Monday, December 17th
Waking up bright and early, Emily and I headed off to Parts Sorta-known. We only really one or two things we HAD to do, the rest would be tracking down rail lines with Emily again.
1) See the "Birthplace" of the truck
2) Mail Postcards
So, to see the birthplace, we had to head to
Seguin.
My truck is superhuman (or super....truck...an). She really is. She's working far better far later than she should be. She's taken good care of me when I haven't taken good care of her. She's wonderful. That truck of mine is a superhero. And she has an origin story.
1992 - Dad goes to buy this truck from a little car lot in Seguin, Texas. Texas farmers have a lot of superstitions, and one dad has managed to take advantage of is that farmers in the area tend to lease farm trucks for two years, and get new vehicles every few years. He found a little town on the outskirts of the county, and was planning to buy this big behemoth of a white truck. He got financing set up, haggled over the price and features, and sure enough, a week later, he went out to the lot to buy his truck.
Only to find it gone. In the corner was this lost lonely looking blue pickup, just dropped off by another farmer. Like magic, the dealer dropped the price, the finacing, and she was ours for a song. She went home with us, and the rest is history. Whatever mysterious pixie left her for us, thank you!
We went back to her "birthplace" only to find that the lot has been turned into an environmental...something. We weren't sure what. But it was nice to be back. :) Like a homecoming for my pickup.
From there we checked out some old spurs and loops in the area, before moving on to
Lake McQueeney (no laughing from the 12 year olds please). Emily got her fill of more railroad trackage, and actual rail working near steel mill there, while I got to feed my "Abandonned Roads" hobby's stomach by examining an old abandonned bridge that used to carry the highway across the Guadalupe.
From there, there was a lesiurely drive into Marion (nothing to see here, not even a Handbook of Texas Online entry, move along). Here I was reminded of an old abandonned rail line I once saw In
St. Hedwig, so off we went to look for it, completely and totally missing it because I didn't have a map with me, and I was finding ghost everythings everywhere. :D
Eventually, we gave up, and with a small side trip through
Adkins, Live Oak and Sayers, we made our way to finish up our first errand - mailing postcards from
China Grove. Yes that China Grove:
When the sun comes up on a sleepy little town
Down around san antone
And the folks are risin for another day
round about their homes
The people of the town are strange
And theyre proud of where they came
Well, youre talkin bout china grove
Oh, china grove
Well, the preacher and the teacher
Lord, theyre a caution
They are the talk of the town
When the gossip gets to flyin
And they aint lyin
When the sun goes fallin down
They say that the fathers insane
And dear missus perkins a game
Were talkin bout the china grove
Oh, china grove
But every day theres a new thing comin
The ways of an oriental view
The sheriff and his buddies
With their samurai swords
You can even hear the music at night
And though its a part of the lone star state
People dont seem to care
They just keep on lookin to the east
Talkin bout the china grove
Oh, china grove
The idea was to start a tradition where I would ail out all my Christmas postcards out from small towns in Texas so we'd have just obscure postmarks. And what more obscure postmark than a town mentioned in a Doobie Brother's song from the early 70s?
At least that was the PLAN. China Grove, it seems, doesn't have a post office anymore. Boogers.
Sorta at a loss at what to do next, we decided to head towards my Dad's hometown, Lytle. I seemed to remember a "Bustling" train loading area there, that still existed, however small. So we meandered our way to the Southwest, visiting Paso de las Garzas, an ancient Mexican community that my dad's family is from, along with the cemetary nearby (although we had to view it from about a quarter mile away).
We pulled into
Somerset because I remembered a that there was an old railroad that ran through there, and while there wasn't much left, and a lot had been run over, we were still able to barely track it through town. We made our way up to the former town of
Kirk (the fact that Kirk has an entry, and Marion doesn't, says alot about Marion), where that track met up with what was still the main line to Laredo. We didn't see any signs or remains of the town. However, I did give Emily a primer on the Kirk/La Coste/Macdona/Von Ormy area. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, a guy named Pearson (whose first name escapes me) built Medina Dam in the north to crete an irrigation reservoir. This reservoir would then feed into a huge patch of land bounded by those towns, an irrigation canal system that still exists and is still used almost 100 years later. Each of the roads in this area has little "posts" and "gates" at their junctions that look like castles, or flyoffs, in a very spanish style. We saw a TON of these little structures still standing everywhere.
In the middle of all this is the town of
Atascosa. I'd driven by this area hundreds of times as it was a scenic way to get to my grandmothers house, and on the way was this little tiny post office in the middle of nowhere. What better place to mail all these cards, AND get an obscure postmark! It took some time, but they were all sent out...only for me to find later that EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM has a a San Antonio postmark instead of Atascosa. WTF, people?! Where'd all the good postmarks go, USPS?
Hmph.
We ended up in
Lytle with daylight slowly fading. The railroad "complex" was still there, although most of the rail spurs had long since been paved over (we did find a set of tracks going into a corn shed). And for a piece of history for Emily,. I got to show her "old downtown." Lytle's main street used to be one block to the north, along the rail tracks. In the 30s, when they began "straightening" a lot of the highways, US 81 was moved one block south. So the buildings literally turned around, using their back doors as the front, and leaving the fronts of the buildings to slowly fall away and fall apart. But the facades are mostly still there if you look, giving the town a very old "washed out" look. The city is actually thriving, but from Railroad street, it looks like a run down ghost town.
A quick runaround to my grandmother's house, we went off to
LaCoste, it was getting dark until we recieved a last minute reprieve by he sun to break open the clouds and shine brightly on us, giving us another hour or so of daylight. This train complex was still used and EMily got a ton of pictures of what Small Town Texas could offer in the way of railroad enthusiast stuffs.
Our last stop on this almost 200 mile odyssey was the small town of
Macdona. The sun wasn't able to hang around much longer, we got some pictures of some rail cars sitting WAY off the road. Emily got some pics, I talked to Steph, who I wouldn't be seeing today because our schedules were just too off, and we headed to my parents house (empty) for a bit of a rest up, a trip to a Chinese buffet, and then home.
And thus ended the day.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
