Cross-Country Road Trip! Day 13-14, Mile 3109: Musing in Museums.

The final days of our second week on the road were defined by museums., two of which we had planned to see earlier, only to be foiled by their odd hours.

The Panhandle - Plains Historical Museum is located on the campus of Texas A&M's West Texas branch in Canyon, Texas. Established in 1932, it has an appropriately institutional facade.

It opened at 9 am Tuesday morning, and we were waiting eagerly for the doors to open. After all, we had many hours of driving and two more museums to visit. 

We had come mainly to see the exhibit on Native American life on the plains. We were surprised that there really wasn't much Native Americana, and also at how well the exhibits they did have were done.

The paleontological section featured a beautifully preserved skull of one of O's ancestors. 

The slingshot deer is a close relation.

When a goat has serious horn envy.

Most of the museum is dedicated to the life of nineteenth-century Americans of the European persuasion, including a recreation of a small town with homes, hotel, livery stable, church, land office, and general store. 

There was also, of course, a big section dedicated to the evolution of the petroleum industry.

I loved this 1910 automobile.

And this 1928 Cadillac V-16. It is gorgeous, but at 8 miles per gallon, we're glad to be driving our hybrid on this trip.

Apparently, even the buffalo here are into Jesus.

Next stop was the Bob Will Museum in Turkey, Texas, an hour and a half away on dusty backroads.

Turkey is a typical small Texas panhandle town. The Bob Wills Museum is its only attraction. Now, Bob Wills wasn't born here, but he did live for a while as a child. 

Whatever. Turkey has embraced his legacy. Every year in April, they celebrate Bob Wills Day. We just missed it by two weeks.

One of Bob's touring buses.

Everything revolves around Bob because there isn't much else going on here.

The main street is mostly boarded-up.

Hotel Turkey has seen better days.

In spite of the ubiquity of Bobmania, the museum was hard to find. We had spent a bit more time in the Panhandle-Plains Museum the we'd planned, and we were disappointed to see that the museum was closed from 11:30 to 1:00. We were due to arrive at 11:20 and really didn't want to cool our heels for an hour and a half. We had miles to go, and wanted to get on with it.

Finally, we stopped at a small brick building with a poster of Bob outside. I went in to ask directions. It turned out to be City Hall. There was one woman working in the otherwise empty building.

The Bob Wills Museum. Oh, it's just down the hall.

It was. And it was closed. Oh, don't worry, just go on in, she said.

And so we did.

It was a small place, two rooms with a timeline of Bob's career. 

Some cool posters. I would have loved to see this concert.

I knew that the most successful part of Bob's career had been spent not in Texas, but in California. But I had no idea that he and the Playboys appeared in several popular movies.

We stopped for lunch at the Bison Cafe in Quitaque. It took over an hour for our food to come (they said it was slow food). It was quite tasty, but we lost as much time as we would have if we'd waited for the museum to open at 1:00.

As we rolled through another maze of backroads toward Lubbock and the Buddy Holly Center, Siri serenaded us with the hot swing of the Texas Playboys, recorded live in Santa Monica at the height of their popularity.

The Buddy Holly Center was as professionally put together as the Bob Wills Museum was not. Buddy's 18-month career was well documented with photos, film, and memorabilia. It's remarkable what an impact he made in such a short time. And sad to think what might have been.

The Center doesn't allow photos, so I have none to share. You'll just have to go there on your own.

After leaving Lubbock, we drove southeast through high winds a blowing dust to San Angelo.

The next morning, the winds were still high, but the dust abated as we left the flat expanse of the panhandle behind us and climbed into the Texas hill country.

Well, they call it hill country. To those of us from the mountainous west it's more like a few minor corrugations on the vast flat plains of Texas. But unlike unbroken sameness of the panhandle, there were at least trees.

Our first destination was the small town of Fredricksburg. It is a charming tourist town, reminiscent of the Gold Rush towns in the Sierras foothills of California.

The area was settled by German immigrants starting in the early 1800s, and much of the town's identity still revolves around that heritage. So we figured we could get some good German food, a cuisine I crave maybe once a year.

But for some inscrutable Teutonic reason, most of the German restaurants we found on the web were closed on Wednesday.

Finally, we found Der Lindenbaum.

They had German beer. They had German sausages. And it was all delicious.

Our reason for coming to Fredericksburg was to visit the National Museum of the Pacific War, situated fittingly enough in Chester Nimitz's hometown.

The museum is huge, with a great collection of artifacts and a deeply informative room-by-room timeline of the origins and progress of the war.

The museum recommends spending at least two hours to see the exhibits. We took three.

This is the only surviving Japanese midget sub from the attack on Pearl Harbor. The other four were sunk.

Barely enough room for the two-man crew and a warload of torpedos.

The exhibit covering the Doolittle raid on Tokyo features an actual B-25 bomber.

Both Japanese and American weapons are displayed.

Including this replica of the Fat Man plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

We finally emerged, staggering with museum fatigue, about 3:30. We still had an hour and a half drive to Austin ahead of us.

Mr. Google soon informed us the that drive was actually going to take a little over two hours.

Austin traffic was horrible, which was a shock after the mostly empty backroads we had so far encountered in Texas.

Welcome back to civilization.

Of course, the upside of returning to civilization is a veritable cornucopia of excellent restaurants.

We selected Foreign & Domestic, a small neighborhood place that bills itself as "Austin's first nose-to-tail, farm-to-table restaurant.

The prix fixe menu was tempting, but I already have all the goat heart I desire.

Instead, we had root vegetable bolognese, charred cauliflower with lemon, crispy duck-fat fingerlings with  pecorino. 

And a juicy bacon cheeseburger. All very delicious.

For dessert we had a slice of very Southern buttermilk pie with strawberry preserves and...barley ice cream? yes, barley ice cream. Weird, but tasty. It disappeared too fast for me to get a picture. And I'm not ashamed to say I washed my half down with a glass of late-harvest Gewurztraminer.

Ah, civilization.

P.