The Cheese Cave

We passed through Waco, Texas on the way to Dallas some time last year. We'd been through Waco before without having any reason for stopping, but this time we saw billboards for something called the Cheese Cave. The distance from San Antonio to Dallas is such as to render minor excursions from the main part of the journey impractical, but we made a mental note because in our heads we imagined vast underground caverns full of cheese, and who wouldn't want to see that?

So now that we have the time, we're going to have a proper look at the Waco Cheese Cave. Furthermore, we're peeling the kid's face from whichever screen it has become affixed to and we're taking him along for the ride so that it will be an experience, so that one day he'll be able to look back and remember that time when he was in a moving vehicle, far, far away from his laptop. Ordinarily he would have been at summer camp but it was called off due to coronavirus. He's still a bit pissed off about this but we're doing what we can.

I'm still cycling twenty miles a day, five days a week, but I've switched my schedule so that I get out on the bike at around 7AM, then arrive back a little after nine to throw myself into the daily round of cleaning up and emptying litter trays - chores undertaken prior to going out on the bike up until a few weeks ago. This is because we're having one of those hot summers and it's hit 100° some mornings, which is 37° in old money in case anyone was wondering - a little too hot for riding a bike across the prairie. Anyway, this change of schedule means I can get in my daily twenty miles before we drive to Waco, which is nice, because I'm not crazy about long car journeys, particularly if I haven't had any exercise that day.

We get going at around ten in the morning. It's a fairly straightforward haul, two-hundred miles or about three hours depending on how you look at it, up I-35 passing through San Marcos, Austin, and Temple. Luckily my wife enjoys driving.

The boy sits quietly in the back. After a while I realise he actually isn't absorbed in playing a game on his phone and is instead taking in the scenery. He turned seventeen about a week ago and I'm not yet accustomed to this newly contemplative version of my stepson. Even without the distraction of pixelated elves, he might ordinarily have spent the journey delivering a long, long list of snakes of Texas, famous medical miracles, or the unsung achievements of Nikolai Tesla. His chatty periods can be quite entertaining, but the quiet nevertheless makes for a pleasant change.

Three hours later we locate the Cheese Cave off a small road just the other side of Waco. It's actually an eighteenth century agricultural building converted into a store, a former shed or workshop or something. We go in. They have yoghurt, toffee, and other things handmade on site. They have cheese, but in nothing like the quantity I would have anticipated given the promise of the name. I've actually seen more cheese in my local supermarket. Also, it's hard to get a good look at the cheese as there are two other customers in the store, two older women stood in front of the refrigerated cabinets talking loudly about favourite cheeses they have eaten. It doesn't seem to occur to them to move, and they don't even seem to be buying. They are cheese enthusiasts.

'Just trying to buy some cheese here,' I say between politely gritted teeth as I forcibly interpolate myself between them and the cabinets. 'Thank you so much.'

The cheeses on offer are mostly cheddar with a few of the mouldy varieties, all wrapped in wax paper. I pick out a block of ghost pepper cheddar and read the label which lists four types of chilli among its ingredients. It sounds interesting so I head for the counter, passing the boy who is picking toffees out of a jar.

'You know what a ghost pepper is?' my wife asks, concerned.

'It's the hottest one, right?'

She nods, still evidently concerned, and now the boy has taken an interest. This is because every six months he tells us about the YouTube video featuring an idiot eating a raw ghost pepper as part of some challenge. I've seen the video, most of which shows the idiot groaning and clutching his stomach before being taken to hospital, which didn't really impress me. I like chilli peppers, but once you're past being able to taste the food, I can't see the point; however, I tell myself, this is obviously some fancy cheese place, as proven by the cheese vats - or whatever they are - which we are able to view through a window at one side of the store. If they've made cheese using ghost peppers, then flavour is almost certainly a priority, with hopefully few concessions to the sort of persons who might engage in competitive endurance eating.

'So where's the actual cave?' I ask the woman at the till.

Once outside we follow her directions to what may have been an outhouse. There are stone steps within, leading down to a window behind which is some large subterranean space with shelf after shelf of cheeses maturing down in the cool beneath the baking soil of Texas. The aroma of cheese is overpowering.

'So that was the Cheese Cave,' I observe once we're back in the car, back with gloriously cold air blasting from the AC. 'I must admit I expected more, but I'm glad we came.'

Three hours drive for five minutes spent buying cheese seems eccentric, but my wife points out that Waco also has something called the Mammoth Monument and the Dr. Pepper Museum.

