Highway to Waco

Driving up Interstate 35 from Austin to Waco was an experience! Mostly some really great road - spoiled by about 20 miles of bone-shaking roadworks where the passenger side of the coach is about a foot from a concrete wall and the driver's side mirror feels like only a foot away from the mirrors on an endless stream of 18 wheelers passing by at 60 plus mph! I think I aged 10 years by the time I got to Waco.

By contrast, we got parked up in a quiet campground alongside Waco Lake and I managed to settle my nerves with a stiff gin and tonic!

Yesterday we hopped on the scooter and explored downtown Waco. Home to Baylor University, the town was very quiet as the students are a few more days away from starting back after the term break. Waco is not really a tourist spot. We suspected as much when we looked up the top three attractions and saw that two of them included a mammoth site and the Dr. Pepper museum!

The other was the Spice Market - which sold just about everything other than spices.

Brenda browsing the racks in the Spice Market

Short on tourist attractions it is - but I will forgive any town that is home to a Cabelas outdoor sporting goods store. This needs some serious investigation.

I have never been to Waco before and like a lot of older folks I remember that dreadful siege back in the early nineties  - an armed standoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh that lasted over 50 days. It was fatally resolved when the FBI launched a tear gas assault which ended with a disastrous fire in which over 70 of Koresh's followers (including Koresh himself) lost their lives.

Despite its troubled past, Waco looks and feels much like any other mid-sized Texan town. Here are a couple of pics taken on our travels yesterday....

Impressive bronze statues line the river bank

The campus at Baylor University gives much needed green relief to the city

View across the old suspension bridge linking downtown to the northern suburbs (long replaced by modern bridges)

Turtles cruising the cooler waters around a bridge rampart. The big one looked to be about 2-3 foot long!

So we dined in yesterday (after dining out a bit in Austin). Before we left Austin we found a "Trader Joe's" grocery store - very common on the west coast - but a rarity in this part of the US. After cruising the wine shelves, I had to buy a bottle of "two buck Chuck" - a famous (infamous?) brew that our Uncle Chuck in Corvallis Oregon first mentioned to us. Not that it is him that the wine is named after, instead it is the "Charles" responsible for the blend and the very modest price of $1.99.....

A bottle of "two buck Chuck"

When we buy wine made in the USA it's always a bit of a lottery as we are not overly familiar with the wine market here. While at Trader Joe's I did also buy a nice Italian Chianti that was familiar to me and a NZ Sauvignon Blanc - always a winner! (They don't know how to make a good SB here in the States - or if they do - I have never found one despite my best efforts to do so)!

But back to "Chuck" - I wouldn't match it with a good New York sirloin steak, but this extremely cheap Cab Sav actually went down quite well with the bangers & mash we had with it!