Brenham and bluebonnets.

The more we drive up to Brenham, the more we love it. The bluebonnets are all in bloom now.... endless fields of them, tiny patches of them.... and wherever they bloom, they can't be cut down till they go to seed. Then the following year, they will multiply like rabbits. We lost count of how many cars had pulled off the road so people could take photos of their kids sitting in the middle of all that blue. A few little girls wore beautiful blue and white dresses as their parents took photos-- I told my husband that those pictures would end up being the photos on the family's Christmas cards.

There was one field covered in tiny yellow flowers, for as far as your eye could see. It reminded us of the butterbloom fields in Germany.... there were hundreds and hundreds of those fields all over Germany last year, as there have been every year for generations. Fields just set aside for a tiny yellow wildflower, to make the landscape pretty to look at.

While we were driving around the country roads the other day, we saw a turtle trying to cross one of the two-lane roads. Every time a car came by, the turtle pulled in his head and legs and he'd sit there. The cars either swerved around him, or the turtle happened to be in the middle of the road and away from the wheels. How long could his luck hold out? We stopped our car and I jumped out and carried the traffic-stunned turtle to the side of the road he was trying to get to. As I picked him up, I could have sworn I heard a low grumble coming from inside that shell. As soon as I put him down in the grass, he poked his head out of his shell, looked around at me, and then off he went. Destination unknown, but at least he got there safely.

During our travels, we saw a self-storage facility, this one named "Amazing Space." For the next half-mile after that one, my husband was humming the song Amazing Grace...

We had lunch again in the historic downtown section of Brenham.... reminds me of Galveston, with all of the shops and tiny cafes. (Except there isn't a bar tucked inbetween each of the shops.) The town has a Christmas parade every December, and every shop and store and street gets all decked out for the holidays because the tourists make Brenham a must-shop destination for antiques, especially during the holidays. (My kind of town.)

There are wooden benches all over the quaint historic downtown streets, and people just stroll around the streets, either shopping or window-shopping, and they sit on the benches and eat the Texas-famous Bluebell ice cream that's sold (and made) right in Brenham. We passed by the Bluebell Ice Cream Factory, but we didn't stop in this time. We've been to the factory before, and we will most likely go there again.

Two hours driving time, from here to Brenham...... and it's like being a world away. In fact, as soon as you drive past the downtown area of Houston, you can see the landscape on the side of the roadways turning from concrete to green. You get away from the concrete of the city and you're surrounded by the green fields and the bluebonnets and all those pecan trees...... Amazing Space indeed. I am ready to go back.