The Mammoth Monument is in a national park, and as we pull up to the gate we realise there's an admission fee, which we weigh against how much we want to walk around a park at midday in 100° heat. It turns out that none of us are keen on the idea, at least in the absence of further information regarding what we're likely to see. We presume the remains of a mammoth were once found somewhere in the vicinity, and our projected worst case scenario is that the discovery may now be acknowledged by a monument in honour of the mammoth; so we probably aren't likely to see anything which actually was a mammoth at any point of its previous existence.

We head back into the city, which is bigger than any of us recall, and more picturesque with a lot of nineteenth century buildings around the centre. We pass the Dr. Pepper Museum commemorating the history of said fizzy drink, which was apparently invented right here in Waco. Dr. Pepper is one of those flavours resembling nothing found in nature and I'm not really a fan. I try to imagine what we might see were we to enter the museum. I imagine a diorama with a manikin of Dr. Pepper himself, sat in his dentist's chair, invited to rinse and suddenly realising he could turn that flavour into a drink and sell it to people.

The boy is quite keen on Dr. Pepper but even he's less than stoked about the prospect of the museum, and so we head back to I-35 secure in the knowledge that at the end of the day we will have clocked up four-hundred miles in the name of buying cheese.

Back on I-35, it begins to dawn on me just how stupid are most of the billboards we've seen today. I suppose they were always stupid, but it's not often that I spend six hours having them flash past, one after another. I've become accustomed to advertising which aspires to sophistication in its own gormless way, which regards itself as slick or even witty, but out here on the highway we're back to lowest common denominators and no-one going broke through underestimating the stupidity of the general public.

The first I notice are billboards promoting the idea of not being a massive dick when one's journey is delayed by roadworks. The billboards show smiling roadworks people in hard hats and hi-vis clothing. Do I speed in your place of work? one of them asks in friendly rhetorical spirit.

Well, no, I suppose some PR person imagines us sheepishly admitting, no, you don't, as we ease off the gas, settling down to a more leisurely eighty. The other variants are even more conceptually basic. Along similar lines, we pass a billboard reading, when the push comes to the shove, don't, then, please be civil. It seems to suggest that we, as a people, are getting angrier - not just those temporarily inconvenienced by roadworks along I-35; and I suppose we are.

There are Buc-ee's billboards every five or six miles advertising what is essentially the motorway service station equivalent of underwhelming relatives who were never quite so funny or popular as they believed themselves to be. Buc-ee's billboards are mostly all the same thing, their badly drawn cartoon beaver logo with text. The slogans were never anything side-splitting, and were usually slightly bewildering - THE EYES OF BUC-EE'S ARE UPON YOU, being one example; but just recently they may as well be speaking in tongues. There's STOP - NUGGET TIME!, which I assume alludes to MC Hammer's allegedly classic U Can't Touch This without bothering to include an actual joke; BEAVER FREEZER which helpfully includes an image of some ice lollies and presumably appeals to those reduced to hysterics by combinations of words which sort of rhyme but don't; and BRISKET NOW, JERKY LATER for which I can't even be bothered to compose facetious commentary.

Given recent events, it's beginning to feel as though America is  becoming progressively more stupid, and this time next year Buc-ee's billboards will feature suggestions along the lines of EAT CANDY BAR - MAKE HUNGER STOP!

We pass an eighteen-wheeler which seems to underscore my train of thought. The rear door features a bumper sticker of text written above and below the stars and stripes. The text above speaks of supporting our troops, while the text below concludes with, give comfort and aid to the enemy? No way!, which is possibly the most retarded sentence I've encountered this year, despite heavy competition. The arbitrary nationalism might not be quite so objectionable were it not phrased in the language of an NFL-addled jock teenager whose sexual preferences have been called into question.

No way, dude! No way!

Eventually, half an hour from home, some idle comment passed around as part of the journey unexpectedly blossoms into a conversation, specifically one which yields the information that my stepson considers Bram Stoker's The Snake's Pass to be one of the most boring things he's ever read. He elaborates, describing what happens in the book, what he liked and what he didn't like, and all the while my head is spinning. I know he reads but have never truly worked out at what level, assuming most of his reading to be undertaken because he can't get out of it - an assumption supported by my never actually having seen him with a book.

The thing is, I haven't even heard of The Snake's Pass. I tell him it sounds as though it suffers from the same problems as Stoker's massively overrated Dracula; and suddenly, for the first time ever, I'm having a conversation with my stepson about books, and books other than Harry fucking Potter. We talk about Dickens, Catch-22, and others, and most of it is what we don't like about this, that or the other; but it's a conversation I never thought I would ever have, and it's obvious that he's considered what he's saying at some length; and somehow it's all thanks to the Cheese Cave, kind of.