Texas

The United States of America is a big place. So big in fact that they chop it up into fifty different bits to make it more manageable. Not that these subdivisions are equal in size you understand. The biggest is Alaska which is positively enormous with a population that consists mainly of bears, seals, indigenous eskimos and a few strange people who seem to like really, really lousy weather. The smallest is Rhode Island which is not an island, about the size of a football pitch yet has a population (human, not bear) some fifty percent bigger than Alaska. I’ve been to both of those states, barely scratching the surface of Alaska on a week’s cruise and doing Rhode Island to death in the space of an afternoon. As is evident America is a land of contrasts and a positively fantastic place to visit. Easy to get to, not overly expensive when you get there and they speak a form of English that is generally understandable. Not that the Americans will be able to understand your (proper) English all the time but communication problems you may have in say, Uzbekistan, are few and far between in the USA. I’ve been a few times but until a couple of weeks ago had only ticked off thirteen states and even then I might have cheated a bit as I don’t think I got out of the car in Maryland. I can now say that I’ve done fifteen of them. This blog is specifically about the fourteenth, Texas.

I planned this trip in the summer. It was to be a post retirement father and son bonding trip. A couple of years ago my son Nicholas and I went to Shanghai for three days which seemed like a long way to go for a short break but it went well so we felt it was good idea to do something again. The destination was chosen purely on the grounds of Avios reward flight availability and a limited window of opportunity in November for us to be able to go. British Airways flies to Dallas and Houston in Texas but they also fly to the state’s capital city, Austin. Seats were secured on this service which gave us a full week to fill. Texas is a big place. Not as big as Alaska of course but it is the largest state of the contiguous USA. It is probably unfair to base any opinion on the place following just a week within its borders, especially when we went to Louisiana for the best part of three days, but it would be a rather dull article if I didn’t. The flight to Austin went perfectly well. There is an advantage in flying in to Austin. It seemingly doesn’t handle any other intercontinental flights. Consequently, when you land you do not arrive at the same time as ten other wide body aircraft all discharging hundreds of passengers to the mercy of the USA’s Department of Homeland Security. Getting in to the USA is one thing that puts people off going. The queueing can take hours and the officials seldom have a sense of humour. At Austin, however, the chances are you won’t even see an official. They have biometric passport gates which sometimes even work the first time you try. You still need to do a customs check once you’ve got your bags but that was straight forward and with that you are disgorged in to the Texas twilight. A taxi whisked us to our hotel for the night. Did I say hotel? It was actually a motel, one of those that you will have seen in any number of movies, where you park outside the door, the room is a bit on the dingy side and the owner is waiting to stab you to death whenever you take a shower. Thankfully, the owner must have been on holiday and the accommodation turned out to be fine, even if we didn’t own the obligatory pickup truck parked outside the window.

We walked in to the city centre in search of food. Our first impressions of the city itself were not that great. For a start, with few exceptions pedestrians are not really a thing in the USA and walking anywhere makes you feel quite conspicuous. There also seems to be a huge homelessness problem in Austin. Rightly or wrongly, this adds to the unease about walking around the place even though your own problems are as nothing compared to those watching you pass. Eventually we found what passed for civilisation in the city, a couple of blocks with bars and restaurants. There wasn’t much happening on this Tuesday evening except one place which we gravitated to and decided it seemed a good place to eat. It was too. It was Tex/Mex, quite appropriate really. Well, the Tex bit at any rate. We took an Uber back to the hotel. It seemed worth the few dollars it cost and it is Nicholas who has the account anyway so he paid. That was our Austin experience all done and dusted. I can’t say I’d hurry back, though a Tuesday evening in November was not exactly giving it a fair trial. The following morning we returned to the airport and flew to New Orleans for two nights, returning to Austin late on the Friday, picking up a hire car and following a comical journey where Google Maps took us to the wrong place twice, before crashing (not literally) into an airport hotel for the night. In contrast to the motel, we got huge suites each. It was a shame we were only there the night.

The following morning, pausing only for the obligatory enormous breakfast, we headed the eighty miles or so to San Antonio, the oldest municipality in the state of Texas. It was surprisingly big, the seventh most populous city in the USA and second in Texas only to Houston of which more later. In and amongst all that urban sprawl, however, was an actual city centre. It was quite compact but a distinct focal point for the city. The reason for this was that The Alamo was, and bits of it still are, located here. The Alamo holds an important place in American history. This despite the fact that when the battle took place Texas was not part of the USA and wouldn’t be for another ten years. Not only that, the Texians lost but the massacre of the defenders proved to be the turning point in the revolution and Texas would soon win its independence from Mexico, becoming the 27th US state those ten years later. The battle now firmly established in American folkloreand San Antonio welcomes many thousands of visitors a year. As The Alamo in itself isn’t enough to keep those visitors happy, other touristy things have popped up round about it including the riverwalk and some shops which give the town some sort of beating heart sadly lacking in other American metropolises. The first thing we did there was go our separate ways, Nicholas to the cinema and I to an ice hockey game. San Antonio Rampage were at home to Rockford Ice Hogs in the American Hockey League, the second level of hockey in North America. I’ll bore you with my thoughts on that in another blog.

