A weekend trip in the Texas Hill Country turns into a bit of an endurance test that brings the author and her daughter closer.

"Let's take a trip," she says, pacing around the kitchen, puncturing the air overhead with her fists. "Get outta town."
My youngest child’s antidote to boredom or stress or depression or having nothing to do or having too much to do is a road trip. It beats just sitting there, which is what I tend to do. So I say, "Sure! Let's do it."
We'll take off after she finishes work Saturday afternoon. She has a hankering to have dinner in Fredericksburg. Spend the night somewhere out there. Wake up and browse a few antique shops. Get back to Houston by bedtime Sunday night. It's a bit far for a weekend jaunt, to my mind. Fredericksburg has always seemed like Way Out West to me. But it'll be fun, just the two of us. Friday morning I ask her, "Should we make a reservation or something? You know, just for back-up."
"Nah," she says. "We don't know where we'll want to light. Be spontaneous! Besides," she says, with a dismissive wave, "you know how many motels there are out there."
So it is that we head west into the stunning Texas heat at 4 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon in July. Spontaneously.
As soon as we slam the car doors, our spirits begin to lift. Doesn't matter if we're only going away overnight. We've packed a cooler with sodas and spring water, dropped the dog with the neighbor, and tossed our Nikes in the backseat. Feels like vacation to me.
The way west is familiar. I love to watch the changes along the road that say you're not home anymore. The trees shrink and get twisted. The terrain starts to roll. The soil becomes grittier. By the time you see the first windmill, your shoulders have unclinched and Willie Nelson tunes are playing in your head.
“Henry wants me to bring him some venison jerky,” she says. “They make the best in the Hill Country, so we have to find some tomorrow. And Ray wants some peaches,” she says.
“I haven’t had a real tomato in years,” I say, my mouth watering. “Not since Granddaddy died.” My country-born father had kept all his family and friends in tomatoes, no matter where he lived.
Our eyes scan the roadside for produce stands. By this time it’s after seven and we’re wondering how long the restaurants will be open, so there’s no stopping now. We mentally note the location of the venison jerky sign, and a table of peaches, and a little wooden stand that’s raucous with pyramids of warm home-grown tomatoes. A sensory memory of sunny, acid freshness provokes the salivary glands into anticipatory action. Tomorrow; remember this spot tomorrow.
Tonight, we need a restaurant.

