Fred and I started taking road trips about a year and a half ago, just day trips around Texas. Our first one was to Shiner, Texas (we called it our pilgrimage.) There’s not much IN Shiner, so we drove into Gonzales and got some dinner, and I was intrigued by the diner there. And the square of mostly-empty shops.
Gonzales has a lot of homes, and a good-sized high school, and Walmart, but the center of town had a diner, a bank, a clothing store (I think, I may be getting my small towns mixed up) and an antique store. Not a big draw, but the buildings themselves were so pretty.
So I was intrigued. And all around Shiner we saw a lot of natural gas rigs, and storage stations, so I started thinking about a town on the verge of a boom, and who would live there, and what they would do.
Our road trips became very frequent after that. We went to Karnes City because we heard it was booming (not so much, though LOTS of hotels for the oilfield guys), Cuero (much more of a boom town, lots of truck traffic), Cotulla (never saw so many hotels outside of Disneyland!), Pearsall, Three Rivers, George West. We didn’t just go south, though. I wanted more inspiration for my town. We went north on 281–Burnet, Lampasas, Hamilton. We went northeast–Bastrop, Smithville, La Grange, Round Top.
We went west–Uvalde, Hondo, Castroville. We called it our Miles and Miles of Texas tour.
Evansville, Texas (so named for our family’s place near Geronimo, Texas) is a combination of Lampasas and Gonzales, located between 281 and I-10, south of San Antonio, within a couple of hours of San Marcos.
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MJ Fredrick 