May 18 – “Jesus Shaves”

Finally.  One of the main attractions for going on vacation has been found.  Our Kerrville hotel has those make-your-own waffle irons.  I love those things.  And to top it off, these were in the shape of the state of Texas.  Can’t get any better than that.  Nice job, Kerrville.  Oh, there is the one thing.  As we were leaving town we noticed all the construction going on around the high school football stadium.  And then we noticed the team mascot.  Fighting Antlers.  Really?  You can do better than that.

Our goal for the day was to do some browsing at antique shops.  First stop was scheduled to be in Comfort, Texas.  The drive was really pretty, and we even saw an entire field full of jackalopes, just lying around resting.  No, really.  They were too short to be deer, but they all had antlers.  Can’t convince me otherwise.  We ran into a problem in Comfort.  No one is awake until after ten o’clock.  I can understand the shops not opening until ten, but there was nothing going on when we arrived around nine.  Not even a coffee shop to wait in.  Sadly, we missed all those antique shops.  We headed on to Boerne.

Of course you know that the name of this town rhymes with Ernie from Sesame Street, right.  Strange.  The antique shops in this town were open, though.  And they were the kind I get a kick out of.  Piles and piles of junk strewn about a big room in no particular order.  I saw a few baseball cards they were particularly proud of.  They were from the 50’s, but they weren’t anyone famous.  Couldn’t tell it from the price, though.  I also found some old comic books.  Texted Kel to see if he was interested, but they weren’t old enough either. 

After Boerne we headed for Gruene.  Now understand here that our GPS voice pronounced this as “Groon.”  Fortunately, we had already been informed that in reality people in the know pronounce it to rhyme with lean and mean and fighting machine.  Yep.  “Green.”  Like the color.  Go figure.  On the way we drove through part of New Braunfels.  The part that has a high school with the mascot Unicorns.  Wonder how the Unicorns would fare against the Antlers?  And how would you cheer?  “Go, Antlers.  Gore the mythical beasts.”  Or “Break the Antlers.  Hang ‘em on the wall.”  We did like Gruene, though.  Very quaint town.  Definitely tourism driven, but they seem to have embraced their tourist-ness.  We did take on another passenger from Gruene.  Dashboard Jesus joined us.  I really wanted to buy one other odd Jesus representation for my collection.  The “Jesus Shaves” coffee mug.  The beard on the picture of Jesus disappeared whenever you put a beverage in the cup.  That one proved a bit much for Chris to handle though. 

Next we headed toward Wimberly, but it really didn't look much different from where we've been all day so we kept going.  I showed Chris a short cut through Dripping Springs and Bee Cave that took us near Lake Travis.  I thought that would be a nice sight.  I guess it was, except for the fact that much of Lake Travis was dried up because of a drought.  Oh well.  We bravely forged on to look for a hotel room around Round Rock.  Thought maybe we could do some stuff in the Austin area.  And that’s what we get for daring to think ahead.  Virtually every hotel room in Round Rock was booked for the night.  Something about a convention for high school girls dance teams.  Rather than backtrack, something we had determined early one that we didn’t want to do, we kept going north looking for a room.  We finally found one in the little town of Salado, just south of Temple.  And it looked like a fun place to walk around in.  New plans.  But wait a minute.  Salado.  That’s where Josh was doing a wedding this very weekend.  We didn’t want to crash a wedding or anything, but it would be fun to accidentally run into them.  Tomorrow could be very interesting.

Psalms 25:6 says, “Remember, O Lord, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old.”

Father, that’s the kind of antique to focus on – your mercy and love.  Amen.