5/28 Johnson City, TX to Lake Charles, LA

We slept in a bit this morning, and the first order of business when we did get going was to find and view Pedernales Falls at a state park just a few miles out of town. The entrance to the park was 9 or 10 miles down a small county road, and once we checked in at the gate, the falls overlook was another 3 miles or so from there. We walked about 350 yards down a trail sheltered by overlapping oak trees – or at least I think they were oak trees. The Pedernales River, as with most of the rivers around here, is subject to flash flooding. We couldn’t miss the signs, because there were so many, that instructed us to just get out of there if the river either turned muddy or started to rise, as it could flood in a manner of minutes. The county road we took out to the park had several dips in it, and at the bottom of each dip was a flood gauge with foot markings going up to 5 or 6 feet above the road.

The waters were calm on this day, and the falls were mostly a collection of pools among some large rock faces, with a small stream overflowing to the pools below. It looked like an ideal place to take a dip, but swimming at the falls has been prohibited since 1971, probably due to some unnamed tragedy. We could tell from the landscape that a real torrent could and surely has poured through there many times in the past.

According to the map, the road to the park was a dead end, and we would have to backtrack to Johnson City to get back on a highway going anywhere. As we came out of the park, the TomTom spoke up and said to turn left. We could see a small unnamed road, paved, but too narrow to even have a center stripe. It wasn’t on the AAA state map at all. We decided to see where it would lead us, and it turned out to be a real back road treasure. We were going in the right direction, and winding through fields, oak trees, pastures and ranches. Most of the ranches would have an elaborate gate or entry way with the name of the ranch on it. We followed the road for about 20 miles, and it eventually widened into a full two lane road. It also had flood gauges in all the dips, and a few of the dips were concrete and had some sand washed on them from previous flooding. We eventually emerged onto US 290, our intended route, just in time to skirt around the city of Austin.

We followed highway 290 a hundred miles or so, stopping in the town of Brenham, where we had lunch. We were looking for a Mexican restaurant, and had seen several along the way previously, but of course we couldn’t find one when we were ready for some lunch. We settled on a placed called “Must Be Heaven”, which was fashioned after an old ice cream parlor with a cafeteria. The town of Brenham had many old buildings and homes, and reminded me of what a typical main street looked like back when I was a kid, or maybe even beyond that.

From Brenham we took highway 105 a little to the north and avoided most of the traffic and population around the Houston area. We followed 105 to Beaumont, where we joined I-10 and headed into Louisiana. We encountered some passing thundershowers in this area, with rain at times exceeding the capacity of the wipers. The temperature also dropped from the mid 90’s down to the 70’s, but as you can imagine, the humidity was maxed out.

We are now in Lake Charles, about 35 or 40 miles from the Texas border. Tomorrow we plan to take some scenic byways through the bayous and along the coastline, then work our way up to New Orleans, where we’ll see how repairs are going from the Katrina disaster.