5569 Miles: River Walk, Padre Island, and The Waffle House, Chapter 4
River Walk
The River Walk (Paseo del Rio) is not far from the Alamo. Less than one half mile away. In fact, River Walk even connects with the Alamo. This is a unique attraction for a city. If you miss this, I don't care what you have seen, you have missed San Antonio. Since the Alamo and River Walk are virtually adjacent to one another, these two attractions together are the number one tourist attraction in Texas. Festivals, craft shows, and other events take place there each year. It's on a subterranean level of the city, and you must descend staircases at various entry points to get down to the San Antonio River where River Walk lines the banks.
This all started essentially in 1961after years of flooding problems on a beautiful little river running right through the center of San Antonio. The city hired the designers of Disneyland to come up with a plan for the commercial potential of the river. Flood control construction started first. New businesses opened on the top side of the river in 1968 in light of the city's plans. Today we have a premier tourist destination where scores of restaurants, hotel entrances, and shops that line quaint walkways on either side of a narrow river that meanders and curves beneath city streets that pass overhead. Below, several arching walking bridges that remind me of Venice carry pedestrians from one bank to the next. One extension of the river even flows through a hotel atrium. Sidewalk cafes, beautiful trees that are sometimes ten stories tall rise up into downtown San Antonio from the flower and tree lined indigenously landscaped River Walk. My wife and I sampled cheese enchiladas right on the banks of the San Antonio at a little sidewalk table in front of Casa Rio on this warm and special day.
Corpus Christie and Padre Island
Up we came out of the belly of San Antonio and fired south on I-37 to Corpus Christi, 143 miles south south east. As we got into the heart of Corpus, we took a right on Texas 358, crossed the inter-coastal waterway to the barrier island of Padre Island and turned north on Texas 361. We pulled into the nearest beach access and parked right in the middle of North Padre Island on the board-flat, creamy tan beach itself, about 100 yards from the Gulf of Mexico. It was late afternoon in early March. Dusk was an hour away. The temperatures were cooling, but I could still feel the thickness of the humid subtropical climate so common to the Gulf Coast regions. The record snowfall for Corpus is 4.4" on Christmas Eve, 2004. It was gone on December 26.
Padre Island is the largest of Texas' barrier islands and is the world's longest barrier island. Virtually the entire beach serves as a major roadway of compacted sand. It is the second largest island by area in the contiguous United States after Long Island, New York, 130 miles long. The King of Spain granted title to this island to Nicholas Balli in 1759. His grandson, Padre Balli, assumed title to the island in 1829 posthumously. Thus we have the name, Padre Island. He had built the first church there to convert the Indians. Toward the end of WWII, Padre Island was one of eight candidate sites chosen to detonate the first atomic bomb. Fortunately for the residents of South Texas, White Sands Proving Ground was chosen for the nuclear test instead.
Corpus Christi is the eighth largest city in Texas. The Spanish gave the city its name, meaning the Body of Christ. But it has been nicknamed The Sparkling City By the Sea. 66% of the total square miles of the city is water. Hence, its name.
The Port of Corpus Christi is the sixth largest U.S. port and the deepest inshore port on the Gulf of Mexico, handling mostly oil and agricultural products. If you keep driving north on Padre Island and head for Victoria, Texas, you will understand why. Refineries dominate the area in the production of petrochemicals. There is also a naval air station in Corpus along with the Corpus Christi Army Depot, which is the largest helicopter repair facility in the world. If you drive around the Southern states, you will occasionally see Whataburger, a cheap, fast food hamburger chain in 10 states. They used to headquarter here in Corpus but moved to San Antonio.
Corpus Christi became the first major city to offer city wide free WI-FI, in order to allow remote meter reading after a meter reader was attacked by a dog. But along came Earthlink who purchased the network in 2007 for $5.5 million. WI-FI stopped being a free service on May 31, 2007.
Farrah Fawcett, actor Dabney Coleman, actor Lou Diamond Phillips, and country and western singer Don Williams all hail from Corpus Christi.
