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Way Off Topic: A Day in the Analog World

Well, I almost went on a road trip to Death Valley and the Grand Canyon this week, then I realized it was both my Mom's birthday and Easter this week, so bailing for another state wasn't going to fly. My ex-girlfriend, now just friend Rhonda Schneider wanted me to go. Rhonda is great - in our relationship, I was very much Marlin to her Dory. I felt she couldn't be solid enough to hang on, and I definitely was gripping the world too tight to let go. We definitely didn't find our Nemo, but we're great as friends now.

-phone rings at 5:30am, I'm thinking it's Rhonda calling to wake me up, I think dark deadly thoughts at the phone. It falls into silence.

-phone rings at 7:30, it IS Rhonda this time. She's sooooo cheerful and chirpy in the mornings. I am...much less so. I say I'll get up soon. I go back to sleep.

She calls back at 8:30am, and I say I'll get in the shower. She calls back at 9 something and I pick up the phone, say "Stop pestering me!" and hang up.

While I'm in the shower, she leaves a message saying she was trying to give me directions out to her country place. Woops.

I call back and am apologetic now that I'm awake.

So I start driving out there (towards Llano). I've driven west on 290 a million times, so it's a familiar drive. Unfortuantely, I'm supposed to be driving on highway 71, not 290, and I don't realize this until Dripping Springs.

shit Shit SHIT.

So I buy a map and figure out the quickest way and call Rhonda and leave a message to tell her I've fubared my navigational skills for the day.

I finally get to LLano and call her and she drives her ranch truck down to the end of the road to meet me, since I clearly can't be trusted with any instructions more complicated than "exit your driveway."

On the drive down the dirt road to Happy Hilltop (she has no street address out in the boonies, so when she went to get a new driver's license, they asked her where she lives she said Happy Hilltop [there is, of course, no such road]. So that's what it says on her driver's license. Really.)

So on the drive down to Happy Hiltop off of the highway, she slows down, rolls down her window, and starts calling for her pet/friend: "Donkey!" [Honks horn repeatedly].."Donkey!". Unfortunately today he's a no-show. I've seen pictures of him before, and even a little video that Rhonda included in her submission video trying to get on a reality show called "Texas Ranch House." A friend sent her a weblink to the submission page, and she thought it was one of those shows where they come fix up your house (this when she still described her place as "not so much a house, more like a structure out in the country." Anyway, on her submission video (that I showed her how to drive iMovie to edit - see? This is post related! ...so on her submission video, there's footage of Donkey trotting eagerly over to her car at the gate, sticking his head in the window (he likes candy, she loves candy, so they have something in common). Donkey sticks his head in the window, she gives him a peppermint, she gets out and he lets him pet on her while he chews his peppermint. Rhonda's friend shooting the video is next - as Rhonda pulls her car through the gate, Donkey trots back to Kim's car and sticks his head in her car window, looking for Tweats. Alas, none to be found.

So anyway, that's Donkey. He's her friend. He gets credit as Don Key on her submission video.

We finally get out to her house (it's moved up the scale from "structure" to "place where I can sleep if I have to, and it's now just after noon. I change into cycling clothes and we ride mountain bikes towards town. It's a gorgeous day, about 70 degrees, a few clouds lazily drifting past. It's about 7 miles to town, we have a nice tailwind and it only takes about half an hour. We're in the outback of the Texas Hill Country, so there's lots of green, the wildflowers are starting to come out, and we slow down to say "MooooOOOOOOooooo!" at the cows.

Because that's what one does in such circumstances.

It's around this time that it dawns on me that Rhonda is Dory from Finding Nemo. It takes a little longer for me to realize I am sooooooo Marlin (fearful of new things, etc.). We pass a very young bull that starts to trot after us. She thinks it's cute and that he wants to follow us, I think he's being territorial and am wary of turning around to go check him out. How exactly metaphorical is that?

: )

We arrive at the Castell General Store. Castell is a thriving Texas metropolis, population 13. Yes, thirteen. If Randy moves, it's 12.

