Mini Texas

Tonight I find myself in another hotel room - this time it's the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine. It's a rather impressive establishment, with structural representation of just about every major Texas landmark, i.e., the Alamo, the Hill Country, oil rigs, etc.

We're here this week for Commodity Classic. This will make CC No. 2 for me since I've been with corn. Last year, we journeyed to Nashville to yet another Gaylord property, the Opryland Hotel. Like the Gaylord Texan, the Opryland requires a map to navigate - only it's a little over twice the size of this hotel. Very Vegas-like.

Every time I step inside a new hotel room on work trips, I always wish I started a photo diary of hotel rooms. It's like opening a present on Christmas morning each time - you may have an idea of what's inside, but you never really know. This particular hotel room has wall decor that I wouldn't mind taking home with me. (If this reminds you of anything, well...you know who you are!)

It's always fun to come to conferences like Classic, because I get to reconnect with people I've met at different times in my career, whether it be during my college organizational involvement, internships or whatever. I like that my career choices have intertwined this "community" of individuals in agriculture.

So, I will be here until Saturday, immersing myself in the world of grain policy and leadership. I've thought about hitting the hotel's fitness facility tonight. To get there, I have to cross the "Riverwalk" - a slightly smaller version of the Riverwalk I wrote about previously.

Friday (Sunday) the 15th

I just realized I'm a moron and titled the last entry "Friday the 14th" when I meant to write "Saturday the 14th" - dang copy & paste. Oh well, maybe I should name this entry "Friday the 15th" since the whole weekend felt as good as Fridays do.

Luckily, I can name these entries anything I care to name them - even if they don't make sense to anyone else.
Before leaving Fredericksburg Sunday morning, we stopped by the town's historic churches to take a few photies, as they say in Scotland. Old churches are awesome. This church was built in the early 1800s in Fredericksburg.
We journeyed north from Fredericksburg to Llano, Texas. I was familiar with Llano only through my team roping interests.


In case you can't read the lettering, it says "Rich Skelton - 8x World Champion Team Roper".

I'd never been there, but Byron was set on taking me to one of the most highly rated BBQ joints in Texas - something in which every Texan must partake.


Normally on Sundays, we would be in church, but on this particular Sunday we pulled into Cooper's in Llano before the church crowd hit. While we were there I realized why.

This place was good.
Before entering the building, you select the meats you want from an open pit outside. They slop it on a tray, then send you inside where they weigh your choices and charge you accordingly - not until after you've selected your cobbler, drink and sides, of course.


After filling ourselves silly with BBQ prime rib, sausage, pork chops and cobbler, we stopped by the dam to take a stroll.


Nothing like a good dam stroll.

Ever since Byron and I have been together, I've learned many hilarious stories about his rambunctiousness as a child. These stories include things like Byron getting his head stuck between rails at a restaurant; Byron almost getting eaten by a vicious African fish after disappearing at a zoo; and many other countless random injuries the boy has had over the years.

Once we got out of the truck, he immediately began roaming off down the rocks. The next thing I knew, he was balancing on a pipe that on one side had cascading jagged rocks and the other a deep lake.

Luckily, no one was injured during the dam stroll and nothing fell in the water.


The drive back to Lubbock from Llano covered a lot of territory. We passed through the largest wind turbine field in the world near Sweetwater. Unless you're actually there, you can't really grasp how many turbines are actually out there.

These are giant, huge, big, large, ginormous structures. Their blades are turning at a speed of 240 mph at their end. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these things out there - million dollar wind turbines everywhere. There are turbines as far as the eye can see.


There's easily enough energy being produced out there to match half the energy of childhood, zoo adventurer, kid-who-stuck-his-head-in-rails Byron.

Friday the 14th

Part II

The next morning on our way from San Antonio to Fredericksburg, we stopped by the famous Texas town of Luckenbach. Luckenbach literally sits off the main road on a dirt road. The town consists of a post office and a camp ground. Since I moved to Lubbock, I still occasionally get asked by people at home if I live in Luckenbach. That always makes me giggle. Seriously, this building here is really the only building for the town. There's a bar and a gift shop inside the post office.


Friday the 14th was coincidentally Valentines Day. Although we spent V-day in a rather romantic town in a rather romantic state of mind, neither one of us really thought about it being Valentine's Day. We're not really V-day people. I always thought it was quite silly myself.


So, I'm going to refer to it as Friday the 14th.

Fredericksburg, Texas is one of the coolest towns I've ever visited. It's an old town. In fact, there's buildings there from the 1820s. Texas was still technically Mexico at that point. It's a cultural explosion down there - a mixture of Texas, Germany and Mexico.


German immigrants flooded into the area over a century ago and their influence is still very prevalent.


There are shops galore, a bunch of great places to eat, and it's a mecca for wine lovers and music and food.


The Texas Hill Country has 22 wineries in all. Nearly 10 of them are within a 20 mile radius of F-burg. We visited the Torre di Pietra winery, which had tasting, live music and an awesome atmosphere.

I tasted five of their red wines, including one of their ports - I love port wine with chocolate desserts. YUM!

It was a fairly cloudy day and the grapevines were still a few months from coming out, but the place was still beautiful. I bought a red wine called "Classico" to keep as a memento from the weekend.



We found some super cool dishes in a store ironically called "Something Different" that were crafted in a Mexican city where Byron lived for a semester during law school. Each piece was different. I took home a nice platter. Honestly, I think that was the first platter I have ever purchased.


The stores are all nice. No junk here.


There was ample super nice furniture, decor, fudge, Dublin Dr. Peppers...you name it.

Perhaps the best part of the day was while we were traveling down a Fredericksburg road and saw something moving on the side. I thought it was a raccoon, but it turned out to be a porcupine. I have never seen a porcupine, so we stopped and took pictures.

Also stopping to take pictures was a fine Hispanic fellow with a Kentucky waterfall hair cut, complete with buzzed sides.

Byron took off into the woods to get a closer picture at which point I was certain he would return with quills sticking out of his face. I got out to get a closer look myself, when (let's call him Pedro) Pedro asked me in the little English he knew to take a picture of the porcupine with the cell phone he had been waving in the direction of the animal. Upon taking his phone, I realized he hadn't been taking pictures...that is, he had been trying, but was only waving the phone at the porcupine hoping it would take its picture. I took a picture for him, he thanked me, then got back in his truck that had a giant chandelier in the back.

Friday the 13th

I'm going to use this blog post to tell a story.

I know I usually tell stories on this blog, but this one is a little different. I usually do everything possible to avoid the "diary disease" that sometimes comes across in blogs. That is irritating to me, because no one really wants to read your diary (unless they're really nosey, I guess). I just like to post observations about the weather, agriculture, travel and such without sounding like a narrator. So, consider this story time, and please excuse any diary disease that may be evident. It will not be contagious.

Part I

I can't say I've ever flown on a Friday the 13th. Typically, that's a day of bad luck.

But, I flew last Friday the 13th to San Antonio. I took the day off from work to meet Byron in San Antonio. He had been there most of the week for a conference for work. About a month ago, we both decided that would be a good opportunity for the two of us to get away and explore the Texas Hill Country.

So, I flew from Lubbock at 7am and landed in San Antonio three hours later.

Byron still had a session left in his conference, so after picking me up from the airport, I just hung out on the famous River Walk. The La Mansion del Rio hotel where he had stayed all week was built in the mid-1800s when Texas was still a part of Mexico. The architecture is vividly Spanish and sits right on the River Walk's edge.

I spent about 30 minutes on the balcony outside the room taking in the scenes on the River Walk, which has always been one of my favorite places, and most definitely a Texas icon.
I strolled across the foot bridge that linked the El Mansion del Rio to the other side of the River Walk. I didn't realize it then, but that bridge and the other side would become a rather important place in the story of my life. After Byron's conference had come to a close, we set out from San Antonio north to a small, flavorful town called Gruene. I had visited the town twice before to float the Guadalupe River in a rubber tube - another iconic summer past time in Texas. Gruene is another historic Texas town, filled with shops and restaurants and one of the most famous dancehalls in the country, Gruene Hall.


The Texas Hill Country is somewhat "ground zero" of the Texas music scene. We stopped in Lone Star Music and found a CD from the Hogg Maulies - a band full of guys Byron grew up with, and ultimately the band that first introduced Byron and I three years ago when I was going to graduate school at Texas Tech. (Byron took the picture that graces the cover of the album he's holding up.)

