The Best Laid Plans . . .

When our Melrose friends Jeanne and Chip told us they had tickets to visit the LBJ Library here in Austin, we thought, “What a great idea! Let’s take it a step further and go to the GHW Bush (41) library in College Park. It’s on the way from Lafayette to Austin and, hey, Fair, Balanced and Unafraid, that’s us. Let’s cover both sides of the political spectrum.”

We get an A for strategy but an F for execution. But it all turned out just fine, as you’ll see.

The execution problem stemmed from a series of tactical blunders.

We (OK, I) picked a hotel that turned out to be 5 miles west of the supercharger site in Lafayette. That meant we had to backtrack to do the morning’s charge. Plus, we didn’t wake up until almost 8 AM, an hour later than planned. The coup de gras was what Judy calls advancing senility and I prefer to call highly-developed absent mindedness. Whatever, we arrived at the supercharger and walked to the nearby MacDonald’s for breakfast  . . . without first plugging in the car. Another 20 minutes down the drain. So, about an hour from our next charging point it dawned on me that we wouldn’t reach the 41 Library until after the last (3:30 PM) ticket time. We scrambled for Plan B which, in the end, worked out just fine.

Upon crossing into Texas, we stopped at the Texas Welcome Center for a map and suggestions of what to see in Houston.  The friendly fellow there suggested the San Jacino Monument, commemorating the Texas War of Independence from Mexico/Spain. We opted to bypass it in favor of downtown Houston and it’s good we did. The monument is located on the Houston Ship Canal amid innumerable petroleum and chemical processing plants.

He also recommended the Hermann Park and the Museum District, which we did visit. I’m sure there are some fine sections of Houston worthy of a tourist’s visit but, frankly, this wasn’t one of them. We didn’t have time to do a museum, which are supposed to be really fine. Instead we wandered around the streets and parks, admiring Houston’s skyscraper architecture, built with energy company money, that is quite impressive and worth a view.

We walked through Sam Houston Park which, despite its name, has as far as we could see absolutely nothing to do with Sam Houston. It’s a collection of late 18^th and 19^th century homes moved here and put on display. All the signage commemorates the people who put up the money to move and restore the buildings.

Sam Houston, for those of us who slept through that chapter in sophomore high school history, was a general in the Texas War of Independence, served as the first and third President of the Republic of Texas, was one of the first two senators from the State of Texas, was the sixth governor of Tennessee and the seventh governor of Texas. The guy couldn’t hold down a job to save his life.

But the visit to Houston was OK. Back in the early 1990s my business partner, Barrs Lewis, and I spent quite a bit of time in Houston doing work for our consulting client, Exxon. One thing led to another and that work was the cornerstone of Harmonic Systems, the business we grew and eventually sold to JC Penney, also located in Houston. JC Penny was in fact one of our first consulting clients. So I have a lot of memories centered on Houston.

I was able to reminisce and show Judy a little of what I remember about Houston, which wasn’t much. Not only is my memory of 30 years not quite razor sharp but even back then I spent virtually no time sightseeing: cab ride to the hotel, meetings and cab ride to the airport. But I found the Hyatt hotel and showed her Houston’s subterranean network, analogous to Minneapolis’s Skyway system. The underground stores were mostly closed so I missed the afternoon ice cream I/we had been looking forward to.

Then it was on the road headed for Austin, another almost three hours of driving. But our sightseeing wasn’t over yet. Judy discovered that the town of Hempstead, TX was just off US 290, our highway to Austin. We had to stop. We found the city hall and took pictures. We chatted with a clerk in the town office, introducing Judy Hempstead Rick. She was mildly amused but didn’t call out the mayor to present Judy with the keys to the city or anything.

The real score, however, came from our inquiry about ice cream in Hempstead. “Well, there’s Dairy Queen out by the highway, the clerk suggested.” Then another clerk yelled, “No, go to the Neveria (ice cream parlor) in the strip mall across the tracks.” What a great place! Row after row of ice cream flavors we’d never heard of before. A clean and bright place and a nice young gal who handed out samples and scooped our choices.

Moral of the story: planning is great but sometimes the best experiences come from wandering around to see what you might find.

So now we’re in Austin, arriving at our hotel about 9:00 PM after putting the feed bag on Elon’s horses and hitting the nearby Panera.

Notice I didn’t mention bodily functions once this time? All the stops went just fine, excepting the mental kerfuffle this morning.

Tomorrow we’re off the forementioned LBJ Library with Jeanne and Chip and then some good old fashioned Texas barbeque.