I've been out the the General Store once before, last year, and there were some folks cooking barbecue that day, so we'd had some great pork loin sandwiches. Unfortunately, we were too late today for that. So we got some Moon Pies and a cinnamon bun (the kind you only find in rural stores off the highway, all prepackaged in plastic with a shelf life like plutonium). MMMMMMmmmmm, good.

We shoot the breeze with Randy, the proprietor for a bit. Rhonda knows him well, she's up here all the time. She jokes about what the townfolk must think of her, bringing all these men by. There's me (ex boyfriend, you know the rest), her current French boyfriend Arnaud whom she met New Year's Eve during a disastrous date with Drew (asshole - Drew not Arnaud, she's in LoooooOOOOOoooove with Arnaud, I approve), Ken (an inline skater from San Jose she met at the Paris airport), Jeremy (23 year old triathlete and virgin by choice (!!), a good Catholic boy).

We chat with Randy a bit - he used to work bidness in Houston, but got sick of it and moved out to Castell. He runs the 100 year old general store most of the time when he doesn't go fishin' in the Llano River which is about 100 yards out back. It's still open when he's not there, you just leave your money on the counter. Plus, there's Cock-A-Roo to keep an eye on things. He's a rooster. No shit. He wandered in while Randy & Rhonda were sitting at the table catching up amidst all of Randy's newspapers. He's very worldly - he had newspapers from Austin, Houston, Mason, and Llano. Cock-A-Roo pecked a bit at Rhonda's feet when she darted playfully at him. Perhaps not a good game to play in Birkenstocks, but a fun game nonetheless.

The Castell General Store is a meeting place - every day around 4 or 5 some locals drop by after work to have a beer and catch up with their neighbors and friends, and any strangers in town that are happening by. Rhonda showed up one day and was hanging out, talking to everybody, "getting caught up on the gossip" after she had biked up to the store and kayaked home - everybody knew about it. It was also the day she helped Don & Shirley herd cattle with her mountain bike amid all the cactus and prickly scrub - definitely challenging terrain. (All her stories apparently quickly become legend around the Castell General Store.) When she arrived that day, there were four or more horses tied off in front of the store on the hitching post. She was chattin' with these folks, and some of them belonged to the horses. A guy drove up in a truck with a bunch of feed in back, and he's wearing his cowboy hat, and snap up western shirt, his Wranglers with chaps over'em (not the assless urban kind), with his boots and spurs. She finds out later he collects spurs, and his name is Cameron Nelms, aka The Cowboy. They chat, and discover they live about a mile and a half apart on the river, and that he's her closest neighbor, her country next door neighbor. A couple days later Kim is filming the video for the TV show, he comes riding up the river, "all cowboyed up" and drops by to visit. He's all proper and such - everything is all "yes ma'am" and "no ma'am" and the harshest word he's ever exhibited in his vocabulary is "Dagnabbit!" He hobbles his horse in the front yard (with hobbles he braided himself - he's full-on Real Cowboy). When Rhonda asked him what he does, he says he's a cowboy - he's a roper. And yes, you can make a living doing this, if you're really good.

(Rhonda's kinda smitten with him, in an "Aww, shucks ma'am" kind of way.)

(Rhonda then corrects me, saying she's not smitten, she's enamored. "Because what's his name - Arnaud - is my boyfriend." I cut her some slack because we just split a bottle of Liberty Hill Cabernet at Hilltop Cafe - more on that later).

Randy shows me his videotape of him on the news, with Cock-A-Roo's infamous dislike of fish. He has a Billy Bass singing rubber fish, when he starts it up on the floor, Cock-A-Roo jumps on it and starts pecking it. (Later, we saw Cock-A-Roo performing some rated R activity on the Billy Bass, truly a fitting fate for the wretched rubber thing.)

