We are out on vacation or maybe not; there are Events in train and we don’t know enough yet to know which way to jump.
A sequence of Murphic interferences kept Lise in Houston for three days last week instead of the budgeted one. (She continues to believe that Murphy never applies to her, despite being regularly proven wrong.) This pushed everything else out of place, including getting the yard mown—I’ll have to find a gypsy yardman when I get back—and the bamboo beaten down again. Alyks and I did some of it, but much more remains to do. We got packing done Saturday night, but nothing loaded into the car. Looking back, that was an avoidable mistake.
Everyone did their best to ignore the Alarms That Must Not Be Ignored this morning, and getting gas and buying picnic lunch makings pushed us further back. We left, at last, at ten in the morning, two hours behind. Making up for that delay meant we couldn’t do my favored strategy of taking US and state highways until we were out of Texas. Instead, we barreled up I-35 to the south side of Dallas, cut around the southeast corner, and left running up I-30 toward West Memphis, Arkansas, our usual stopping place for the first night.
Despite being late and wanting to hurry, we did stop in a couple of places. The first was lunch at a rest area west of Sulphur Springs, a very pretty and well-landscaped spot with a new and clean visitors’ centre and a bunch of exhibits about regional pland and wildlife. I really could have done without the twenty-four inch square photo of a golden orb-weaver (writing) spider that I suddenly came round a corner and faced. While spiders overall bother me a lot less than they did when I was young, golden orb-weavers are just BIG sumbitches and unnerving at the best of times, never mind when they’re blown up to seven or eight times life-size.
After lunch, Lise suggested we might like to stop in Sulphur Springs to see the Hopkins County courthouse, which she described as “a good one.” She also mentioned a public rest room standing on the courthouse square made of one-way glass, so anyone using it can see whatever is happening outside.
The courthouse was indeed A Good One, a J. Riely Gordon design high in his Richardson Romanesque period with a combination of pink and gray granites and sandstone trim in decorative Italianate patterns. I was reminded stylistically of the courthouses he designed in Ellis and Wise counties. Like the a number of other Gordon designs but unusual for the period, this one had its entry doors set on the corners of the building, not in the centre of the sides. Also very unusual for Texas courthouses, it sits on one corner of the courthouse square instead of slap in the middle, as most do. A hysterical commission plaque hinted this was because construction began before the débris of the old courthouse, which had burned, was cleared away.
Northwest corner entrance. There is a matching one on the southwest corner, but none on the east side.
A medallion displaying the year construction was begun, in deeply carved and decorated sandstone
The courthouse looks out on a prettily rehabilitated public square, apparently part of a 2012 overhaul. Besides the one-way glass rest rooms—there turned out to be two rather than one—there was a public fountain kids could play in (several were doing just that), a giant chess board, and several military memorials.
SOMEone in Sulphur Springs—I don’t know who, but I suspect one of the businesses on that particular corner of the square—has a Sense of Humo(u)r. A and I discovered the zebra crossing on that corner was marked by signs obviously produced by the Ministry of Silly (Cross)Walks.
We headed east again, detouring to investigate the Titus County courthouse in Mount Pleasant. We shouldn’t have bothered. A basically nice 1895 design was ruined in 1940 when the WPA knocked off the tower, flattened the roof and detailing, slathered stucco over the whole mess, and stuck on a couple of minor Art Deco details as an afterthought. One commentator called it “a cross between the battleship Texas and a geometrically-challenged Mexican pyramid,” crowning it as the Ugliest Courthouse in Texas. (He’s not wrong.)
The 1895 courthouse design, a perfectly nice late-Vic Texas courthouse
The courthouse in 1940 after the WPA finished ruining it
Fun and games over, we got back in the car and hauled arses across Arkansas, reaching our traditional first-day stopping point of West Memphis, Arkansas. We did manage to arrive in time to have dinner at our usual Tex-Mex joint. It’s surprisingly acceptable food, though I did have a Discussion with the waitress when I tried to order a margarita straight up only to collide with Arkansas liquor laws. However, the bartender figured out a workaround that nearly got what I asked for while keeping on the right side of liquor law.
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Yeah, man can’t. Neither could I by this time.