As darkness set in, we stopped for dinner and wound our way for over 100 miles on the backroads in a northeast direction through many twinkling, steaming refineries and arrived late in Victoria, Texas, 50 miles inland from the Gulf. Victoria is known as "The Crossroads" because of its location within a two-hour drive of Corpus Christi, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin.
Houston
The next morning was bright and sunny and very cold. The 500 mile trip from El Paso to Kerrville and the late nights of travel were getting to me. I had to fight fatigue all the way and nearly fell asleep several times on the way to Houston. It is a very dangerous situation when sleep is stalking you while riding a motorcycle. The effect is no different than driving a car for a long time. This was one of those times when I wasn't sure I wanted to go on. I had thousands of miles to go, and this was also working its way into my mind and making me even more tired. Linda had to keep pounding on my back to keep me awake. The ride seemed to last for hours. If you ride a motorcycle long enough, these days will come. They always do. That is why I don't let these times guide my decisions about riding. This will pass in time, and all the reasons I do this always come back with verification. Eventually.
By the time I reached Houston, I was back. The maze of freeways, the volume of traffic, and the energy of the fourth largest city in the United States had saved me from myself. I had called a girl that I had gone to school with from Kindergarten through high school but had not seen for many years and made arrangements to stay with her and her husband in a place north of Houston called The Woodlands, 28 miles north of Houston along Interstate 45.
The Waffle House
The next morning we were out early. It was 376 miles to Mandeville, Louisiana, my next stop. We headed south on I-45 and turned left onto I-10 east. Somewhere near the edge of Houston, I spotted one of my favorite restaurants, the Waffle House, and pulled in for breakfast. If you live anywhere in the Southeastern United States, you will see a Waffle House at nearly every exit on an Interstate highway. It all started in 1955 in a suburb of Atlanta when two men who were neighbors, Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner, started a restaurant business. Rogers worked for a national chain called Toddle House, and Forkner was a realtor. In 1957, a second Waffle House was built. By 1961, there were four. More followed in neighboring states. At the end of the 60‘s, there were 48. In the 70‘s, they had 401. There were 682 at the end of the 80‘s. 1,228 waited at exits at the end of the 20th century. In 2006, there were 1500, and they finally accepted credit cards after 51 years of cash-only. Today they have 1600 restaurants in 25 states built on the short order.
If you laid all of the Smithfield Bacon that Waffle House serves in a year end-to-end, it would wrap all the way around the equator. If you could stack all of the Sausage Patties that Waffle House serves in one day on top of each other, it would be nearly twice the size of the World's Tallest Building, Burj Khalifa in Dubai or four times the size of the Empire State Building. They have served over 2.5 billion eggs and 1.7 billion bacon strips since 1955.
Many a night as I have rolled over freeways early in the morning in my position as a fundraiser for Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and for other ministries, I have seen through the blackness of my windshield that brilliant yellow sign with black letters sticking out over the trees. I knew that familiar yellow glare meant a little oblong box was always open and that I would soon be rekindled for more driving by that plain, diner-ish atmosphere. Waffle House was always best when it was cold and raining outside or when snow was whisking across the highway like waves of sand on Chicago's Lake Michigan beaches in the winter. I would pull up slowly into the soft light that fell out of the windows upon the hood of my car as I looked in at diners hunched over the counter. Those windows reminded me of a modern day version of Nighthawks, the 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner at night. There is ALWAYS somebody in a Waffle House. As I yanked the door open, I stepped from night into day under their blazing fluorescent lamps, and somebody like Flo on the TV series "Alice" that ran from 1976-1985 would yell out, "Good mornin', Hon." In a Waffle House, you are always Hon, Sweetie, Sweet Heart, Sugar, and all those southernisms that the deep South embeds in the mouths of many of their blue-collar women.
