It's New, It's Huge, It's Buc-ee's New Braunfels!
Since we are somewhat experienced as long-haul road-trippers, we are – thank you very much – aficionados of those beside-the-highway establishments set up to offer gas, food, conveniences, or even just a place to pull over to stretch one's legs and let the dog romp for a bit. Some of these places – like the Pilot Travel Centers and Flying J truck plazas – offer (or did offer, the last time we checked) amazing coffee, with half-and-half on tap, not those nasty little mini-containers of liquid chalk. And when I was stationed at Hill AFB in Ogden, Utah, we always used to calculate our commute to Southern California on I-15 to include a breakfast or lunch stop for burgers at the Bun Boy, in either Barstow or Baker – heck, my grandparents used to go to Los Vegas back in the day, and my father remembers stopping at the Bun Boy even then. The burgers were fantastic, the breakfast plates were huge, and there was always a lot of interesting people at the counter, including truck drivers who could tell you down to the mile marker where all the speed traps were. (Alas, the Baker Bun Boy, next to the world's tallest thermometer went out of business a while ago.)
Head, shoulders and a good bit of torso above many such roadside establishments in which to pause in the midst of the weary journey is Buc-ee's. What is Buc-ee's? You may well ask; the answer is that it's a chain of nineteen stores in South Texas aimed at supporting the long-drive motorist. It has a beaver mascot, a string of amusing and sometimes slightly raunchy billboards along the highways advertising their presence ... and the cleanest bathrooms around. They started in the early eighties, offering cheap bags of ice, reasonably priced and good-quality food, and the aforementioned bathrooms ... all of these things being hugely appreciated by travelers who have encountered ... well, let's just say that overpriced ice, horrible, expensive food and truly nasty bathrooms are more the usual thing for long-haul travelers. Remind me to tell you about the service station bathroom on the highway near Gibraltar which we once encountered. My then nine-year-old daughter took one horrified look at it and said, "Mom, I don't have to go that bad."
This being Texas, Buc-ee's offers everything bigger, better and relatively cheaper ... and more gas station lanes than I have ever seen in one place before. In short, it is to your usual truck plaza/traveler's rest stop as Buckingham Palace is to a crumbling double-wide in a trailer park on the bad side of town ... especially the latest Buc-ee's, which opened this week in New Braunfels. The Luling Buc-ee's, which we knew best, is now but a small annex to the splendor and glory of the New Braunfels outlet. I had never in my life seen a travel-plaza with servers cutting up BBQ brisket on a wooden stand ... or a made-to-order deli ... with a row of computer stations to place your order. Or as many soft-drink spigots as there were; seventy-five in a row, or so said one of the duty managers giving away samples of coleslaw and dips on chips. This new hall of splendors and merchandise is admirably placed just off IH-35 and the turnoffs to Canyon Lake and to Lake McQueeney – and quite honestly, it looks as if they could handle as many travelers at one time as are spectators at regular Spurs games.
But oddly enough – no 18-wheeler truck services. Just autos and RVs.
I look at the pictures that I took in the early spring, and I can hardly recognize my yard. A bitter winter freeze and various large and small animal depredations had pretty much laid waste to it for the last year or so ... but what a difference five months have made! And a half-truckload of 
The squash plants are spreading near and far, blooming luxuriantly – but so far, only a handful of tiny, inch-long squash. Note to self: Self, plant the squashes against the fence and give them plenty of space, as they seem to want to sprawl all over. The eggplants have fat purple and white blooms on them, but as yet, no embryonic eggplants, but the okra ... a couple of incipient okras. Or is the singular of okra 'oke'? Curiously, the pepper plants from last year are doing rather well, especially the one jalapeno planted in a separate pot
The most important item is – the tomatoes. We have three topsy-turvy planters, each with two plants in them, hanging from the top tier of a home-designed and built frame, suspended from two branches of the mulberry tree in the back yard. The plants have grown down, and the eight tomato plants in earth-boxes and self-watering pots below have grown up, supported on tomato cages ... into one productive tangle. There are clusters of jade-green tomatoes everywhere, but it turned out that the tomatoes were irresistible to something with sharp and indiscriminant teeth. I suspected that the same critters were the same who raided throughout last year. They nibbled half of my hanging airplane/spider plants to death, digging up and digging up and eating the lush, juicy tubers that made the root network of the plants. The same hungry critters also ravaged the hanging turvey-planter full of peppers. We finally had to hang the pepper turvey from a hook in the center of the back porch roof, where the rats would have needed rappelling ropes and one of those hook-shooting thingys beloved of espionage thrillers to climb vertically from the edge of the roof to the pepper-plants.
And they did it in the last week or so, but this year we were out of patience with seeing our potential crop from this garden reduced by freeloading anything ... birds, caterpillars, rodents, freeloaders of any phyla. We hates them, so we do my precious, we hates them! This year we set out baited rat-traps, and the first couple of rats caught in them were so big that they were ... just maimed, which we did feel a little guilty about, but not much. The rats caught since then have been increasingly smaller and stone-cold instantly dead ... and the tomatoes, peppers and hanging plants have since been unmolested. Still – the traps go out, every evening for another week or so. And that was my week in the garden; what was yours?
Texans love their dogs and cats... and here in San Antonio we are no exception. Dogs and cats are loved everywhere, except it gets a little tricky when it comes to buying real estate that accepts your pets. Especially when looking to buy: condominiums, townhomes and villas; since each may have its own rules and regulations regarding pets. Single family homes have fewer, if no restrictions regarding pets. (A word of caution, some HOA's, even towns/cities may have dog restrictions.)
Many condominiums for sale in San Antonio allow pets, but, even so, it may not be exact the right condo for you and your furry friend. I happen to think that dogs need to have lots of green space. Just because the Condo board rules allow pets, doesn't mean that is the right place for you and your dog. A condo that is a building in the middle of a parking lot with little to no grass or trees, doesn't have a lot to offer for your dog, unless there are some nature trails or they are next to a park.
Me and my hound, Milo (actually he's an Australian Shepherd) are hunting down 
Happy Mother's Day! Sorry, I am unable to be with you today, but I will see you soon.