I heart Texas

Driving three hours through Texas on Tuesday and back on Wednesday, I got to see many miles and small towns that are exactly what I love about Texas. I love small-town churches and VFW dance halls, hand-painted signs, old motels with peeling paint and seeing the one restaurant that has a full parking lot at the dinner hour. I love walking into convenience stores and overhearing local conversation, How's your Mom doin', sweetie? and, What college are you headin' off to? I love the small stores and giant farm and feed operations. I love seeing the Dairy Queens. And I love the rows and rows of planted fields of cotton and corn. I love the Cotton Festivals and Watermelon Thump Festivals and all the other weekend festivals announced on banners attached to lines overhead and stretching across the road.



I love seeing the small churches and signs like this one, which has a lot to say in relatively few words.



I don't love taking pictures from a car moving 70 miles an hour with a manual focus lens, but what's a girl to do when she packed the wrong lens but still wants to take pictures? I'll tell you what she does, she ends up deleting a lot of out-of-focus pictures.



I also don't love my feet but this is how I rode most of the way home yesterday so it's inevitable that I would make them the subject of at least one photo since they were not moving and it was easy to focus on them. Oh gosh, I really don't like my feet. Please try to ignore them and would you get a load of that sky?



Just look at that blue sky. I just love a blue sky spread far and wide and dotted with white cottony clouds.



I just love this great state of Texas. I love its people and I love its colors, its rivers and lakes and fields. I love its boots and its music and I love driving its roads beneath the blue, blue skies above.