Texas started out with a funny story. You’ll probably know where this is heading before long … but we drove on Saturday from Carlsbad NM to Lubbock TX. In doing so we went from Mountain time to Central time and lost an hour. We have been waking up fairly early on this trip, hotels tend to get a little noisy between 6 and 7 as people are leaving and doors are slamming. So it’s not been unusual that we are up before 7:00. Sunday morning I woke up thinking it was the middle of the night. But I looked at my watch and it was 7:20! Pretty late for us. Then Larry went over to put up the window shade and it was pitch dark outside. I said “why is it so dark outside?!” And he says “I don’t know, I was thinking the same thing!” So we were like well, we are on the western part of the Central time zone… oh well it’s dark and it’s weird. I went down to the gym to work out. When I was done I noticed the clock on the wall said 6:58 and I thought hmmm the clock is wrong. Seriously. That is what I thought. I did NOT figure it out! Then I came back to the room and Larry said it’s Daylight Saving time. We felt so ridiculous that this had NOT occurred to us, and me, even with the clock an hour off. We laughed so hard at being so far removed from everything. We had actually just talked about it too. We had lost not just one hour, but two! But on to our Texas adventures.

We first stopped in Lubbock. Buddy Holly was from Lubbock so there is a lot of him around — street signs that have his famous glasses, etc. They also have the Buddy Holly Center. We took a few hours to go through the center and it is just so tragic. We all know the story, but to realize again that he was only 21 years old, and his career was only 18 months old when he died is just so moving and thought provoking. What more would he have accomplished had he lived? How many more hit songs would he have written? There was lots of memorabilia, guitars and records, etc. But I thought one of the most interesting things were his glasses. The actual glasses he was wearing in the plane crash. And they looked perfect. Not broken or bent or anything! We then headed over to the American Windmill Museum and saw so many windmills. It’s amazing to see huge windmills that were constructed in the 1800’s. Big, huge windmills. And we certainly learned a lot about wind power!

Our second town was Waco. After spending a number of single nights in a row in hotels, it was nice to stay here for 2 nights. Turns out Dr. Pepper was invented here, and there is a big museum about it! It was interesting to learn that carbonated water was considered good for you, and pharmacists would then add flavors and syrups to the water to encourage people to drink it. That is why there are soda fountains in drug stores. Carbonated water, and then flavored sodas go way back to the mid 1800’s! The challenge came in selling it in containers that would maintain the fizzy property of carbonated water. We also went to Baylor University to take a look around. It was nice to have an afternoon with not much to do except hang out a bit. We have been really packing in our days with activities and driving, so it felt good to take care of some things from home and relax.