Kerrville, Texas Road Trip

Written by Larry Kubin on March 2nd, 2008 | Published in Trips

Every once in a while, Ashley and I take a short road trip to a random small town in Texas. This weekend it was Kerrville, home of the Kerrville Folk Festival. Was the festival going on this weekend? Nope. Is there anything particularly special about Kerrville? Not really, it’s just fun to hang out in another town sometimes. It’s also really cheap to hang out in another town if that town is not San Francisco or New York. As a bonus, we got to test out the Garmin GPS unit we just got. No more printing those vague Google Maps directions (no offense Google, we love you). We can just get in the car and go.

Daddy, what was it like?

Well let me tell you. We got to Kerrville and walked around the town a bit. We went into some random bookstore which had a really unique collection of books. I’m always surprised places like that actually still exist since it’s hard to see how a small bookstore can be profitable anymore with companies like Amazon around. I looked through some of the field guides on dragonflies since it reminded me of the work I do with John Abbott.

Fun fact: I work on a site called OdonataCentral, a web application dedicated to expanding our knowledge of dragonfly and damselfly species. The site is very cool because it allows citizen scientists to submit photos and latitude/longitude coordinates of species they find in the field so that their distributions can be plotted using the Google Maps API. John Abbott is a biology professor at UT and the curator of entomology at the Texas Memorial Museum. Every month or so I meet him out at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory by Lake Austin. It’s really fun.

Meanwhile, back in Kerrville — After bumming around downtown, we went to Shreiner Park and hung out by the Guadalupe River. It was very peaceful. A kid was fishing with his dad. Ashley was fascinated by a dead goose floating in the water. You could see it’s trachea hanging out. Gross, I know. But she’s a speech therapist, so she is very interested in such things. Weird, I know.

Check out my new haircut. See how it’s shaped like a “V”. The barber did that on her own, I promise. I “went with it”. Notice also how I look like the little cartoon guy on my T-shirt.

Weren’t you hungry?

What trip is complete without some local cuisine? We went to some place called Pampelle’s and had some salads and sandwiches. You know, stuff white people like. Then we hung out at Hastings and read some books and magazines. I bought Ashley a copy of the Omnivore’s Dilemma since Lee from Jason’s Deli mentioned it in a meeting the other night. Since then she’s been talking my ear off about corn. Ha!

Seriously though. Apparently I can’t eat anything anymore because it’s all made of crap. And those Chicken McNuggets we all loved when we were 5 years old are carcinogenic, which explains a lot.

larry kubin