As we were sitting inside just talking and watching Cock-A-Roo, the chicken (still getting over that), a woman comes in to get some stuff. Randy says she just rode in 7 miles to get an ice cream sandwich and three pounds of bacon. I'm assuming she rode in on her bike, but we go outside, and I get a big surprise....

...she rode in on her horse and buggy. Or more accurately, her horses and buggy. She has a buggy with two dogs in it that's made of modern materials, metal pipe and modern wheels with rubber tires. But the real shocker was the horses...or more accurately, THE HORSES. They are Belgians, which are essentially just like Clydesdales without the metal rocker band hair around their ankles. These horses are HUGE, their eyeline is above mine (I'm 6-3, 6-4 on a good day in boots on a date). Their heads seem like they are three and a half feet long or more. But they are gentle and sweet - they let us, total strangers, walk up and pet their faces and stroke their noses. I felt like I was subject to some CAD program's scale function, since these horses were just enormous, off the scale of what I'm used to seeing. Rhonda still had peppermints in her pockets that she had intended for Donkey that she hadn't been able to find. She fished out one and held her hand flat to feed one of the Belgians, but the horse's lips are so big it seemed like feeding a whale a Certs. The male horse took it, toyed with it in it's mouth for a bit, than casually, no big deal, just dropped it on the road.

Belgians don't like peppermints, apparently.

(Donkeys and cows do, for the record. Don't tell Rhonda's neighbors. She's spoiling their cows.)

She tried with the female horse, and it too sampled then politely, quietly, without making a fuss, dropped it on the road. I love that. Adults can't just push food they don't like out of their mouths, the last time I saw that stunt was my nephew when he was a weejun trying squash for the first time. No muss, no fuss, no change in facial expression, he was chewing and then he was pushing it out of his mouth to fall in his lap. Tweren't nothin' but a thang.

The owner was a sweet older woman named Anne McCullough who appeared to be about 60 ("unless she worked on a ranch all her life, then she's about 35." according to Rhonda). She was nice as could be, although after petting one dog, the other snarled at Rhonda. Silly dog! Rhonda is the sweetest woman in the world, and loves all critters. That was about when the phone rang for Randy, and shortly thereafter it was time to go.

We rent kayaks from Randy (this was the plan), and he's about to drive us and the kayaks down to the river when he gets a phone call. Mary ??, a local woman with Parkinson's Disease, apparently is having an issue. He tells us he''ll drop us off on the way. As we're pulling out, a pickup pulls into the store. He loops back with us sitting in the bed of the pickup with the kayaks, and yells to the old timer in the other truck "Mary's locked up, I gotta go help her. You're in charge. Take all the money." And with that, we're off.

We drop in Castell Slab and it's still just a gorgeous day. Perfect temperature, no clouds, abundant grass and greenery on the sides. The river is a little higher than usual, so our sit on top kayaks are perfect - we rarely scrape bottom with our few inches of draft (vessel below the waterline). We saw cattle and horses on the shore, we saw several blue herons, a sand piper looking bird, and turtles either sunning or poking their heads above the waterline. Oh, and vultures circling above, hoping we got REALLY stuck on a sandbar. I flipped them off to show my resolve when I got stuck. I Shall Survive (insert theme song).

Castell is fairly unique in that instead of the usual limestone (highly water porous), there's literally tons and tons of granite everywhere, these huge 100 ton boulders flopped lazily in the river, smoothed by patient aeons of water flow and time.

We got a little bit of rapids action, which was fun to zoom through. The kayaks were easy and a blast to deal with - I haven't been in a canoe in years, and I don't think I've ever kayaked, but it was easily mastered. Well, maybe not mastered, but easily "dealt with" enough to get buy. I accused Rhonda of giving me the kayak that likes rocks, but perhaps my 60 pounds and less than deft skills played a part in that.

We cruise down the river, paddling or not, flowing with the current, getting stuck on the occasional rock (me almost always). To remove yourself from a rock, practice your pelvic thrusts repeatedly to dislodge yourself from the rock three inches at a time.

