fauxklore

Even wth angst, I am still me, so I went away for a few days last week. As you may know, there was an annular solar eclipse that was visible through a swatch of the U.S. As you may or may not know, I am a devoted umbraphile. A number of years ago, I wrote what I prefer to refer to as a life list, rather than a bucket list, and one item on that was to see a total solar eclipse. I did that in Ghana in 2006 and got hooked on the experience. I’ve seen 5 total solar eclipses so far. I attempted to see an annular solar eclipse i 2019 in Oman, but the weather didn’t cooperate, so I only saw a partial one. This was a much shorter, easier trip.

I’d originally thought about going to Roswell, New Mexico. The problem was that, between the eclipse and the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, rental car availability and prices were outrageous. Er, no, I am not going to spend over $200 a day and rent a full size SUV. It briefly looked like there would be a space on a trip in Arizona and Utah being run by the company I’d done 3 eclipse trips with, but there was an issue with hotel space. A little bit of looking around, turned up an excellent option. San Antonio is fairly easy to fly to, doesn’t require a car if one stays downtown (which is a cheap bus ride from the airport), and had plenty of reasonably priced hotel rooms.

I got in early afternoon on Thursday. I’d been to San Antonio previously and, that time, had walked pretty much the length of the Riverwalk. This time, I just started with getting lunch at Guadalajara Grill, where the food was just okay, but the decor was pretty over the top. Note the amusing signs (e.g. “To Err is Human … and Stupid”) and the ceiling covered with loteria cards.

The restaurant was at the edge of La Villita, which has an historic area of San Antonio. I walked around the area, browsing in crafts shops and reading historic signs for a while. The city is preparing for Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and I particularly enjoyed seeing part of the Calaveras Collection - giant skulls decorated by local artists. Here are a few of them. Note the middle one of these is Ruth Bader Ginsburg themed.

Because I’d seen a fair amount in San Antonio perviously, I booked a small group Grey Line tour to the Hill Country, including several sites associated with Lyndon Baines Johnson, for Friday. I should probably set some sort of goal associated with presidential sites, since I’ve been to a fair number of them. In this case, I had been to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin several years ago.

Anyway, the first stop was LBJ’s boyhood home. He lived there from the age of 5 until he want to college. There’s a visitor center, which includes a replica of his office.

Then there was a ranger-guided tour of the house. There was no running water or electricity, but it didn’t look particularly uncomfortable for a farmhouse of the era.

Here’s the bedroom he shared with his brother, Sam.

We continued on to the area of the LBJ Ranch. We stopped at another visitor center, and I couldn’t resist getting this picture.

We just drove past his birthplace and the cemetery where he is buried. But we did stop at the Junction School, the one-room schoolhouse where he started his education. In my opinion, it looks pretty much like every other one-room schoolhouse, so I won’t bore you with a photo of it. We continued around the road to the ranch, passing cattle on the way. They sell the bull semen to other cattle breeders so they can collect a premium for selling beef bred from the Johnson family cattle. Given the nature of politics, I’m surprised they don’t also sell presidential bullshit.

Anyway, LBJ commuted to the ranch / Texas White House by flying Air Force One to Austin and then taking this small plane the rest of the way. The visitor center at the hangar is, alas, currently closed for renovations.

We were able to walk over to the house, but not go in. Apparently they kept adding rooms as his daughters had children and grandchildren.

There’s a wall with the names and dates of various visitors to the ranch. It took me some effort to find names I recognized.

We left LBJ behind and continued on to Fredericksburg, which was founded by Germans in 1846. We had two hours there, mostly for getting lunch and shopping. After eating, I walked around the town. The Vereins Kirche Museum, originally a church, is a rather attractive building and there was a street festival going on at the park behind it. I stopped and listened to music for a little while.

I would have liked to have had more time, actually, because the town was the home of Admiral Nimitz and there’s a huge museum dedicated to the Pacific War (referring to WWII, of course), which sounded interesting. But they recommend three hours for it, so it would have to be some other time.

Then we had a short stop in Luckenbach, which was made famous in country music. I’m not a country music person, but I was amused by this signpost. Note the arrow pointing up to the moon.

Our final stop was at Sister Creek Vineyards, one of the many wineries in the area. I’m not a big wine drinker, but it was nice sitting outside on their patio, enjoying the warm weather, while some of the other people drank some wine. It was a little over an hour back to San Antonio. Overall, I thought the tour was a reasonably enjoyable way to spend a day.

But it was the eclipse that I was there for and that was on Saturday. The morning weather did not look promising. (I should note that the photos in this section were taken with a solar filter over the lens on my iPhone. I also had eclipse glasses and my solar filtered binoculars.)

Fortunately, there were breaks in the clouds as things progressed.

To quote Johnny Cash, “And it burns, burns, burns / The ring of fire.”

Mission accomplished and the moon moved off. (You may need to click through to flickr for this one.)

I didn’t stay until final contact. Instead, I took a long walk around more of downtown San Antonio. I found a couple of other skulls from the Calaveras Collection, including this one.