Just outside Beaumont, TX, right off the 10, is everything I’ve been waiting for: Gator Country, a family-run park packed to the teeth with alligators big and small – and huge – and the very nice people who rescued and care for them.
We spent a few amazing hours wandering around, gawking at these incredible beasts, handling the babies and other smaller creatures, and chatting with Arleigh and his staff.
As we depart for New Orleans this morning, the question has become: where to next? We are winding our way to the Philadelphia area, but until now our route has sorta defined itself. Avoid the cold. Go roughly eastward. Seek out beauty, but don’t push too hard.
Once we hit New Orleans for a week, we’ll have some real decisions to make as the number of equally viable routes grows by an order of magnitude. Do we stay as far south as possible until hitting the east coast, then head up? Do we cut up Mississippi and Tennessee and see Graceland? Explore the Ozarks, Appalachia, Bourbon County? See it all and extend our trip by another month?
Halfway between Austin and New Orleans along the 10 is Beaumont, TX, an oil and port town of 100,000 people, where we decided to stop for a few nights on our way to the Big Easy. Cajun food, alligators and airboat tours have been on our minds, so as soon as we settled in at the campground I began looking for a place to eat.
I almost took us to a chain – it had good reviews on Yelp, as if that’s ever been a reliable guide – and then I found Vautrot’s and something about it spoke to me. We headed across town, through rice and oilfields, a nearly submarine landscape hovering just above the watertable.
The gulf is maybe a dozen miles away, and having just passed through Houston we knew this area was hit hard by Hurricane Harvey, a reality underscored when our host explained that the reason his RV park was always full was that most of the residents were tradesmen volunteering and working to rebuild the area, as he is himself.
Still, as we drove to Vautrot’s we hadn’t prepared for what would come next. As we pulled off the highway we thought at first that the place had closed, but then there was the handwritten sign directing us around back. We pulled around, into a small neighborhood behind the restaurant, and there was a travel trailer – not much bigger than what we are living in at the moment – setup in a small, makeshift court, with a few tables and some string lights in the trees. We both knew, immediately, that we had made the right choice to come here.
I knew we were early – they opened at 5 and it was just a few minutes past – so there were no other customers around yet. As we approached we were welcomed by a friendly young man and we exchanged pleasantries. We walked up to the trailer and were again enthusiastically greeted by a lovely woman who helped us navigate the menu. Each time we hemmed or hawed, she offered that we could just give have a little of each, so we ended up with a pretty good cross section of their menu:
After ordering we milled about and quickly became drawn into conversation with David, the gentleman who’d originally greeted us, and the story he told still brings tears as I write. He helped his father build Vautrot’s – from carpentry to menu – about 25 years ago, and then grew up in the place, around the food and the people. By reputation it’s a local institution, and many of the reviews I’d read properly referred to its former life.
In 1994 they were nearly wiped out by floods that hit southeast Texas – a cataclysmic event in the area that caused massive destruction and hellish conditions like when the nearby San Jacinto River caught fire – but they rebuilt and were open again in only a few weeks. Then some years later they were hit by a blaze and the restaurant was closed for a few months as they recovered, but they again reopened in the same structure David and his family had once built. Finally, now over six months ago, Hurricane Harvey did what so many other catastrophes had failed to do and left their restaurant and many of the neighborhood homes behind it unrepairable. Undeterred, David took 0ver the travel trailer his mother had been living in, but which too had been damaged beyond habitability by Harvey, sitting on what was once the foundation of her home. He gutted the trailer and handily converted it into a functioning kitchen, and again was serving excellent cajun seafood the way his family had done for so long.
As we talked, he was laying down more pavers to grow the usable patio area in the waterlogged yard around the trailer. In his tenderness and warmth throughout the conversation, and in the doting interactions with Wes, deeply endeared him to us so he could have served us two microwaved Filets o’ Fish from McDonalds and we would have been thrilled. But, of course, he didn’t.
We were quickly presented with an extravagant pile of food, so we spread it out and began to indulge as David went back to work. As we were digging in, other folks began to arrive for dinner, and we quickly go sucked into conversation with a young couple, Shauna and Vince, friends and frequenters of Vautrot’s. She was sweet, outgoing, and a wonderful ball of contradictions. A self-described super-Texan, born and raised in eastern Texas, whose first comment to us regarded her spiritual beliefs regarding chakras, and the next a mild resentment that people from other parts of the country assume she packs a sixgun when they find out where she’s from. When Wes nearly took a nasty spill, giving his mom a scare and causing her to spill her sweet tea, Shauna bolted to the trailer to make sure she got another on the house. Like most everyone we’ve met on our travels, she defied pigeonholing, proof that we are all individuals, and that no region, no city or state, can be defined by some mythological average resident, that no one place has a lock on humanity, kindness, or generosity. Everywhere we go we are hit by this obvious, but easily forgotten, fact.
