We piled into Charlotte and took off on a trip to no specified destination. We went north, then east, then south and then west and, surprisingly, ended up where we started. The first town we encountered was Fayetteville, named for Fayetteville in the Carolinas but I can’t remember which one. It is a bustling metropolis of some 300 souls with the usual courthouse in the middle of a big square of businesses but instead of the courthouse being a big, imposing stone and brick structure, this Fayetteville courthouse was wood. There must be some unwritten law in these parts that all courthouses must have a big assembly of Seth Thomas clocks mounted such that they face all four directions from the steeple or cupola or whatever you call a structure on top of the building because, so far, there are courthouses with clocks at the top in La Grange, Columbus, Schulenburg and Fayetteville we have seen.. They are very nice, if not similar.
They can publish a tourist guide indicating that this area has numerous towns with merely two types of civic improvements; painted churches and courthouses with Seth Thomas clocks in their roof embellishments.
We left Fayetteville and went to Bellville which is actually in Austin county. Surprisingly, the city of Austin, TX is not in or even near Austin County.
Bellville is a nice little town with some 3000 folks but we did not see a courthouse with four Seth Thomas clocks nor any churches painted anything but white. Strangely, the courthouse in Bellville is a large, ugly, imposing structure of indescribable style that has been built directly in the middle of the road from Bellville to I-10 causing virtually the only traffic backup we encountered all day. Bellville is also home to an enormous bust of Steven Austin that is plopped down at the intersection of two minor highways. Austin must have been an ugly fucker or the sculptor intended to make a joke statue because Steve seems to have been given an enormous nose that appeared to be a cross between Pinocchio’s and Walter Matthau’s. The statue is made out of some type of yellow stone and gazes into a culvert.
The drive through the country around here is wonderful. The grass is emerald green, most of the farm houses are very nice, the town residences are mostly beautiful with Craftsman-type and late Victorian architecture and there is almost no traffic, even on weekdays. It is very scenic and it seems pretty clear why folks settled around here.
There does, however, seem to be one almost universal failing in these parts: Texans apparently believe foundations are extraneous and too expensive to build properly so quite a few of the structures we have seen have assumed a list to one side or another, including Fayetteville’s courthouse.
The power in our park took a hearty shit this evening and the park was full of workers digging and pulling feeders and playing with transformers and freezing because the overnight temperatures were in the low 30’s. We used a bunch of propane and ran the batteries low trying to keep the interior of the Invader warm.