greetings from austin

[jfb]

No time for the more thoughtful posts right now, but here is a list of some things I have seen:

• CHESS PLAY HERE, spraypainted on a wooden board on a fence on a farm on California Highway 152.
  
• Protein from Wisconsin! in 50s advertising cursive on the back of a truck.
  
• Casa de Fruta, a fruit stand grown to theme park proportions.
  
• There is a place on Interstate 5 where the northbound and southbound routes split to opposite sides of a small canyon. Deadpan, a standard highway sign warns: KEEP OFF MEDIAN.
  
• If you take the first Palm Springs exit from I-10, you will quickly come to a sign that says PALM SPRINGS CITY LIMIT. You will then drive for several miles before spotting anything that reminds you of a palm or a city. (As for springs, I couldn't tell you.)
  
• A MASTER PLANNED COMMUNITY, defiantly lettered on a sign that stands among acres of Arizona scrub and cacti.
  
• A lawyer's office in downtown El Paso--a city as entwined with Juarez as Minneapolis is with Saint Paul, except that Juarez is on the other side of the Mexican border--tells you what the lawyers specialize in: IMMIGRATION   ACCIDENTS.
  

A few more comments:

The scan feature of my car radio--which plays a few seconds of each station it can find, then goes on to the next--would be more useful if it were able to recognize when I started singing along.

Texas is huge. Also, gas is cheap here.

It has not escaped my attention that Hurricane Isabel and I are approaching North Carolina from roughly opposite directions.