There is something about the human condition and the underdog story. Whether it is a sport’s team cast as the underdog, the team without any chance to win or a historical tale without hope on paper, being stacked up against the odds and fighting back romanticizes a world that at times can seem very far from romantic. I rise early to see Texas’ ultimate underdog, the Alamo. Rain is starting to drizzle, hence the tourist ponchos making an appearance. I turn the corner and in the truest of underdog fashions, the Alamo lends those feelings of being inadequate. The small little façade of the Shrine Continue Reading
Photographing Uncertainty and Beyond at Caddo Lake in Texas
Travel is fraught with uncertainties. You might think you know what to expect, what you will see and when you will get there, but in reality, you never know. The process is similar to dominoes. If one element falls through or there is a missed connection, all expectations and thoughts of certainty fall at the same time. It is uncertain, much like the borders between Louisiana and Texas at Caddo Lake. The lines are truly muddied, where islands, swamps and bayous make up the division. On my road trip, I decided to leave the state of Texas in a state of uncertainty. I made my way to the Continue Reading
The Texas Gulf Coast Wishes You Were Here
Vacations aren’t always pretty. Destinations can fail short of our expectations. We imagine how these settings will look and when they don’t fit the imagination, we can feel like paradise has been lost. My high expectations for cute and quaint met the opposite somewhere along the Texas Gulf coast. Rather than accepting defeat, I swore to find the details of the vacation I wanted, beginning with the towns of Rockport and Fulton. They are the type of towns where you don’t know where one begins and where the other ends. Like a collision of the beach town variety, their march toward one another is Continue Reading
A Taste of Spain in Texas at Mission San José
I step inside the walls of what could be a motel compound. Wooden doors line up a uniform fashion, equidistant from one another just like at a single-story motel. Checking in to these rooms wasn’t of the travel variety. The spaces weren’t used just for a night’s sleep. Checking in to these spaces meant giving up one’s own beliefs to follow one god and one king oceans away. I am within the confines of the Mission San José, part of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. While the park encompasses four missions south of San Antonio, I am focusing my attention on good old Saint Continue Reading
Jefferson, Texas Wishes You Were Here
The air has a quiet only found on Sundays. Shops are closed. Streets are deserted. And in all of the quiet of Jefferson, Texas, there is a whiff of intangible activity. I begin to stroll the small settlement that was once a boomtown when the first steamboat arrived on the Big Cypress Bayou. By 1845, steamboats could reach New Orleans from Jefferson, making the city the port of entry for many into Texas and a thriving cosmopolitan destination. Appropriately, Jefferson is my port of entry for seeing what Texas looked like circa the 19th century. I roam the streets of the “Riverport to the Continue Reading