A Trip To West Texas

This past weekend, we went to Lubbock to attend the wedding of a friend of the family. The groom is a longtime friend of my oldest son, who was one of the ushers at the wedding. In this pic you can see the back of Mrs. Doohickie in the blue dress, and my son in the center of the pic.



The wedding and reception were held at the Cap Rock Winery just south of Lubbock. Quite a nice place. And the wine was very good.

By the time the wedding got started it was getting dark out, so the only picture that my cell phone took that was worth a darn happened to be taken at the same moment someone else's flash went off.



The wedding itself was just charming- low key and high class. It featured a processional of Pachelbel's Canon played on guitar, a duet performance of The Prayer by the groom's brother and sister, and for the recessional, they played Queen's You're My Best Friend (a song that predates the bride and groom's births). Very personal and classy, I thought.

Okay, so that was the "official" trip. This was also our first trip to Lubbock. My wife sent me on a mission to find a Texas Tech pennant for her classroom (she puts up pennants to encourage her students to think about attending college). I drove up to the Texas Tech campus and found the pennant at the Varsity Book Store across from the campus.

There were also several other college-town type businesses, so we went back there for lunch. After looking around, we settled on Freebird World Burrito (which was kind of dumb, because we can get that here in Fort Worth). After lunch we got ice cream at The Arrogant Texan, an ice cream and sweets store a couple blocks down. I saw a first there:





Shine Bock flavored ice cream! (For those who don't know, Shiner Bock is a Texas beer.)

A few other tidbits from the trip- First, here is the view out our hotel window:



Trust me, the block wall was an improvement; we were next to a used tire store. ;- ) On the trip we passed Sweetwater, Texas. Sweetwater is the center of the Western Hemisphere's leading wind power generation region, at least according to Wikipedia.





These pictures don't even begin to capture the extent of this wind farm. You drive for several miles and see lots and lots and lots of wind turbines, all spinning to generate electricity. There are thousands of them. To get an idea of what you're looking at, each blade is longer than a semi trailer (I know this because they are a common site passing through Fort Worth). And the turbine at the top of each pole is about the size of a minivan. These things are massive. And like I said, they go on for miles.

Anyway, those are the highlights of our little trip. I hope you enjoyed them.