Back when I first moved to Texas, I took weekend road trips fairly regularly… usually one or two a month. I’d pick a direction and find what looked like the best “not the interstate” way to get there and often turned down side roads just to see what was down them. Eventually, that led to the creation of the Lone Star Back Roads Facebook page and the conversion of what had been my personal Instagram account into the LSBR Instagram account.
It’s gotten harder and harder to take those road trips in recent years, partly because I often attend (and photograph) things happening in Lee and Fayette Counties. That’s not at all a bad thing… I’ve gotten to see things that I would have probably never seen if I’d stuck to the weekend road trips… things like the TWHS volunteers cooking over the direct heat pits at Serbin and forty-two tournaments at places like the Loebau Store. That continued focus on one community will, I hope, yield a valuable documentary record down the road for the generations after us (if Christ doesn’t return first).
Today, though, I got to take a road trip… I wanted to drive out to Immanuel Lutheran Church of Copperas Cove to get a particular photograph to use in the next TWHS newsletter. So we took a roundabout trip that took us through Thorndale (and naturally, we stopped in at the Thorndale Meat Market for lunch), followed by The Grove (to see the old Dube store as well as St. Paul Lutheran Church The Grove) and finally Copperas Cove by way of Gatesville and numerous other small towns. While we were waiting for it to get dark enough for the cross on the hill behind Immanuel to light up, we headed over to Lampasas and ate at Storm’s Drive-In Lampasas.
All in all, it was a very nice day and a fun trip!
