The Allure of the Quilt

by Celia Hayes

Once again this last weekend, we were lured to the pleasant bedroom-slipper community of Boerne by the charms of the Squirrel's Nest on Main Street, which supports the totally worthy services provided by Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation to animal-kind of this part of Texas. This visit also coincided with the celebration of a uniquely American art form – with contemporary examples hung from storefronts, and along the sides of Boerne's town plaza. They made a splendid show, all through downtown, and many of the businesses along Main Street (or Hauptstrasse) also had window displays incorporating quilts – and many of them were offering drinks ... although we had to turn down the offers of margaritas at one

Eating on the Go

by Celia Hayes

Well, there is fast food, and then there is fast food – fast food that comes to the customer. When I was stationed in Korea such a convenience was called the 'chogi' truck, or as the local national employees called it 'roooch-coachie'. It came around mid-morning to the building where I worked, dispensing hot sandwiches, snacks, candy bars, ice cream and bags of salted or sugared snack foods. But the chogi truck is to a food truck today as a Model T is to a Jeep Cherokee. They're gasoline-powered motor vehicles, and they dispense food to the hungry ... but the 21st century food truck tends to be a specialty gourmet kitchen on wheels. Certainly in a large and

Guten Tag, Y’All - This is Texas!

by Celia Hayes

When I first came to Texas, at the express request of the US Air Force some (mumble) seventeen (mumble) years ago I thought I knew all there was to know about the place: the Alamo of course, and the Riverwalk, too. I knew that Houston had a Grand Opera, that Lubbock was a flat as a pancake griddle with some Monopoly houses set on it, I had read Edna Ferber's Giant, and I knew about cattle drives and the King Ranch, and that Texas was called the buckle of the Bible Belt ... I knew pretty much what any well-read traveler could pick up through the medium of pop culture and the base library.

What I did not know, until well after I got here and began to look around – was how very much more there was.

Boerne – Ye Kendall Inn

Call Mission Realty for Boerne Homes for Sale

by Celia Hayes

So, we were off to Boerne again last Friday, rejoicing in the rain that had fallen the night before – this time so that I could do a talk on the Civil War in the Hill Country for a local chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War. Quite a few of the members are transplanted Texans, courtesy of military service – so the series of events in the years 1860-65 in the Hill Country were new to them and interesting.

To me, the nice part of the meeting was that it took place at Ye Kendall Inn, in the modern-but-decorated-to- look-old Halle – the conference center, which is just one of the ramble of buildings – many of them historic and fascinating

A River Flows Through It

As the Riverwalk of San Antonio is such an ornament to the city and such a popular tourist attraction (only second after the Alamo) that one of the nicknames for our fair town is 'The River City' you'd think that any municipal organization possessing the necessary attribute – a permanent body of water deeper than a puddle in, or flowing through downtown – would have been been seen as a gift and an opportunity to do something like it. Maybe not cheek by cheek eateries and boutiques – but at least a pleasant string park, paralleling the river bank can this be created, for the benefit of the residents, the enriching of those retail establishments lucky to overlook it, and the sheer

Civil War Anniversary in Comfort August 10-11, 2012

 by Celia Hayes

I've written before about the Comfort Civil War monument – a stone obelisk under the oak trees at what would have been the edge of town in 1866. It is a monument to those Union Loyalists from Comfort and the surrounding communities, who were killed in a vicious firefight with Confederate partisans, or executed as captives afterwards, near a branch of the Nueces River a hundred and fifty years ago this year. There were nearly sixty of them – men from Comfort, Sisterdale, Fredericksburg, Cherry Spring and a dozen other little towns and hamlets scattered through the Hill Country. They were abolitionists and for the Union; they would not take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy, much

The Town That Was – And the Hardware Store That Is

by Celia Hayes

Lately, we've taken to getting to New Braunfels by following Nacogdoches road all the way up to where it intersects with FM 482. Just around that intersection we have been intrigued by a range of old buildings – two of them side by side, weathered gray boards, with a false front and a veranda across the front, looking like something on the set of a Western movie. Around the bend in Old Nacogdoches Road, there is an industrial-looking building of yellow buff brick with a tall chimney. The fourth building – the only one still whole and in use is a little way down FM 842 – a charming and totally random brick church; the Catholic Church of St. Joseph. From the evidence of the storefronts, the

Museum of the Pacific – Re-enactor Daze

by Celia Hayes

Among the attractions of Fredericksburg, the queen of the Hill Country is the Museum of the Pacific War. Ever since I started visiting the Hill Country (shortly after coming to settle in a tiny suburban San Antonio home) in 1995, the Museum has been expanding by leaps and bounds. On my very first visit it seemed that everything was pretty much contained within the old Nimitz hotel, the steam-boat shaped edifice at the corner of Main and Washington, with the Japanese peace garden out around in back. At a slightly later date, there was a open-sided shed with sides of chain link, down across Town Creek which contained some large and small relatively indestructible exhibits ... but that was it.

Fredericksburg Adventures in Auctions

by Celia Hayes

We haven't found anything good in a while, there are few spectacular big sales on the calendar, and our favorite thrift stores have been milked dry ... so last weekend we explored a new venue: an estate auction. We had seen auctions on history channel shows, and had the the impression that they were cut-throat and expensive propositions, wherein one could get easily carried away, or accidentally bid on an item by scratching your ear at an inopportune moment. Still, I don't know why we had never done this before; lack of time and opportunity, probably.

A friend of ours in Fredericksburg let us know of one, run by a local Fredericksburg auctioneer, on Saturday at the American Legion Hall. So, we

Road Trip: Bergheim

by Celia Hayes

The name 'bergheim' means – if I remember my several years of high school and college German correctly – 'mountain home'. Strictly speaking, although the beating urban heart of Bergheim, Texas, is not anywhere near a mountain that I would recognize as such, (having lived at the foot of the Wasatch Range in Utah, or from living in the foothills of California's San Gabriels) it is pleasingly situated at the top of a substantial rise in the Hill Country, and a pleasant drive north from San Antonio. Especially, if you take 46 to get there; either east from Boerne, or west from Bulverde; the road rambles through rolling country, sparsely scattered with small ranches and housing developments, groves of trees, campgrounds