Today we got us very late and were quite sluggish until after noon. We eventually became bored with watching TV and decided to take a trip into Bandera, a small community about 20 miles from Thousand Trails Lake Medina where we are currently set up.
Along the way to Bandera, there are many strange sights like cars on posts, camels in a pasture, little limestone Texas houses and metal sculptures of hogs. As we drove along, we passed over some Texas creeks which were absolutely clear. One can see the limestone streambed bottoms. The limestone seems to resist algae unless the water stops moving.
In Bandera, we cruised through the residential neighborhoods and spotted more limestone ashlar masonry houses and shacks and some are quite attractive. We also stopped at a Texas vaporizer store, something we did not expect to see in a state where smoking marijuana or any derivatives is punishable by a million years in jail. A nice elderly lady was working behind the counter and answered all our questions.
This part of Texas seems to have an abrupt dichotomy between the rich and the poor. The rich live in enormous mansions with big fences and gates and the poor live in trailer houses with wrecked cars and broken toys in the yard. There does not seem to be much of a middle class here. They all have covered their cars with Trump stickers, now pointless since he has been elected.
Out at Lake Medina, where we are camped, there are no houses but an abundance of wildlife. There must be 100 nearly tame deer that come by to visit us twice a day. There are meadowlarks that have the most amazing yellow breasts, cormorants, Egyptian geese (despite Texas being a long ways from Egypt) and a myriad of other varieties of birds we have yet to identify. The weather today was nice but the Weather Channel says we are about to get thunderstorms that should last through the weekend. We think we are located high enough above the lake to avoid being flooded. We’ll see in the next few days.
There are some Bandera photos available if you click here