This isn’t really a restaurant review, per se, but I will come back to the food, oh the food, for just a moment. Had we been sitting in any place with four walls, plumbing, and a floor, I doubt we could have done better with the food. Fries and fried onions, ok, you can get them anywhere, but that wasn’t why we went to Vautrot’s. The catfish was excellent – though I’m afraid we buried it under other food and let it get a little soggy – and the fried shrimp was incredibly good… Stephanie’s first comment – not a big shrimp-eater, by the by, was “I can taste the ocean”, intended as every bit the compliment. Vautrot’s gumbo wasn’t like any I’d had or made – it was smoky and rich in a way I still can’t place, and I’m having the leftovers for breakfast. And Boudain balls – some kind of rice and meat ball – were just my kind of jam, their only flaw the fact that we only had one order.
Vautrot’s was the perfect entrance into southeast Texas, easing our way into Louisiana with great Cajun food garnished with a powerful story and human connection, served outdoors on a blustery, moist afternoon. It really doesn’t get much better than this.
To residents who so proudly love it Austin is a boom town, a rapidly expanding sprawl, droves of noobs gentrifying its charm away with huge shiny towers, McMansions where there were once woods, and skyrocketing rents. For a visitor from the biggest sprawl in the U.S., the scale is lovely, easy to navigate, dense with art, culture, food – ohhh, glorious food – where rush-hour traffic from downtown to just about anywhere is still measured in tens of minutes, not hours. In a city that’s seen 30% population growth just since the last census, both impressions can be right.
We went to see the gorgeous state capitol, drove out to wine country, I squeezed in several motorcycle rides, explored the incredible Zilker Park and Barton Springs, and had some of the best meals in memory nearly everywhere we went. The truth is, I felt so at home from the first moment that it doesn’t really feel like a visit. Of all the cities I’ve visited in this big country, if city life appealed again at all I could see settling in Austin.
Fits like a glove
Since we brought the motorcycle with us on this trip I’ve been hoping to get a ride in, and since we unloaded the bike to make some extra room and do some needed cleaning I finally got the chance.
Unsurprisingly, there are lots of little – and a few big – differences riding here.
The good news is that Austin drivers are comparatively civil and biker-friendly. I’ve yet to experience any aggression, and plenty of caution and civility. Not one person has cut me off, made a last second turn in front of me, or drifted into my lane. Every time I stop somewhere, someone wants to ask me about my bike – and, surprisingly, I’ve seen a lot more BMWs here than I expected – though not nearly as many as Harleys – and far fewer super sports. I don’t exceed the speed limit if I can help it, and it seems almost no one here does either, which makes for a much more relaxed ride – no angry Prius drivers passing on the right at 90, no one riding my ass when I’m already doing ten-over.
Drenched
The bad news, if it is so for a big, pothole eating beast like my bike, is that the roads are in a lot rougher shape, but this also makes for a more interesting ride, so I’m not sure this counts. I definitely prefer these roads on my bike – often rapidly narrowing, with steep or shoulders – over driving the truck, but that’s a matter of space and agility.
The mixed news is that, like most places in the country, there’s no lane splitting or filtering. I can live without splitting, especially as the traffic has been really mild and short-lived even at its worst – compared to Southern California – but I’ve had to stop myself from filtering up at long, backed up stoplights, of which there are many, and instead patiently wait my place in line, inhaling the diesel from the inevitable 3/4 ton in front of me. C’est la vie.
Overall, riding all over Austin has been pleasant: motorcycle parking abounds, civilized driving is the norm, and everything is a quick 15-20 minute trip, it seems.
Now if only I had remembered to buy a rain suit like I’ve been promising myself for years.
Pronghorn
We camped a few nights in Carlsbad, NM, and we obviously had to visit the caverns at least once, but as amazing as they were it was too far of a haul to go back for a second day.
On the way into town we noticed signs for the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park, so after running an errand or two, we stopped by the check it out. As we walked in a lovely volunteer greeted us, asking if we’d visited before. I told him no, that we were just visiting, and he cracked a big grin and told us we were in for a treat.
He was right.
This was an expansive natural museum, with beautiful exhibits and many wonderful examples of local flora and fauna, and we spent three hours walking and gawking while encountering nearly no one else. It was serene and tasteful, a monument to the varied and fascinating life of the deserts of the southwest.
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