Road Trip #4.1

Well, here we are, on the road again.  This trip was planned earlier as a visit to TAMU-Kingsville for a home football game to observe their security operations.  The game is on Saturday night but I decided I needed to head that way on Friday...and since there are Harley dealerships "on the way" I decided I needed to drop in a see a few of them.

My plan was to arrive at the first dealership on the south side of Austin shortly after they opened at 9am so I left home a little after 7 and headed south.  I decided I should go through Bastrop and enter Austin from the south...which turned out to be a perfect plan.  Because I hit town after the morning rush hour, the traffic wasn't any heavier than a normal day.

The  drive through Bastrop was a little depressing as I drove through The Lost Pines area turned black by the recent wild fires.  Once a beautiful tree lined section of Hwy 21with houses built up in the trees, the road now is a reminder of just how fickled grass fires can be.  You would be driving  along seeing all the devastation and then there would be a house completely surrounded by burned grass and trees, completely untouched.  It will be many years before this area will be anything close to what it once was.  I guess this could be said for areas all around the State this year.

I arrived at Cowboy Harley Davidson on the south side of Austin at 9:10, walked in, looked around a bit and then got my stamp and continued my journey south to the next stop...Gruene (pronounced Green).  The dealership in Gruene is one of the very few exceptions in that it isn't on a major interstate or highway.  Rather it is on an older stretch of a Farm-to-Market road, but not too far off I-35 in an area where New Braunfels and Gruene run together.  I made a quick stop and then it was back on the road to San Antonio where I would hit two more dealerships before stopping for lunch.

One of the dealerships...Alamo City...was on the interstate not too far north of Loop 410.  I had been to this dealership previously so it was easy to find...and my trusty GPS was working good today.  I made a quick stop, got the passport stamped and began to look for the next place, Caliente H-D.

Caliente was on the west side of town on Loop 410 and as I got closer I also got hungrier so I started looking for a good place to eat lunch.  San Antonio has about everything you can ask for except what I was hungry for...Saltgrass.  I wanted some baked potato soup, but that was not to be...at least according to my GPS.  I found the dealership without a problem, got my passport stamped, bought a t-shirt and headed back the way I came to where I saw a Marie Calendars.  If I couldn't have baked potato soup from Salt Grass then I'd have cornbread from Marie Calendars.

I had intended to go to lunch with the police chief at TAMU-San Antonio but when I called to talk with him I found out he was out of town for the day so I ended up eating by myself...although I texted Sharon, Cassidy and Courtney between bites.  After lunch I headed south on the loop towards the TAMU-SA campus...actually the Brooks-City campus.  Brooks AFB is being converted to a civilian facility...called Brooks-City Base and not long ago TAMU-SA was offered a lease on a 77,000 sq ft academic building that once housed the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine.

On the way to the campus, I saw the exit for the Lackland Annex...also called Medina in the old days.  This base is where they had Officer Training School before and where I graduated on December 21, 1972...seems like just the other day.  I made the exit and drove down the road to the gate where I showed my ID and drove back in time a few years...or should I say decades. 

The based looked different than it did back in the '70's but some things looked the same.  The parade field...a large expanse of concrete where we had a parade every Saturday morning and where we marched on graduation day.  The O'Club...apparently abandoned...was still there as was the gym and chow hall, but the dorm I lived in back there had been torn down and replace with new housing.

After a short trip down nostalgia lane, I headed over the campus, took a short tour of the new academic building and then hit the highway to Kingsville.  I pulled into town about 5pm, found the hotel and checked in.

On the way down today I came up with the idea of driving over to Victoria and Corpus Christi on Saturday morning and then resting for the rest of the afternoon until time to head to the stadium, but once I started looking at the map I realized that dealerships in McAllen and San Benito were closer than Victoria.  Now I have a plan for tomorrow.