South TX Safari

In Botswana I wrote every week and felt like I had something to share, but now that I’ve settled into a hum drum adult life it seems like things just aren’t that exciting but I think I’m completely wrong. The mass email I got the most positive comments about from Botswana was about waiting in line at the post office, and how much more day-to-day can you get than that? So it’s simply a psychological phenomenon of changing perception. Yesterday I went for a run around Lady Bird Lake and had a man in his 50s or 60s in full running gear skip towards me…yes skip, you would NEVER see that in Nac but somehow it fits into the Austin landscape…perception.

So for Thanksgiving we made the trip to find our oh-so-scattered/distant Texan cousins in the hopes that they’d share some jellied cranberry sauce with us (Which reminds me that for some reason I missed cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving! Must go back and repeat it really.).

South TX really should cash in on the eco-tourism trade, and not the game farming/lets go shoot an imported African deer trapped inside and enormous fence, but the kind where you go and look at animals ...odd concept I know. Folks get sooo excited about seeing an impala or two, why not some of our south TX species instead? Around Hebbronville I saw javelinas, Mexican eagles, a fox, a lone coyote, a stunning herd of deer, and what I was most excited about wild turkeys. It was like being in a game park and would have been easy to forget that we were simply cruising down a lonely stretch of very straight road. If I’d had a camera my album from the weekend would have looked a little somethin’ like this: