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.