Our time in Texas with the Killer B's is going to be brief but if you're in Texas you have to do the cowboy thing so our first stop was a horse ranch. The pace was decidedly methodical but these weren't trail horses so you could easily wander off on your own and channel your inner Clint Eastwood. We were also fortunate to be skirting the second-largest canyon in the United States, the Palo Duro Canyon. It is roughly 70 mi (110 km) long and reaches a w...

As much as DH enjoyed San Antonio, I really liked El Paso. I had always conjured up images of the border town of El Paso, Texas as a rough and tough gunfighter town which personified the old wild west days. The city’s lawlessness in the late 1800’s had earned it the moniker of “Six Shooter Capital” and the city’s first and oldest street was the scene of the infamous Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight. And when we found out that a lo...

We started this road trip through the U.S hoping to explore both the loud, boisterous, and somewhat biased pride that Americans have in their own country, and the eccentricities that seem to stir the whole drink. We haven't been disappointed. Even the term 'Americans’ seems to have been hijacked (everyone living in North and South America are technically 'Americans') by a population that genuinely struggles to understand why everyone wouldn&...

Most of the more significant incidents in U.S. history are immortalized with some sort of memorial and/or museum but the Branch Davidian tragedy in Waco might be the one exception. Eighty two Branch Davidian followers and 4 ATF agents were killed in the siege which ended when the compound burned down. Apparently there is a plaque that sits near the residual of the burned buildings but it is on private property now and the reception has been reported as a little h...

Texas invokes a lot of rugged images and we did kind of expect that we would be part of a wagon train as we crossed the border. DH was already going somewhat weak in the knees at the thought of a black hat cowboy jingle-jangling by us as we tip back a Starbucks late on a sunny Texas patio. She was blaming the weak knees on her recent surgery but she keeps calling me "pilgrim" so I'm really working hard on my best Clint Eastwood squint. Texas isn’t just...