103. Sterling City, Sterling County

Schoooooool’s OUT for SUMMER! This place literally looks like something out of Dazed and Confused. Heck, it looks like a couple of older high schools here in Austin. I wonder if there is a lot of overlap between courthouses and high schools of a certain period and their architects. That said, the place had a certain charm. There’s a really cool looking old hotel across the street. There’s a nice little pocket park, too, that contains a cache that I took a quick shot at but couldn’t find. I was short on time so I couldn’t give it the full look over. But I still had work to do…

The cache itself was in a rest stop across the street from a Dairy Queen being renovated. The Dairy Queen was only of note because I was starting to get a little peckish. But the giant pokey bush? That’s especially salient because it put some of that poking into my hands and arms. Which I was already primed for because I spent some time looking in the matching pokey bushes on the other side of that road. Times like this, stung by plants, jabbed by flora, make me wonder if it’s all worth it. It is (well, 99.8% of the time).

I got rolling on the road. Normally my drives are just a means to an end, but this… This was different. I’ve been out on I-10 a lot of times and seen all those giant wind turbines in the distance, but this time? I’m driving up 158 and dipped down into a canyon. Then as I started driving out, heading upward to crest the other side, those wind turbines rose from the earth into view. Soon enough, I was driving through the turbine farm, surrounded by these wondrous white whirligigs wrestling with the wind. It was such a sight that I was overtaken and couldn’t help but feel a smile come to my face. I drove on, past these gentle giants, and watched the herds of cows eating the grass below them, standing in the great shadows for shade.  I usually hold these types of moments to myself, knowing that I can’t photograph them because they’re already gone, that the moment will reside in my head and in my heart. But in that moment, I wished that cybernetics has progressed to the point that cybernetic eyes were real and that I had one with a camera embedded inside so that I could record that beauty, that synthesis of nature and engineering, and share it with people I love. And, with that smile still on my face, I pulled into…