The 4th of July

Not the most beautiful place to awaken,
but it was nice to have hot coffee waiting for me!

Spent last night in the parking lot of a small truck stop in the town of Riesel. It sounds much worse than it was. The Casita has blackout coverings over the windows and is insulated well enough that little sound from outside gets through. And, of course, it was quite nice to walk inside the truck stop this morning and find fresh coffee ready and waiting. We had looked for a more aesthetically pleasing spot, including one rather long, after dark tour of a series of narrow gravel roads. The roads cut between crops of corn and sorghum that seemed to tower over the FJ, Once I had started down the road, there was no place wide enough to turn the FJ and Casita around.  Our luck held and we wound around and came out back in Otto, where we had started. That is when we decided to go back to a more traveled road and found the truck stop.

We got up at 6 am so we could get to Otto while the morning light was optimal for photography.  I have already written about the fact that Otto was not what we were expecting and I will not rehash that here. Suffice to say, I stayed in the Casita writing while Andy went about taking photos of several Otto buildings.

We had no set itinerary after Otto, so we soon found ourselves roaming the highways and byways of the Texas Lakes and Prairies region. I had found some campsites posted on freecampsites.net that I wanted to check out. The closest to where we were was a place called Brushie Prairie on Navarro Mills Lake. We headed, more or less, in that direction.

I may, or may not, have mentioned that I seem to have a rare version of "Attention Deficit Disorder".  My ADD only shows when I am driving on a highway with four lanes (or sometimes a two-lane with wide shoulders).  Texas 171 was just such a highway and my disorder kicked in when I saw a small lane with a sign that said "Tehuacana".  The combination of a name like "Tehuacana" and a narrow lane was simply more than I could resist.  Brakes squealing, trailer fish-tailing, a hard right turn..., and we found ourselves exploring Tehuacana, Texas!

It was as though we had stepped back in time to 1940 or so.  All of the houses that we saw were wooden frame structures in what I always think of as "Grandmother" style.  The downtown store fronts seemed to be all vacant, and, even on the 4th of July, we did not see a single soul moving about the town. There had been a sign that said that mentioned "Westminister College" so we began to look for the campus. We soon found it.

Westminster College / Trinity University

What we found was a wonderful old, three story, stone building.  There were two historical plaques beside the building and I spent time reading them while Andy ran around photographing the building. Per the plaques, this building sits on the highest point between Dallas and Houston. Originally, this was Trinity University (now in San Antonio). When Trinity moved, the Presbyterians sold it to the Methodists and it became Westminister College.

About this time we spotted a man on a riding mower. We asked him about the school and town and he filled in a few blanks for us.  According to our informant, Trinity, a Presbyterian school, opened here in the 1870's. Trinity moved to Waxahachie, Texas in the early 1900's and the Methodists purchaces the building and opened Westminister College. Westminster operated until about 1970.

I wish that I had more photos of Tehuacana. Andy took quite a few so they will probably show up on his website, eventually.