We travelled this route counter- clockwise, staying overnight in north San Antonio.		The Texas Hill Country was our chance to tour Texas off the interstate highways and see some terrain and small towns at a more-leisurely place, top down in the sun. I would have taken a lot more pictures but the area looks pretty much what I'm used to at home: rolling hills punctuated here and there by river-carved channels. It's supposed to be the heart of the Texas wine industry which predates that of California or Virginia, but we didn't see many vineyards, and the few we saw were pretty small. One thing that did differentiate the landscape from the foothills at home is the exposure of the area's limestone subsurface under a thin layer of soil.
Another feature of the area, unlike home, is massive flash flooding. Half the world's record rainfalls have occurred in this region, as warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with colder air from the north, resulting in mind-boggling rain statistics like 29 inches (73.7 cm) in 2 hours, or 32 inches (81.3 cm) in 24 hours. Early European settlers that found tall grasses encouraging for farming found out within two generations of farming that the thin topsoils overlaying a limestone base were quickly depleted and agriculture-based life was very hard.

Lampasas courthouse main street Lampasas

Just west of Johnson City we stopped at Lyndon B. Johnson State Park and Historic Site . There's a large interpretive center about Johnson's life, recreational facilities, and a living history farmstead presenting rural Texas life as it was around 1918.

Luckenbach, Texas was immortalized by country musician Waylon Jennings in a song called Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love) . My good friend PM is a country music and Jennings fan, so we had to stop to check the place out, just southeast of Fredericksburg . I was thinking we'd find a little old town like many that we had passed through but in fact Luckenbach is now an outdoor party place favoured by motorcyclists and just plain folks wanting to drink beer, eat, and listen to music in the collected remains of the original hamlet. So we joined them for beers and brats on a warm afternoon.
entrance				old Post Office		beers!
				outdoor stage				<-- One of several crowing roosters guarding the premises.		music hall
from TFS		noshing		still noshing		driving off after				cheers from Austin

Afterwards we just toured the countryside, making our way to San Antonio for the night after being foiled at finding either an open restaurant (at 8:00 on a Saturday night!) or lodging in Boerne (pronounced bernee). Even in San Antonio we were hard-pressed to find a restaurant other than one of the large chains or fast-food places open past 10:00, one of the most-annoying features of Texas. Despite its size and population, Texas is very un-cosmopolitan this way.

Our hotel was flanked by two massive big-box churches and the following morning we were surrounded by church-goers for what seemed to be youth-oriented services. While having coffee outside the hotel we were serenaded by the boom-boom music emanating from the nearest church - apparently the services were not the staid quiet ones either of us were familiar with in our religious youth.