dolari | Around baout now your copilot should be screaming "EJECT! EJECT!"

January 1st

We started off the New Year with yet another Road Trip. The idea here is to show Emily as much of Texas as I could in the shortest amount of time, and going to places even _I_ hadn't been to before (or at least, hadn't been to in a long time). This time, our trip went due Northwest, beelining for the town of Llano, with one small side trip. Then a side trip to the side trip.

We decided to take a quick runaround on our way to Llano at the town of Click. But on the way to Click, I was reminded that the tiny little county road that takes you to Click crosses Sandy Creek. Sandy Creek, by the way, runs around Enchanted Rock, which is a gigantic mound of granite. So the creek is completely pink with granite "dust." A pink ribbon as far as the eye can see, which in thee parts, is pretty far. We played around in the granite dust for a bit, including me doing some incredible stunt work on video that the world WILL NEVER EVER SEE before we moved on to Click.

Click is a total ghost town that's been left alone, yet lightly kept up. It's not like your typical Texas Ghost towns where (1) it's in shambles or (2) been revamped into a tourist trap theme park, but instead it's (3) a place where a local farm has taken over the buildings for storage and kept them up. So you have just the two "log cabin" buildings in the middle of nowhere, looking just as they did in the 1880s.

From Click, we continued back through the Texas hillcountry, around Packsaddle Mountain, we made it into Llano, a small town (although average by most hill country county seat standards). We'd not really had anytime to eat anything, so Emily and I hit a convenience store to get breakfast. One of the wierd things about towns out here, is that, since they're small, they often only have Nice Sit Down Restaurants and no fast food (except for a airy Queen, which is required in all city charters when they incorporate - if you don't have a Dairy Queen in your town, no number of stoplights will make you a city). So instead, convenience stores have picked up the slack, usually selling some decent super-deep-fried fast food, or prepackaged sammiches/salads, with qa big enough menu (and sit down space) to qualify as a fast food joint. We bought some food, and decided to take it down to the Llano River dam to have a picnic.

The Llano area is dotted with granite EVERYWHERE, gigantic granite boulders pop out of the topsoil here and there, and the Llano River area is no exception. On one of the boulders I got a creepy feeling of "What a Coincidence!" when I saw, spray painted on the side of one boulder "Moises Loves Betty." My friend Mike's parents came from this area, and their names were Moises and Betty. I hadn't thought about Mike and his family in ages - and it made me wonder - was tht them? :D

I'd meant to take a picture of that spray painting, however, as I got to shoot the picture, the camera fell out of my hands, on to the concrete and granite boat ramp going into the lake. ::SMASH:: The camera lens had managed to break, the camera itself wouldn't power on, and, for all intents and purposes, my camera was dead. I wasn't happy about this at all, and I said and yelled a few things that maybe I shouldn't have, because the mood for the next several days between Emily and I were incredibly tense. But that's over and done with.

Emily explored the old railroad area while I used my sidekick to buy a new and better camera (and got it delivered the next day, somehow!). We trailed the railroad from Llano through Stolz, into Lake Buchanan, with the hopes of going onto the dam and taking picture of some of the neat structures that are there (There's one that's very Myst like, a building that just juts out of the water with a small walkway to it...the art-deco design and the "floating" look of it are amazing.

Unfortunately, yet again, the terrorists have one, and the dam is not only closed off, but sealed off, and anyone who gets near the dam is videotaped and scrutinized. In fact, the only reason we got CLOSE to the dam was the new security fenses they'd put up hadn't gone up in one spot. This led to a nice long rant by me about how we're losing our freedoms because our government is too damned scared of terrorists, and our citizenry are too damned scared of the government. This didn't help the tense situation between Emily and me...but that's over and done with.

We backtracked to Kingsland, where at least we knew a historic railroad "district" was established, and while it was small, it didn't disappoint. The Antler's hotel owned most of the railroad depot area and had developed it a bit. The Antler's hotel is an old establishment from the mid 80s, and played up on the railroad by buying some old rail cars, fixing them up, and renting them out as rooms. The depot across the street is being renovated into...something (we never could figure it out) but the pièce de résistance was the Kingsland Old Town Grill.

Or as you Texas Chainsaw Massacre folks know it - The Family House.

I'd totally forgot that it was in Kingsland, but there it was in all its glory. I'm not a TCM fan, really, but it's neat to see it's still around, and I know a ton of folks who will worship at its front steps when they find out where it is.

We continued followin the tracks into the Scobee/Fairland area, which now seems to be a gigantic storage grounds for cars...they're everywhere out here, but haven't been moved in ages, found some nice shots of a flat valley that can be used in AWFW, and then promptly dropped the truck into a creek when the pavement over a creek decided to be several yards to our left. Thankfully, though, we made it through that one with little to no scarring. :D

We got a few pictures of Granite Mountain, but as we entered Marble Falls we were running out of light. We were both stressed from the issues we'd had earlier, so we passed on the town, and began heading back to San Marcos via Round Mountain and Cypress Mill. I promptly fell asleep here and woke up to the sound of a train blaring it's horn as loud as it possibly could in my right ear in San Marcos.

It wasn't a good day financially, personally, and relationshipply, and for being the first day of the year, 2008 didn't seem really promising. Thankfully, that seemed to change rather quickly. :)