what about the plastic animals?

At The North Portico

Somebody wrote their congressman and got us a tour of the White House.  While security is pretty tight, it is not as annoying as going through an airport.  You can't bring a bag, or electronics, or a camera, and your cell phone has to be turned off.  Thus no photos of the inside.

The tour is self-guided but somewhat limited in that you see the first floor of the East Wing and Residence.  Friendly Secret Service agents are in each room to answer any questions.  We got to see the Green Room, the Red Room, the East Room, where the President typically holds press conferences (it was much smaller than I expected) and where musical performances are held, and the State Dining Room (which was also much smaller, and a bit dowdier, than I expected).  The best part of the tour is in the Family Dining Room where you get a special White House pin if you beat the president in two out of three arm wrestling matches.

George Washington Is Still Sleeping Here

]George and Martha are eternally resting in a very modest tomb at Mt. Vernon.

Other final presidential locations that have appeared here:

Abraham Lincoln

Ulysses S. Grant

Warren G. Harding

George Washington Slept Here

Last month I had the pleasure of visiting Washington DC with some Bay Staters. One afternoon was spent at George Washington's Mount Vernon estate. We got a tour through the house (no photos allowed) and wandered around the grounds where we saw the lower garden, the wharf on the Potomac, a horse barn, a slave cabin and Washington's tomb.  We also toured the museum where George's dentures are displayed (no photos allowed).

Yes, that is a cherry tree in the middle photo.  The garden had a variety of fruit trees shaped to grow low to the ground. The giant tulip poplar was planted by Washington himself in 1785.

Did you know that after the revolution George operated one of the largest distilleries in the new country?

Go Gruene

Gruene was a successful cotton town along the Guadelupe River until a boll weevil infestation and the Great Depression essentially killed it off by the early 1930s.  There it sat until the 1970s when someone bought and restored historic Gruene Hall and then started buying and restoring many other buildings in town. Today Gruene is a tourist town but without a lot of the tackiness that implies.  I spent a very enjoyable evening walking around town, listening to the western swing coming out of Gruene Hall, buying delicious pecans to bring back to the office, and eating fish tacos and drinking a St. Arnold Fancy Lawnmower beer at Mozie's.

Then it was back to San Antonio and an early morning flight to New York.

Lindheimer, Naegelin, Zeitung and Heidemeyer in New Braunfels

In case anyone was wondering, many of the early European settlers of this part of Texas were German.  New Braunfels celebrates their heritage with a ten-day "Salute to Sausage" Wurstfest every November.  The flags are displayed at the Friesenhaus Restaurant.

I'm almost done with Texas!

Giant Golf Ball

You should have seen the club they were using!  Somewhere between Blanco and San Antonio.

Dining in Blanco

Hiking in Pedernales Falls State Park worked up an appetite and massive amounts of BBQ the previous day were telling me I should eat more vegetables and less meat for lunch.  Luckily the Redbud Cafe in Blanco wasn't too far away.

The Redbud was allright in my book.  When I walked in one of the cooks in the kitchen started waving oddly at me like she knew me.  I had stopped briefly in Blanco on my way up to the park a few hours earlier but didn't make any acquaintances in the five minutes I was there so I didn't know her.  Then it sunk in that she was giving a thumbs-up to the WFMU t-shirt I was wearing.

The soup, salad and local beer were all good but I needed something else to finish the meal.  In small-town Texas that something else is spelled DQ.  I ordered the smallest cone they had at the Dairy Queen and sat down to see Blanco's ladies of purple and red attire enjoying their lunch.

Pedernales Falls State Park

Here's the falls at Pedernales Falls State Park, a bit more than an hour's drive north of San Antonio in the Hill Country of Texas.  The Pedernales is not much of a river in the middle of a drought.  It makes for an interesting landscape though.

Dusty

The drought in Texas had been going on for several months at the time of my visit.  I've got a few more drought photos coming up soon.  But not too soon.  First I've got to get off the Internet for a week or so.

The Dr. Eugene Clark Library in Lockhart

Sorry this is such a crappy photo.  This is the stage and stained glass window in Lockhart's public library.  You know it is a solidly built stage because President Taft once spoke from there. 

The library's benefactor, Dr. Eugene Clark, had a tumultuous life.  His father was killed in the Civil War when Eugene was three and his mother died soon after.  Clark was raised by a friend of his mother in his native New Orleans.  She did well and Clark graduated from Tulane's medical school and headed west to Lockhart.  In Lockhart Clark entered practice with an older doctor.  The older guy promptly left town leaving Clark as Lockhart's doctor at the age of 21.  After a number of years in Lockhart Clark went to Europe to become an ENT.  Following his studies he opened a practice in San Antonio and became terminally ill.  On his deathbed, in New Orleans, he dictated a will that left $10,000 to Lockhart to build a library.  Wikipedia says this is the oldest operating public library in Texas.

The old library building is a stately little classical building with lots of dark wood and columns.  The library expanded in the not too distant past into the Masonic Lodge building next door.  Unlike in Luling, the Clark library had plenty of fiction books other than the most mass-market of mass-market novels.

I am dangerously extrapolating from a sample of two, but what's the deal with Texas libraries?  To write up the library history I searched for the library's website.  I found this, which, if you click on the "directions" link sends you to the Google Maps page for the Lockhart Road Public Library in Hong Kong.  The page lets you search the collection and, well, that's all you can do.  Compare that with the Mexico, NY Public Library site, which, despite having a tenth of the population of Lockhart, has a ton of services listed and has an extensive and active presence on Facebook.  Both libraries have a number of Hemingway publications but only Lockhart has a video of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingways.