I left for my first 2016 visit to Texas on March 3. It was a big wheel, little wheel trip: a few days in Austin and the Hill Country, a week in San Antonio. When I left Illinois, there were patches of snow on the ground; in South Texas in early March, the grass is green and a few trees and leafing, and there are a handful of flowers and other buds. Heavy rain is always a distinct likelihood in early spring down there, and sure enough we had a couple of thunderstorms.

I visited my mother, both brothers and a nephew and his girlfriend. I spent time with a few old friends — in one case, someone I’ve known since 1973, Tom, a longtime resident of Austin. Our friendship might make the 50-year mark with both of us still alive. I think the actuaries would be with us on that, but who knows?

Out in the Hill Country, which is hardly remote and the opposite of sparsely populated in our time, I wandered around a main street designed to please day trippers, took in one of the most detailed war museums I’ve ever seen, visited the boyhood home of a certain president from Texas, pondered a cemetery full of Germans, saw an elegant Gothic church, happened upon a hilltop vista, and ate beans and jalapeño-cheese cornbread at a storefront restaurant.

In Austin, I saw a city that isn’t what it used to be. The thing about Austin, though, is that it’s always been a city that isn’t what it used to be. That doesn’t bother me particularly. I mainly go to visit old friends, such as the aforementioned Tom, who aren’t who they used to be — and yet who are in some ways. Such is the paradox of knowing people for decades. I also saw Blue Healer at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q. My nephew’s in the band. They’re really talented.

Each time I visit San Antonio, I try to spend a few hours outside of the familiar grooves laid down decades ago. I was able to this time. When I started to do so consciously, back around 2009, I thought it would be hard to find interesting things outside those grooves. I was wrong. In a city this size, with a history this deep, it isn’t hard at all. Such places includes tumbledown cemeteries and new green spaces and milestones of another era and the Blue Hole and China Grove, Texas, and a big basilica.