A long-haul truck driver friend of mine once told me that if you want to stay awake on the road, never eat pasta. It will be like sliding onto flannel sheets in a Michigan winter on Christmas Eve. He said eat eggs. Eggs will keep you awake. So on those long drive nights till way up in the morning as my driving endurance to the next day's work city was waning, I would saddle up to the Waffle House counter and go through a pointless routine of scanning over their yellow menu. Pointless because I always ordered the same thing. The only thing as far as I was concerned. I had only sampled one thing on that menu for many years. If you ever order it, it will be the only thing you will ever order too. Cheese eggs (scrambled). bacon. hash browns scattered and smothered (that means covered with onions), grits, and raisin toast. I substitute the raisin toast with good old white toast because I have a memory from the time I was a child of my mother putting moist scrambled eggs on white toast soaked with butter. I fold that bread over to make an egg sandwich, and my taste buds do time machine travel back into the late 40‘s. Waffle House has its own way to make scrambled eggs. Wherever you go, the eggs and cheese are always moist, and the bacon is as flat as a dollar bill after they lay a press on top of it.
With coffee coming out of every container in the joint as those sometimes toothless, sometimes pretty, sometimes slovenly, sometimes old, sometimes young waitresses fly by the counter and cash register calling everybody "Hon", bumping into one another, yelling out Waffle House lingo to the sometimes clean, sometimes covered with grease short order cook who is scraping the grill like he is sanding it and then throwing down hash browns, onions, and cheese like a high roller skipping dice down a craps table.
The only thing about a Waffle House that may be a bit disconcerting - and even this is part of the experience because it just seems to be the Waffle House way that makes the joint always the same - is the bathrooms. Many of them are like the classic, disgusting, gas station bathrooms that are opened with a key attached to the end of a telephone pole. If you can get by those restrooms and some of those waitresses that look like they have been in there for a week and have slid across the floor on their bellies like a seal on the Arctic ice at the end of every eight hour shift, you will do as I do and stop at one of these places every chance you get.
So Linda and I went in to this Waffle House box in Houston and were served another round of cheese eggs, bacon, grits, white toast, and coffee by a woman who looked exactly like Flo. Her hair was platinum, twirled and curled, and stacked high on her head like Bart Simpson's mother, Marge, with a large Christmas bow sitting on the top of her behind holding up her apron. Her lips went round and round as she chomped on her gum. Every time she lifted her teeth off of her Spearmint, you could hear a popping sound at the same time that somebody got called "Sugar" in Houston twang. It was classic. I remounted the Beemer with this image sitting here in my mind eleven years later.
The River Walk (Paseo del Rio) is not far from the Alamo. Less than one half mile away. In fact, River Walk even connects with the Alamo. This is a unique attraction for a city. If you miss this, I don't care what you have seen, you have missed San Antonio. Since the Alamo and River Walk are virtually adjacent to one another, these two attractions together are the number one tourist attraction in Texas. Festivals, craft shows, and other events take place there each year. It's on a subterranean level of the city, and you must descend staircases at various entry points to get down to the San Antonio River where River Walk lines the banks.
This all started essentially in 1961after years of flooding problems on a beautiful little river running right through the center of San Antonio. The city hired the designers of Disneyland to come up with a plan for the commercial potential of the river. Flood control construction started first. New businesses opened on the top side of the river in 1968 in light of the city's plans. Today we have a premier tourist destination where scores of restaurants, hotel entrances, and shops that line quaint walkways on either side of a narrow river that meanders and curves beneath city streets that pass overhead. Below, several arching walking bridges that remind me of Venice carry pedestrians from one bank to the next. One extension of the river even flows through a hotel atrium. Sidewalk cafes, beautiful trees that are sometimes ten stories tall rise up into downtown San Antonio from the flower and tree lined indigenously landscaped River Walk. My wife and I sampled cheese enchiladas right on the banks of the San Antonio at a little sidewalk table in front of Casa Rio on this warm and special day.
Corpus Christie and Padre Island
Up we came out of the belly of San Antonio and fired south on I-37 to Corpus Christi, 143 miles south south east. As we got into the heart of Corpus, we took a right on Texas 358, crossed the inter-coastal waterway to the barrier island of Padre Island and turned north on Texas 361. We pulled into the nearest beach access and parked right in the middle of North Padre Island on the board-flat, creamy tan beach itself, about 100 yards from the Gulf of Mexico. It was late afternoon in early March. Dusk was an hour away. The temperatures were cooling, but I could still feel the thickness of the humid subtropical climate so common to the Gulf Coast regions. The record snowfall for Corpus is 4.4" on Christmas Eve, 2004. It was gone on December 26.
