THE SIX STAGES OF MID-LIFE CRISIS: 3) REPLAY

Reflection, Rumination & Rhetoric From the Road

This is based on a trip I took to Austin, Texas coming up seven years ago.

To celebrate the third stage of midlife crisis—REPLAY—Van Stein and I opt for an old fashioned summer road trip. So we rent a car and what do we find? Tired towns with LBJ libraries, LBJ schools, LBJ this, LBJ that… and then we get to Johnson City. Needless to say, this is no one’s destination of choice and not ours either, headed as we are towards Fredericksburg, reputed to be an artist’s enclave.

Not. 

Van Stein’s Tagline:  Here, kitschy-kitschy.

Even worse, almost everything that looks to be vintage Americana is a Made in China reproduction.

Beer gardens complete the picture in Fritztown, so nicknamed by the Germans who settled this place and continue to prepare food as they did in Prussia 150 years ago…

…so thank God or Mother Nature for the sweetest peaches I ever tasted from a roadside stand as we head towards Devil’s Backbone through Texas hill country past Purgatory Road and into a town that should be called Gift-Shop-From-Hell because trinkets and trash is all it is.

Then on to Lockhart, “The Barbecue Capital of Texas,” for more brisket, potato salad and beans, which we try to walk off by poking around a vast vintage shop that goes on forever and there is no one inside except a sole shopkeeper who babbles relentlessly about everything being subject to one type of discount or another though there isn’t one damn thing worth buying.

“We’ve got three more warehouses full of things,” she babbles on.

The experience leaves me not only psychologically drained but in serious DEPRESSION, which means the fourth stage of midlife crisis has arrived ahead of schedule.