Don’t Mess with Texas
Mostly because it is so big that it takes more than 10 hours straight to drive across and 29 million people live there! It is about the size of Turkey. Originally, the “don’t mess with Texas” line came from a highway anti-littering campaign in the 1980s though, and only later was picked up by the Texans as an identity statement. Everyone we met was exceedingly friendly mind you.
Western Texas is dotted with wind turbines as far as the eye can see. As could be predicted, this led me to a Wikipedia black hole on the energy mix of Texas. Unsurprisingly, about 40% of Texan electricity is generated by oil and gas. But, recently, about 20% of it was generated by wind turbines, slightly surpassing the amount generated by coal! And did I mention Texas is BIG and populous (and probably consumes commensurate amounts of energy)? Always room to be surprised with the world. Oh also, Texas is also special in that it is the only state in the contiguous US (so, no Alaska, no Hawaii) to have its own independent power grid. Apparently all the rest of the states rely on other inter-connected electrical grids. If you ever want to secede from the country, that’s damn good preparation I’d say! (I doubt that the counties who want to secede from California and Oregon are energy independent. See earlier post.)
In Texas, we stayed in Lubbock (just because we had to), Austin and Houston. In Austin, we dined with friends Corey made last year while diving in the Great Barrier Reef and in Houston, we hung out with one of Corey’s childhood friends from Blue Springs, Missouri. A few thoughts: 1. It’s just so lovely and heartwarming to be able to catch up and connect with friends from different walks of life as we do this US road trip. This has been a wonderful unexpected externality to the initial ‘Corey shows Zeynep the national parks and the South’ plan. 2. The friends we met are originally from outside Texas and moved here to work in the health and the oil/gas industries respectively, and that is telling of the Texan economy and it’s vibrant cities. 3. Texas has extremely good food!!! I’d call their ceviche game unmatched by other cities in the US.
In Austin, I went to two small art museums: The Mexic-Arte Museum and the Contemporary Austin (it was a beautiful sunny day and Corey chose to chill outside in the campground). If anyone is in Austin soon or ever runs across Dario Robleto’s hour long video piece called The Boundary of Life is Quietly Crossed, I would recommend it with all force and all my heart! It weaves together narratives of his grandmother’s last heartbeat; the human quest and scientific history of trying to understand, document and image the human heartbeat; the golden recordsent into deep space by NASA in 1977 for extra terrestrials to understand humanity, which includes the heartbeat of the curator when in love; and the latest successes in artificial heart implants in humans, which are continuous motors and not pumps, thereby allowing some humans to be alive without a heartbeat for the first time ever in evolutionary history. It is curious and philosophical and poetic and deeply touching.
Last but not least, when in Texas... Corey and I went to an indoor shooting range. I shot a pistol for the first time. Under supervision of course. The whole place was extremely professional, and still extremely terrifying. As expected, Corey has a better aim than I do. Mostly because, after the first shot, I realized that every time I fire, there is an explosion happening 18 inches from my face and from then on, anticipated the recoil so much that I jerked back while firing the gun. Alas, no Lara Croft here.