We ate lunch on the banks of the Guadalupe River at the Gruene River Grill.

We spent a little while in Gruene roaming around the shops and taking in the historic culture that brings a gazillion tourists to this area every year.

We then left Gruene and visited with one of Byron's college friends who lives with his wife in New Braunfels. After catching up with them, we headed back to San Antonio for dinner.


Byron had made reservations at a River Walk restaurant called Boudros, so we dined there on a beautiful south Texas winter night. It was near 80 degrees and was a perfect night to be on the River Walk. (It really must have been the perfect night, because everyone and their dog was walking along the river that night.)

After an awesome dinner, we took a walk. Let me say here I was very unsuspecting of anything other than a San Antonio stroll. We walked down the river, and then mosied to the Alamo.

We took our picture on one of the bridges over the river like most silly couples you see.

After walking around for a while, we decided to head to the car and call it a night. On the way back to the car (still on the River Walk), we walked back by the La Mansion del Rio. We walked up on the bridge, but there was a guy hanging out there who was kind of intruding on our space. So, we got back on the River Walk and were heading out when the next 15 minutes of my life became a blur.

People were clapping on the other side of the River Walk. People walking by us were turning around and pointing and staring and clapping. And Byron was on one knee. For the first time in my life, I belive I squeeled. I'm not a squeeler, but I think I squeeled.

After saying "yes" (which was something we had to confirm later in the car, because the moment was such a blur for the both of us), we decided we needed our picture taken. A man and woman walked by and looked like good candidates.

I asked them, "Could you take our picture? We just got engaged."

The man took a long drag on the cigarette in his mouth, looked at Byron and said, "You lucky bastard!"

The woman then said, "That's wonderful. I just got a divorce last week."

Byron replied, "Great. Looks like everyone's happy!"


So, thus began the beginning of our weekend, and the rest of our lives.

More Air Time

We had two more TV crews in our office yesterday after I sent out a press release discussing the implications of the salmonella issue on our Texas growers. So far, I've been very pleased with the way the local media has covered this issue from our perspective, which is to protect the farmer.

Because KLBK often shares footage with KAMC, our story appeared on two stations last night at 6pm and at 10pm, and was the top story both times. I was walking out the door this morning to work, and heard myself on the morning news.

Watch the stories here.

I also answered questions from a Dallas Morning News reporter and the Lubbock Avalanche Journal interviewed one of our board members in Seminole.

Goober Tube, Revisited

Our peanut board was a part of the "top story" for all four Lubbock news stations last night.

Since the closing of the Plainview facility, local news is focusing on how the salmonella issue will affect the state's peanut producers.

Two stations interviewed one of our board members in Seminole and we had another station in the office yesterday afternoon.

View the video here from KCBD.

View video from KLBK.

After dealing with corn's food vs fuel issues last spring and summer, I learned a lot about how to handle crisis communications situations. In fact, my whole career here has seemed like a crisis communication effort. In order to keep track of what has been printed about our organization, we search Google News each morning. It brings up a listing of every article that has ran about the issue from all over the world. It's a weird feeling to see your name come up when you do a Google News search.

OMG The British R Coming

It's been an odd last couple of weeks out here in West Texas.

The peanut butter salmonella issue was a small fire that turned into a raging prairie fire for peanut producers.

The Peanut Corp. of America facility in Blakely, Ga., that was the main culprit of the salmonella outbreak also has a plant just north of Lubbock in Plainview, Texas. Suddenly, the national issue hit a little closer to home. Although the issue had cooled down over the past couple of days, the national media got more to feed on today when the Plainview facility voluntarily shut down because of "the possibility of contaminated products."

The board I work for represents growers in this state. We maintain that our farmers are growing healthy, safe peanuts. Those peanuts are clean when they go to the processing facility. So, basically, that one corporation that apparently didn't think it needed to be registered or inspected - ever - is making life difficult.

Keep eating peanut butter in the jar. It's still safe. Don't be scared.

In other news, someone hacked into an electronic road sign about three miles south of where I live and made it say "OMG The British R Coming". The story was on Yahoo, CNN, ABC, Fox, the Denver Post, CBS News and everywhere else in between. I think they also hacked into another contruction sign and wrote "Slow Down: Zombies Up Ahead".

At least their humor was clean.