Sure enough, it seems like no time before we reach Fredericksburg, because we get caught up in the way the setting sun plays off the hills and feeling our hearts expand into the space between us and the horizon. We get there with a little daylight left.
We find a table at the first place we try, and dinner is worth the trip. Only a few weeks earlier I was in the countryside of southern France with my other daughter, rooting like truffle pigs for culinary pleasures tucked in those hills. This Texas country inn with its stone fireplace and earnest service bears up well in comparison.
Deeply satisfied, we amble out under the gaze of a dusty elk over the mantle. It's time to find a room.
Laura had her eye on a budget motel she's used in her previous rambles. We check it out: No vacancy. No problem--across the highway is a big local lodge. We check it out: Again, no vacancy. This time Laura asks what's going on.
An antique car convention, they say. Probably won't find anything in town. Bummer.
We try one more place anyway. No luck. So, it's back to Johnson City. It's just 20 miles. We'll still wake up in the West and act like tourists.
Except that the motels in Johnson City are full. We give each other a look.
It's after 10 as we retrace our path toward Austin. "I've been out here so many times," she says, "and I've never had any trouble getting a room!"
"Well, there'll be something in Austin."
Many stops later, we've had no success on the south side of Austin, so we flip a mental coin and decide to head toward San Antonio and all the little possibilities in between. It's very dark.
She's not going to lose the holiday spirit without a fight. She bears down on the gas pedal and flings her right arm over the seat.
"What's the most scared you've ever been?"
"Why do you ask?" I say.
"Just for fun," she says. "So, what was your scariest experience?"
It doesn't take me long to zero in on a budget "safari" in Kenya a few years back, riding through a remote area known to be a bandit zone, in a van with a plain-clothes ranger who had an uzi in a shopping bag.
"My gosh, Mom," she says after I relive the story. "I had no idea." I had told her before, but her mind had been somewhere else and it hadn't sunk in at the time. Tonight it did.
"What was yours?" I ask, relishing the moment. "Your scariest experience?"
"Getting caught in that tornado when I was driving to Santa Fe."
"Can I change mine?" I say. "Being on the phone with you while you were caught in a tornado is right up there for me."
"I truly believed I was going to die," she says, serious again. We're both quiet for a few minutes, recalling that afternoon. I happened to be home when she called from her cell phone to ask me if she should keep going west or turn back toward Dallas. The sky was black and the wind was roaring and driving the rain sideways. I had kept her on the cell with one hand while I scrambled to contact someone in authority west of Dallas with the other. She'd finally come to an underpass, where she waited out the storm with a nurse from Decatur trying to get home after her shift.
"I felt so helpless," I say.
She has squared up in the seat again, both hands gripping the wheel. We watch the highway spinning ahead of us for a few minutes.
"So," she says, breaking the silence and the mood. "What was your happiest moment?"
"That's easy," I say, "but there were three. The day you were born, you and your sister and brother. Nothing else even comes close." I lean back in the passenger seat in the dark and, for a minute, I'm back in the '69 Mercury, and my husband is running red lights on Yale at 3 a.m. because the baby is coming so fast. Less than two hours later Laura was there, red-faced and angry, bald on top, with the longest eyelashes you ever saw.
She gives me a minute to wallow in my reverie. Then I snap out of it and ask about her happiest moment.
"It's not so much a single incident, but last summer I felt really happy for the first time in my life," she says.
"What was behind it?" I have to ask.
"I don't know," she says, "My life just seemed to come together for the first time. That's when I stopped biting my nails, remember?"
I remembered. Laura, the wonderful mystery child, wound tight as a screen-door spring from day one. Her first sentence had been, "Stop looking at me." She started biting her nails as soon as she had teeth. I had noticed, but the deeper significance of her conquering that old habit had escaped me.
We look ahead again and ponder what it is that makes life bearable.
By this time we've reached civilization again, coming into New Braunfels. It's 11:30 at night, and we stop at another motel. This time I ask the agent if there's an event of epic proportions in the area that I'm unaware of. No, I'm told, it's just the Hill Country on a summer weekend.
Oh.
We head on south toward San Antonio in silence. Laura is driving. I'm looking out the window. My back aches and my eyes feel bruised. I begin to fantasize about the empty mobile homes in all the sales lots we pass. No one would notice, I muse, if we just pulled over and tried some of the doors . . . just curled up on a shag carpet for a while . . .
As we approach San Antonio, we devise a strategy. Surely most of our fellow wanderers are between Austin and San Antonio, so let's just swing around to the south side and find some of the less prominent intersections. Each of us knows that the other has considered the possibility that there are no rooms, but we do not speak it aloud. By now it's nearing 1 a.m., and we are accompanied by a small caravan of desperate families every time we pull into a motel parking lot.
On the south side of San Antonio we see a group of cars clustered around a motel with a drive-up clerk's window, and a man is standing at the window waiting! This means something is happening, so we park and jump out. But no one is inside the window. The man has been waiting for a long time, while cars accumulated in anticipation. Then someone waves us off, and we hit the loop again.
"We have no choice," I say, "but to head back toward Houston."
At Seguin we pull over one last time, fail again, and then we sit, numb, in the parking lot for a minute. Both of us are shell-shocked and stiff, struggling to keep our eyes open. "Do you think it would be safe to just stop in this parking lot and take a short nap?" I ask, but as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know it's not.
Laura has been driving since Fredericksburg, and I insist that she let me take a turn. Riding shotgun, she sits straight up and keeps talking. Finally I say, "You know, the one who's not driving doesn't have to stay awake."
"Unless the one who's not driving wants to stay alive," she says, eyeing me.
I grip the wheel, and at 2:00 a.m. we head resolutely for home, knowing we have no other alternative. Outside, the hills level off and the dark trees grow tall, but in the moonless night, we miss the transition.
"Twenty questions," my daughter says.
"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" I reply.
We test each other’s cultural literacy until neither of us is curious or competitive any more. Laura turns to me and says, "Mom, you are so cool."
Just as we hit Loop 610, the oil light flashes briefly. Suddenly I'm wide awake.
At 4:30 a.m. we turn into the driveway and stumble into the house. We've been to Fredericksburg—for dinner. We've pushed ourselves to physical extremes we will rarely have to test again. We have no jerky or peaches or tomatoes, but we've arrived home safely, together, closer than when we left.
We will remember it as a very good trip.

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