Rhonda grew up out here, on some family land that has since been sold. She bought some of it back from her uncles so that she could renovate "the structure" to live there or use it as a second house. She has a strong connection to this family land, and it's been a major goal of hers to reclaim and renovate it. She has family history and personal history out here. As we float down the river, she points out various features by name, and things that happened there. Honig Rock was where she used to buiild forts, sit out and sun, and jump into the river when she was a kid.

She points out a particular spot on the river where she lost her virginity to her first boyfriend, Tommy. I asked if it was a special night or something "Nope, it was the middle of the day, we'd been riding out on our three wheelers. What can I say, I'm a daytime girl? We were trying to wait till my 16th birthday, but we were madly in love and horny as hell."

Further down the river, we come to her property and we beach the kayaks and hike up to her house. We make sammiches with bread she liberates from her mom's house (100 feet away). We sit out back in a couple of chairs and watch the river flow by for 20 minutes, then walk back down to the river. Rhonda's laid out a couple of giant smiley faces in rocks on the sandbar, and used her feet to scuffle out a 30 foot diameter smily face with spiraling eyes a few weeks ago. It's still quite recognizable.

We paddle down a further stretch, and arrive at Schneider Slab, which is where we stashed the ranch pickup earlier. Schneider Slab is named from her family, her family built it, they were one of the very first families to settle in these parts. Her great-great-great grandfather was one of the first two settlers in the county - that and the Castells. "That's why I never dated local. Miles (another ex, a four year relation) was from out of town, and he's still my distant cousin...he's also Randy's (from the store) cousin."

We pull the kayaks and get'em into the truck, and drive back to Castell's store. We lug our kayaks back to where they are stashed - in a horse trailer - and get them put up. We go in and chat with Randy, we forgot to pack money after getting back in the kayaks, so he says no problem, and we put a couple of ice cream snacks on the tab while we're at it.

Nothing tastes as good as a good cold ice cream sandwich after working out for a few hours. Mmmmmm.......yum.

We run logistics to fetch bikes, return truck, get back to the ranch (as I call it). I wash up quickly and head out, because I'm supposed to have dinner with my family for my mom's birthday. We were supposed to have it yesterday, but dinner was called on account of a six year old running into a door with his head.

I get changed up into my "Mom caliber duds" and start driving home. As soon as I got into cell phone range, I got a call from my Dad, who told me that dinner was called off once again, this time because "Mason's eyes are funny" after his head trauma from the night before. I don't worry too much, his mom, my sister, used to be team lead on a spinal injury rehab unit, so she's double dosed with Mom Paranoia. She'll be on top of the situation, I can trust there's nothing practical I could do. If he's in the hospital, I'll see him tomorow if there's really a problem, which I doubt.

So I call Rhonda to let her know, and I head back to her place. We decided to go to Fredericksburg, nearly 40 miles away, but on the way are passing Hilltop Cafe and decide to eat there.

Hilltop Cafe is great - it was started by Johnny Nicholas and his wife. Johnny used to be a member of Asleep at the Wheel, a famous (well, locally) Texas band. He and his Cajun wife started this restaurant out in the middle of nowhere in an old gas station slash bar on a remote highway. He's greek and she's cajun, so that's the food, and it's AMAZING, especially in context - 15 or more miles from the nearest town of any size whatsoever. We had blue crab cakes and split a bottle of Liberty Hill Cabernet Sauvignon (my favorite affordable red), she had shrimp mytillini, I had a steak.

After dessert, Johnny came out and played a song on the piano. Awesome.

Side note: Rhonda's Uncle Fritz and Grandpa Reuben used to stop at the Hilltop for a beer and gas back in the day.

Ahhh. A great day.

I'm going to crash at her house and then go back to Austin tomorrow.

It's good to have a day off in the real world, and leave all this pixel shit behind.

-not mike today, just mikey

More pictures of Happy Hilltop here and here.

To see what it looks like when Rhonda wakes me up to see the sunrise REALLLLLLLLLLY early, see here.