Victoria

My wife has taken a week off work. It's Thursday and we still haven't really been anywhere, and I can tell she's already having pensive thoughts about the coming Monday. So we're having a day trip, but somehow we're having trouble working up our customary enthusiasm. We always seem to go to the same places, New Braunfels or Boerne or Corpus Christi or Austin. I have a look at the map, realising we've never been south-east. Corpus Christi is on the Texas coast almost directly south from San Antonio, while New Braunfels and Austin are approximately east, leaving a massive quarter cheese slice of terra incognito of which I know little and Bess has only passing knowledge. The largest town is called Victoria as one heads south-east for the coast from San Antonio and it has a zoo, so fuck it - that's what we're doing today. It's an adventure.

Leaving the city, we pass through China Grove which constitutes another first. Apparently it's our white trash neighbourhood, which is interesting. My understanding of San Antonio is that the eastside is mostly African-American, and everywhere else is Hispanic, with white people scattered here and there according to economic circumstances; but it turns out that us crackers actually have our own 'hood and wow we sure do seem to pass a whole lot of trailer homes and RV parking facilities as we head south-east on Rigsby, with plenty of dollar stores and hardly a taquería to be seen. Amazingly there's a garbage collection facility actually called White Trash Services, suggesting someone has a sense of humour. Checking on the internet, I find this was in Victoria rather than China Grove, but it's probably not hard to see how my memory could have misfiled the information.

The two hours to Victoria - maybe under two hours - are uneventful but interesting because I've never seen this part of Texas and it's been a while since Bess passed through. The landscape is different to what we usually see on the other side of the city, very green, almost English in appearance and with a lot of cows. Also, its coastal lowland so the air is thicker, more humid, and we begin to notice great drapes of Spanish moss trailing from the trees. We pass through La Vernia, where the remains of Bess's father were interred for reasons none of us can work out given the lack of any obvious familial connection to the place; then the towns of Pandora, Nixon, and Smiley, which I mention because I'm still entertained by the names which have been given to towns in America. I say towns, but some of them are technically cities, and I still have no idea how the classification works.

I grew up in an English town, a conurbation of several thousand people living in houses built next to each other, a place one could expect to cross on foot from one side to the other in less than an hour. English cities are similar, except bigger and with more people, and it might take a day or longer to walk from one side to the other. However, here in Texas, one may pass three homes on the highway, each separated by about a mile of open land, then find out that the place somehow counts as a town, implying the presence of at least a general store, or something a bit more suggestive of town life behind some patch of trees which you may or may not have noticed; or the same intermittent string of dwellings will suddenly coalesce into what anyone who ever saw a western movie will recognise as Main Street with a town hall and maybe even a square; and sometimes such places are referred to as cities for what I presume to be legislative reasons.

Anyway, Nixon is named after one of the town's founders, in case anyone was wondering.

Arriving in Victoria, we decide to eat, so we pick Casa Jalisco because for some reason it's hard to go wrong with a Mexican diner named after the state of Jalisco. As we enter, I tell Bess that Jalisco gets its name from xalli- the Nahuatl word for sand, Hispanicised with a j after the conquest. I probably tell her this every time we enter a diner bearing a variation on the name, but she doesn't seem to mind. I've never been to Jalisco in Mexico but I assume it's sandy.

The diner is operating at 50% capacity, so we're some distance from the nearest table, six people and a kid, none of them wearing masks. Bess overhears one of them explaining how she ain't gon' wear no dang mask 'cause ain't no sayin' that it matters none nor makes no difference nohow. It's hard to tell whether or not this is directed at us, but it's also getting hard to care. Idiots have become very much a public phenomenon of late, so there's not much point in worrying about one or two poorly informed individuals.

The food is great but there's too much of it.

The zoo, which we gather hasn't been open long, bills itself as the Texas Zoo. The reason for the seemingly unimaginative title turns out to be that the majority of the animals are indigenous - black vultures, turkey vultures, white tailed deer, and others. They're creatures I encounter on a near daily basis in some cases, but it's still a pleasure to see them up close. Critters remind us that life isn't all plague and Guantanamo Bay and Adolf Hitler abruptly downgraded to a man who had some very interesting ideas but went about it all wrong. Sometimes we need that reminder.

The highlight is the bunnies, a whole colony of Flemish Giants, about twenty or thirty of them all sat around their enclosure twitching their noses, with the only activity coming from a group of babies all bouncing around in an adjacent pen. We watch them for about thirty minutes then leave with a warm feeling.

The drive home is uneventful, as was the drive out, which is fine. Not every day has to be life-changing, just something to hit the reset button is usually enough.