I have time on my hands but very little space. I can’t garden, or do […]
On the Road Again 🎶
And man does it feel good. Yesterday, we finally pulled out of Brownsville, Texas, and drove north for a couple of hours, including through a customs checkpoint where the dude with the gun glanced in Tracy’s window then said to him, “Just you and the two dogs then, huh.” I usually keep quiet in these […]
Banjo Doesn’t Care Where We Go (We’ve Planned Anyway)
Banjo is always excited to hop into the truck and go, but she’s pretty blasé about the route. There’s no hanging her head out the window with ears blowing in the wind or tongue spattering spit down the truck sides; Banjo sleeps the whole trip. Same deal with our destination: she’ll sniff around the new […]
Fixing to Get
Yes, that’s the Airstream not in our site at Honeydale Park. For the first time in almost three months, we towed her out, but not for the spring leg of 2023 traveling. We were checking off the final, major item on our to-do list here this winter, which was to get new tires on the […]