The following morning we visited The Alamo, or what’s left of it. The church is still there, as is a stretch of wall that was thick enough to contain something of a museum but I suspect the souvenir shop was a recent addition. This didn’t really matter though as we took the walking tour with our guide, the only person we heard say ‘howdy’ during out time in Texas, filling is in on all the details of the battle and where things had happened such as David Crockett (don’t call him Davy) being killed and where the women and children hid as their menfolk were being slaughtered. It was worth the fifteen dollars as it would have been a bit underwhelming without the narrative. Later, we went down some caves situated just out of town as frankly you can’t beat a good cave and these were indeed good caves. We discovered the finest pizza house in all of San Antonio to eat, did some of the tacky tourist attractions and overall San Antonio left a good impression. Not enough of one that we wanted to stay an extra night, however, which happened to have been the original plan. We had changed it earlier in the week and left San Antonio early the following morning to head 220 miles east to Houston.

I should add here that driving in the USA is easy, at least compared with other countries that choose to drive on the wrong side of the road. The country is made for the motorist with multi lane roads all over the place, decent signage, service stations at virtually every freeway exit, cheap petrol and with a few hot headed exceptions, reasonably courteous drivers. There’s only one problem with it – it’s all rather boring. The road from San Antonio to Houston was two hundred miles of straight dual carriageway through a featureless landscape, until the last fifty miles as that is where Houston started. Not that this made the views any prettier. Here the road widened from a four lane highway to six, then to eight, then to eight with an extra four on the ‘frontage’ roads, with extra toll and multi occupancy lanes when deemed necessary. We passed several huge interchanges where sliproads were carried high into the sky to connect one freeway with another. We should have probably taken one of them but with so many to choose from poor google maps got a bit confused as to which lane we were in. We ended up quite close to the centre of the city before we veered off to the south as our destination was the Johnston Space Centre, some  twenty miles south of downtown yet still well within the urban limits of this massive city.

Houston is the home to NASA’s manned spaceflight program and they have built a pretty good attraction there. It was a popular place on a damp November Monday so god knows what it is like in the summer. There are, of course, many exhibits including the big ones such as the Space Shuttle atop the 747 transporter aircraft and a complete Saturn V rocket that would have propelled the Apollo 18 mission to the moon had the program not been cancelled after Apollo 17. We also got to see one of the Mission Control rooms and enjoyed our trip. For anyone with a modicum of interest about space exploration it is worth a visit if you are in the Houston area. Does the city have anything else to offer though? We fought our way to our downtown hotel and had the evening and the following morning to find out. The answer was, basically, no. Set out in the typical American grid, downtown Houston is a soulless place. There is the shopping district which has few shops, the theatre district with few theatres, a few shiny skyscrapers belong to oil companies and countless anonymous office blocks interspersed with parking lots. It would appear that many people drive to work there then drive home again eight hours later. Unless we missed it, which is of course possible in a big place like this, Houston is no party town. There is a new surface metro that trundles through the streets. The streetcars looked awfully under-utilised. We left Houston to head back to Austin for the flight home. The drive was a bit more interesting as we passed through a small Texan town in search of a toilet, the service station at every junction rule having let us down for rather too many miles. The road to Austin had a few curves in it too which was a bonus. Our car was duly returned, our bags placed in the care of British Airways and our overnight flight to London signalled the end of our Texas (and New Orleans) adventure.

So, what to make of Texas? It’s a big place and four days doesn’t really do the place justice but it was long enough to work some things out. Big breakfasts for a start, though I must admit I never did actually work them out. Whilst the breakfasts were not uniquely Texan, much of the food was had a distinct Tex/Mex edge. This is no bad thing, though after a while you just need a pizza. Texans are a friendly enough bunch but much less ‘southern’ than I expected. The ‘Deep South’ appears, somewhat curiously, to be to the east of Texas and a bit further north too. The place has an interesting history and it is likely to be that that makes Texans a breed apart. In many ways I felt that Texas was the Yorkshire of the USA. The biggest state of the Lower 48 compared to the biggest county in Britain. Texans, like Yorkshiremen, feel a loyalty to their state/county of origin that those not lucky enough to be born there can’t possibly feel. Texans are still proudly American of course and the number of Stars and Stripes flags flying is astonishing. Some of them are huge in fitting with the ‘everything is bigger in Texas’ theme. Alongside them, however, are an equal number of Texas flags. In Yorkshire earlier on this month I witnessed more Yorkshire flags than I’d ever seen before. The Lone Star appears to carry similar weight to the White Rose. Is it a place I’d return to? Maybe, but not in a hurry. It is so big that there must be more of interest than the little bits of it we covered. For now though I feel that the Lone Star state is, for me, now done and dusted.