Padre Island is the largest of Texas' barrier islands and is the world's longest barrier island. Virtually the entire beach serves as a major roadway of compacted sand. It is the second largest island by area in the contiguous United States after Long Island, New York, 130 miles long. The King of Spain granted title to this island to Nicholas Balli in 1759. His grandson, Padre Balli, assumed title to the island in 1829 posthumously. Thus we have the name, Padre Island. He had built the first church there to convert the Indians. Toward the end of WWII, Padre Island was one of eight candidate sites chosen to detonate the first atomic bomb. Fortunately for the residents of South Texas, White Sands Proving Ground was chosen for the nuclear test instead.
Corpus Christi is the eighth largest city in Texas. The Spanish gave the city its name, meaning the Body of Christ. But it has been nicknamed The Sparkling City By the Sea. 66% of the total square miles of the city is water. Hence, its name.
The Port of Corpus Christi is the sixth largest U.S. port and the deepest inshore port on the Gulf of Mexico, handling mostly oil and agricultural products. If you keep driving north on Padre Island and head for Victoria, Texas, you will understand why. Refineries dominate the area in the production of petrochemicals. There is also a naval air station in Corpus along with the Corpus Christi Army Depot, which is the largest helicopter repair facility in the world. If you drive around the Southern states, you will occasionally see Whataburger, a cheap, fast food hamburger chain in 10 states. They used to headquarter here in Corpus but moved to San Antonio.
Corpus Christi became the first major city to offer city wide free WI-FI, in order to allow remote meter reading after a meter reader was attacked by a dog. But along came Earthlink who purchased the network in 2007 for $5.5 million. WI-FI stopped being a free service on May 31, 2007.
Farrah Fawcett, actor Dabney Coleman, actor Lou Diamond Phillips, and country and western singer Don Williams all hail from Corpus Christi.
As darkness set in, we stopped for dinner and wound our way for over 100 miles on the backroads in a northeast direction through many twinkling, steaming refineries and arrived late in Victoria, Texas, 50 miles inland from the Gulf. Victoria is known as "The Crossroads" because of its location within a two-hour drive of Corpus Christi, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin.
Houston
The next morning was bright and sunny and very cold. The 500 mile trip from El Paso to Kerrville and the late nights of travel were getting to me. I had to fight fatigue all the way and nearly fell asleep several times on the way to Houston. It is a very dangerous situation when sleep is stalking you while riding a motorcycle. The effect is no different than driving a car for a long time. This was one of those times when I wasn't sure I wanted to go on. I had thousands of miles to go, and this was also working its way into my mind and making me even more tired. Linda had to keep pounding on my back to keep me awake. The ride seemed to last for hours. If you ride a motorcycle long enough, these days will come. They always do. That is why I don't let these times guide my decisions about riding. This will pass in time, and all the reasons I do this always come back with verification. Eventually.
By the time I reached Houston, I was back. The maze of freeways, the volume of traffic, and the energy of the fourth largest city in the United States had saved me from myself. I had called a girl that I had gone to school with from Kindergarten through high school but had not seen for many years and made arrangements to stay with her and her husband in a place north of Houston called The Woodlands, 28 miles north of Houston along Interstate 45.
The Waffle House
The next morning we were out early. It was 376 miles to Mandeville, Louisiana, my next stop. We headed south on I-45 and turned left onto I-10 east. Somewhere near the edge of Houston, I spotted one of my favorite restaurants, the Waffle House, and pulled in for breakfast. If you live anywhere in the Southeastern United States, you will see a Waffle House at nearly every exit on an Interstate highway. It all started in 1955 in a suburb of Atlanta when two men who were neighbors, Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner, started a restaurant business. Rogers worked for a national chain called Toddle House, and Forkner was a realtor. In 1957, a second Waffle House was built. By 1961, there were four. More followed in neighboring states. At the end of the 60‘s, there were 48. In the 70‘s, they had 401. There were 682 at the end of the 80‘s. 1,228 waited at exits at the end of the 20th century. In 2006, there were 1500, and they finally accepted credit cards after 51 years of cash-only. Today they have 1600 restaurants in 25 states built on the short order.
