One way to deal with January, the grimmest month here in the frozen North (today’s high, 2° F.): adjust your latitude southward. Not everyone has that option, or really even that many people do. Humans get around, but we aren’t a migratory species. Anyway, I managed to travel recently from around 40° North to around 30° North and stay there for 10 days.
I flew from Chicago to Austin on January 9: from clear and chilly to overcast and not quite chilly enough for any precipitation to freeze. The flight path took us up and over an enormous winter storm passing south of Chicago at that time, whose southern edge expressed itself as cold rain in Austin. The storm made for spots of unnerving turbulence and some flight cancellations that day at places in between, such as Dallas, and a long descent into Austin Bergstrom through a gray soup. Hurray for radar.
On my return flight on January 19 out of Dallas — where I’d driven by then — I saw remnants of the earlier storm on the ground below. Somewhere over Missouri or southern Illinois that day, the ground still appeared white miles below, as far as I could see from my 737-800 perch.
Back in Chicago, there is very little snow on the ground. Dry January, indeed.
This was a family and friends trip, visiting more old friends than expected in Austin and San Antonio, including some I knew well in elementary school, meeting them in person for the first time in 40+ years, though I was on a zoom with one of them a few years ago. I’ve been making an effort to visit old friends for a few years now, because of mortality. Mine and theirs. People get a little weird if you say that part out loud, but I believe everyone feels the quiet ticking of the clock.
Also an Austin-San Antonio-Dallas trip, with a day in Corpus Christi thrown in for fun. Some places are like old friends you haven’t seen in decades, and so it was with Corpus, as Texans often call it. Not exactly a favorite destination from the old days, but I do have memories of high school speech tournaments at CC Ray and CC King (two Corpus high schools) maybe as recently as early 1979. I’m fairly sure Corpus was the first city except for San Antonio that I drove a car in, though that might have been Austin.
My brothers and I had lunch in the North Beach neighborhood of Corpus.
Seafood. The thing to eat on the Coast.
It was mostly an urban trip, but one fine day (nearly 60° F), old friends Tom and Nancy and I went to the suburban outskirts of Austin for lunch at the Round Rock location of the Salt Lick.
That too was visiting an old friend, in a way, though my fond memories are of the original Salt Lick in 1993, further out from metro Austin, in Driftwood, Texas, which is about as Hill Country as you can get. Still, the branch in Round Rock, with its long dining room and long tables and stone construction, seemed true to my memories of the original location. More importantly, the barbecue was just as good.
Afterward, we took a walk in the historic district of Round Rock – our Round Rock Ramble – near the intersection of Main and Mays, among the finely restored late 19th- and early 20th-century stone edifices with names like the Old Broom Factory, the Otto Reinke Building and the J.A. Nelson Co. Building. Businesses of the 21st century seem to be doing well in these old two- and three-story stone commercial buildings, including the likes of Fahrenheit Design, Organica Aesthetics (a plastic surgery spa), Gharma Zone Korean Food and the Brass Tap.
Nearby stands an impressive old water tower in a small park (Koughan Memorial Water Tower Park, according to Google Maps and Wiki).
The tower is yet another legacy of the WPA. Even better –
– you can stand right under it, something that isn’t always possible when it comes to public water infrastructure.