This Hampton in Lubbock seemed fairly new or well-kept and service was fine. The best feature was an exhaust fan in the bathroom which I haven’t seen a lot of in a while. They were doing some construction on the building. During check-in when I asked the desk clerk about what noise level to expect from the work, he assured me that they were working on the roof, and we shouldn’t hear anything in our ground floor room. Also, the work was not scheduled to start until 8:30 a.m. The next morning, it turned out that he was right about the time, but not about the noise. About 8:30, we started hearing a fairly constant beep, beep, beep that sounded like a truck back-up warning signal. Right outside our room window was a crane with the long arm stretched up to the roof. Whenever the arm moved even a tiny bit, the warning beeping would sound. We were up by then so it didn’t present much of a problem but was surprising based on what the desk clerk told us the night before.

After breakfast in the hotel, we drove to the main public library in Lubbock, the Mahon Library. Philip found the book he wanted to see in their genealogy collection. The book about the gold lottery in 1832 Georgia was bound in gold buckram and stood out from the others. We found it pretty quickly. After checking out the information in it, he browsed the rest of the books on the adjacent shelves and found a few others with valuable information for his research. After about an hour, the genealogy volunteer arrived and offered even more suggestions.

We left the library by 11:15 to meet Kay and Deborah for lunch at Stella’s. Originally, I expected Kyle to come with them, but he opted to stay in Muleshoe and farm with his brothers. After a long lunch with good food and better conversation—almost two hours—we said good-bye and got back on the road again.

We drove to Cleburne to spend the night at another Hampton. After checking in, we drove into the older part of town to eat barbeque at a tiny spot recommended by the hotel--Buffalo Creek BBQ. It was delicious. Good to have some Texas barbeque again.