If you laid all of the Smithfield Bacon that Waffle House serves in a year end-to-end, it would wrap all the way around the equator. If you could stack all of the Sausage Patties that Waffle House serves in one day on top of each other, it would be nearly twice the size of the World's Tallest Building, Burj Khalifa in Dubai or four times the size of the Empire State Building. They have served over 2.5 billion eggs and 1.7 billion bacon strips since 1955.
Many a night as I have rolled over freeways early in the morning in my position as a fundraiser for Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and for other ministries, I have seen through the blackness of my windshield that brilliant yellow sign with black letters sticking out over the trees. I knew that familiar yellow glare meant a little oblong box was always open and that I would soon be rekindled for more driving by that plain, diner-ish atmosphere. Waffle House was always best when it was cold and raining outside or when snow was whisking across the highway like waves of sand on Chicago's Lake Michigan beaches in the winter. I would pull up slowly into the soft light that fell out of the windows upon the hood of my car as I looked in at diners hunched over the counter. Those windows reminded me of a modern day version of Nighthawks, the 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner at night. There is ALWAYS somebody in a Waffle House. As I yanked the door open, I stepped from night into day under their blazing fluorescent lamps, and somebody like Flo on the TV series "Alice" that ran from 1976-1985 would yell out, "Good mornin', Hon." In a Waffle House, you are always Hon, Sweetie, Sweet Heart, Sugar, and all those southernisms that the deep South embeds in the mouths of many of their blue-collar women.
A long-haul truck driver friend of mine once told me that if you want to stay awake on the road, never eat pasta. It will be like sliding onto flannel sheets in a Michigan winter on Christmas Eve. He said eat eggs. Eggs will keep you awake. So on those long drive nights till way up in the morning as my driving endurance to the next day's work city was waning, I would saddle up to the Waffle House counter and go through a pointless routine of scanning over their yellow menu. Pointless because I always ordered the same thing. The only thing as far as I was concerned. I had only sampled one thing on that menu for many years. If you ever order it, it will be the only thing you will ever order too. Cheese eggs (scrambled). bacon. hash browns scattered and smothered (that means covered with onions), grits, and raisin toast. I substitute the raisin toast with good old white toast because I have a memory from the time I was a child of my mother putting moist scrambled eggs on white toast soaked with butter. I fold that bread over to make an egg sandwich, and my taste buds do time machine travel back into the late 40‘s. Waffle House has its own way to make scrambled eggs. Wherever you go, the eggs and cheese are always moist, and the bacon is as flat as a dollar bill after they lay a press on top of it.
With coffee coming out of every container in the joint as those sometimes toothless, sometimes pretty, sometimes slovenly, sometimes old, sometimes young waitresses fly by the counter and cash register calling everybody "Hon", bumping into one another, yelling out Waffle House lingo to the sometimes clean, sometimes covered with grease short order cook who is scraping the grill like he is sanding it and then throwing down hash browns, onions, and cheese like a high roller skipping dice down a craps table.
The only thing about a Waffle House that may be a bit disconcerting - and even this is part of the experience because it just seems to be the Waffle House way that makes the joint always the same - is the bathrooms. Many of them are like the classic, disgusting, gas station bathrooms that are opened with a key attached to the end of a telephone pole. If you can get by those restrooms and some of those waitresses that look like they have been in there for a week and have slid across the floor on their bellies like a seal on the Arctic ice at the end of every eight hour shift, you will do as I do and stop at one of these places every chance you get.
So Linda and I went in to this Waffle House box in Houston and were served another round of cheese eggs, bacon, grits, white toast, and coffee by a woman who looked exactly like Flo. Her hair was platinum, twirled and curled, and stacked high on her head like Bart Simpson's mother, Marge, with a large Christmas bow sitting on the top of her behind holding up her apron. Her lips went round and round as she chomped on her gum. Every time she lifted her teeth off of her Spearmint, you could hear a popping sound at the same time that somebody got called "Sugar" in Houston twang. It was classic. I remounted the Beemer with this image sitting here in my mind eleven years later.