After Burgess Falls

After our hike to the falls, we went on the short Ridge Trail, which is a dirt trail that is, well, along a ridge.

In certain parts the trail goes close to the ridge and you can see the river and mother nature in all her glory. It's kind of hard to see too much, because it is not an area that is "kept," but allowed to grow naturally.

It was time to head back to the car, and on the way back to town, we stopped at a little country store where they had this:

I was so excited and had to have a scoop of cookies and cream.

The gentleman who owned/ran the store had a great view at work.

And a really cool windchime.


Pretty hungry from all that hiking, we went to lunch at KFC, that had a buffet! We didn't have the buffet, because they didn't have the grilled chicken on there, but I'd never seen a buffet at a KFC before.

We split up to freshen up a bit and then headed to downtown to look around. Nothing was open but the ice cream parlor, so we had some ice cream, which was pretty good. I had the "Garbage Can" flavor, which was vanilla ice cream mixed with seven different kinds of candy bars.

This is the sign for the ice cream parlor. It is a historic sign that the owners spent over a million dollars renovating.


It rained a little while we were at the ice cream parlor, so we hung out there until it stopped and then walked around downtown for a little. We saw this wall mural:

And explored what we could at the railroad museum.


Having explored what we could downtown, we went to a local park. On the way, we saw this barn. Yes, I know, it's just a barn, but in Texas, there aren't a lot of barns around any more. And I thought it was pretty cool looking.

This park had a whole lot of ducks, who were mainly just hanging around hoping to get fed, and these were not skinny ducks, either. At one point, a gang of four ducks tried to commandeer an automobile, or at the very least, get the driver of said auto to toss them a tasty morsel of anything. They stood in the middle of the drive, and then two walked around to the side of the vehicle and honked at the driver, who refused to give in to their demands. Irritated, but not giving up, they headed over to us. Rather than wait and see what these ducks could do, we walked on.






We agreed on having Mexican food for dinner and went to a local Tex-Mex place that was pretty good. The queso was white, and I've never seen white queso before, but it was cheese with a bit of a kick, and that's all good.

After hanging around for a bit after dinner, we went back downtown to look at the ice cream shop's sign all lit up at night. It was pretty cool-looking.

The next morning, before we packed up the car, we went to sample some of the local donuts, and took one last drive by the pink elephant.



Then we packed up the car and headed out, with Baltimore in the cross-hairs!