Small Town Texas

So one thing I love about working with the NRCS is that I get out of the office a lot to see the country.  I've only been here 2 weeks, yet I know quite about the surrounding areas.  It makes it fun to  then grab Katy and go exploring and visit small fun towns.  One evening we went up to visit the small tourist town of Wimberley up in the hill country.  They like cowboy boots there.  The following are just a few.

Tubing the rivers in the area is a major attraction.  We tubed the Comal River through New Braunfels and got sunburned pretty good.  It is a good sized, but slow moving river, claiming to be the shortest in the world.  It's source is a spring from the Edwards Aquifer, and it runs just 2.5 miles before flowing into the Guadalupe.  It took us about 3.5 hours to float 2 miles.  A pretty leisurely float.  We had thousands of other tubers floating with us, probably 95% drinking beer the whole way.  Sorry, but we have no pictures as we didn't bring our phones with us on the river.

Thursday we made the trip to the San Antonio Temple, which is not too far away.  It is a very pretty temple set on top of a hill.  

Yesterday we drove out to the small town of Luling to see their Watermelon Thump.  It is their town festival days at the end of every June.  They host  a watermelon spitting contest every year and the world record for watermelon spitting was set there in 1989 and hasn't been broken since.  The record is 68 ft.  Yesterday the winner won with a spit of 48 feet. 

One night this week we walked around the historic Gruene district in New Braunfels.  This part of Texas was settled by German immigrants and there are a lot of towns with German roots, like Gruene, New Braufels, New Berlin, Fredericksburg, etc.  Gruene boasts the oldest dance hall in Texas and has live music every night of the week.  So we checked it out.

Finally, another thing we love about Texas is cheap gas.  Check out the huge gas station at Buc-ee's, the cheapest gas around.

Road Trip!

Summer is finally beginning!  Katy finished teaching a week ago as I have been working on a farm the last 5 weeks.  So we headed out to Texas a few days ago so I can start my internship with the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) tomorrow.  Last summer we were in Amarillo, this summer we are in New Braunfels, just north of San Antonio.

Since it was going to be a 22 hour drive from Logan, we split up the trip into a little over 3 days.  We got a head start Wednesday night by staying at my grandma's in Cedar Hills (thanks Grandma!).  Thursday we drove to Salida, Colorado, up in the beautiful Rockies.  We stopped at Blue Mesa Lake, which is the largest body of water in Colorado.  We got to drive over Monarch Pass, which had stunning views.

Friday we drove south and stopped at Great Sand Dunes Nation Park and Preserve.  The sand dunes are the largest in the country.  They've got some pretty scenic mountains as a backdrop.  Wish we could have stayed longer.  The stream was nice.

We stayed the night in Amarillo, where I worked last summer.  Lots of flat farmland in the Panhandle!

We drove Saturday all the way into the hill country of Texas to make it to New Braunfels.  We're still getting used to the humidity.  Air conditioning is nice.

Can't wait for more Texas adventures!