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Huntsville and eastern Texas

[Today: 3.1 miles on treadmill]

This past weekend we made a trip to Huntsville, TX for the annual Rocky Raccoon 100 mile race in the Huntsville State Park.  I may have more to say about that some other time.

But for now, just some general comments about our trip.

Probably the most boring part of the trip is the chunk from Starkville to Jackson, MS on highway 25.  I don’t know why, but that road seems to go on forever.

From Jackson, it is a straight shot west to Shreveport, LA on I-20.  From there we followed the Goggle Maps directions to/from Huntsville which took us on a lot of rural farm-to-market roads skirting Carthage, Nacogdoches, and Lufkin.

The landscape in eastern Texas reminds me of western Tennessee.  It is flat in a general way, and the land near the roadways was mostly grazing/pasture.  There were a lot of trailer homes.  There were also a lot of dilapidated houses, some with newer trailers in the same yard and some just neglected and falling down.  The small towns had some substantial buildings, schools I suspect, which generally looked forlorn and probably unused.  The signs were there of past success but recent (30-50+ years?) withdrawal.

The bit of Louisiana south of Shreveport was fairly nice.  And once we got on I-20, the rest of Louisiana looked ok.  All the way through Mississippi we were on a non-interstate divided 4-lane and most of the homes/construction along that road is pretty nice.

Some of the contrast with Texas is probably due to being off of the main roads.  I’ve always been impressed with the number of abandoned houses and buildings in Mississippi.  People seem to just walk away and let the kudzu take over.  We saw a lot of that in Texas, more of that in Texas than I can remember seeing on any specific trip in Mississippi.

We had a nice visit in Huntsville.  It seemed to be a nice town with some current development.  It sits astride I-45 which links Dallas to Houston, so there is a lot of traffic in the area and a lot of restaurants and hotels.  It is also home to a large prison, and the death-row where Texas dispatches their worst offenders.  We looked up on google what the local tourist sights were, and spent about an hour Sunday afternoon on a tour of the Texas Prison Museum.

4 replies on “Huntsville and eastern Texas”

I think you’re right about impermanence, at least in appearance.

Getting rid of an old trailer is not an inexpensive proposition. We’ve got one a mile down the road from us that has trees grow up around it (and probably inside it). It is almost completely hidden. So it turns into permanent until such time as the steel in the frame is worth dragging it out of there.

Another place about 3 miles away, I drive by it rather frequently, and I usually look to see if that ’70s vintage toyota landcruiser is still parked in the weeds… just the other day I noticed for the first time that there is a nice sized house (not a trailer) in the trees behind the landcrusier, all grown over.

There’s a property over near Starkville that we would sometimes run past in the Saturday morning running group. It is a brick house in the shape / dimensions of a mobile home. I think there is a mobile home inside there but they put the brick up around the outside.

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Mobile homes (“trailer” is no longer the pc term – ha!) used to be a less expensive alternative to buying a house, too. Now, it’s much less expensive to buy a moderate home in an older neighborhood than it is too rent a space and live in a run down trailer. At least, around here. Of course, the house may require more of a down-payment to get into.

The people who own the house Sherry rents own two mobile-home courts for people 55 and older. They are full most of the time. The people buy the trailer and pay lot rent, I believe. The one out by Sherry is nice, lots of grass, fields, a lake…the one in town is crowded and barren, except for a few nice trees.

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