Buc-ee's Convenience Store

Aunt Katherine and I drove up to Dallas one weekend. Five minutes after we’d left all signs of civilization, I admitted I had to pee, so we started searching for exit signs. On a blue “attractions sign, Aunt Katherine spotted a cartoon beaver’s head in a yellow circle. “Buc-ee’s!” she exclaimed. She missed the exit. But she was so inexplicably set on this convenience store that she took the next exit and backtracked five miles until we’d reached the destination. 

 We hopped out of our car for an experience so monumental it may well have been the climactic point of the entire trip to Dallas.

 I am not able to communicate what makes this store such an important Texan feature, but I can explain what it’s like to shop there. Firstly, it was teeming with people. I could not believe my eyes. It seemed we had not even passed ten other cars in the past ten minutes of driving. Apparently, that was because everyone was at Buc-ee’s. 

 It was a lot like a normal convenience store, but it was three times bigger and had clean bathrooms. An entire wall was filled with different types of beef jerky. I hadn’t even realized there was more than one type in existence. They had warm food, fudge, cartons of ice cream, and hot pink bathing suits. They gave us free samples of the fudge, and I also tried a sample of their fudge brownies. How can convenience store fudge taste so delicious? The answer remains unclear. 

 We left with some chocolate and coconut fudge, a postcard for my family, and a t-shirt: the perfect gift from Aunt Katherine to commemorate the occasion.

 

Austria 5/30: Salzburg

We didn’t go out on the 29^th, so my account resumes on the 30^th, when we took a train into Salzburg and looked at the Salzburg fortress. 

Salzburg was very pretty and interesting, but it was also very crowded, because we happened to go on the first day of a festival. This particular festival involved old cars and country music, which we found to be quite amusing. The crowds made it hard to take pictures with a couple of the more famous landmarks, like this fountain. 

  Once we’d reached the main part of the city, we bought tickets to go up and look at the Salzburg fortress. No bird demonstrations in this castle, but the view was much more beautiful, and this castle’s history did not seem to be as sobering as the last’s. There wasn’t a real torture chamber since the castle hadn’t served as a court. 

  The first room we looked at was my favorite: the salt room. Since the castle no longer needed to store any salt, the room had been lined with portraits of all the archbishops who had owned and made improvements on the fortress. We could also look at models of the changes each archbishop made to the castle’s architecture. 

 The audio guided tour took us up to the top of the tower, where our already-amazing view was improved, and we could look down on the whole city of Salzburg. 

  I also got to stop and see the castle’s mechanical organ, nicknamed “The Bull.” Tom and I peeked through a small cloudy window to get a look at it. Because the hallway was so narrow, we were soon pushed along by the rest of the crowd. 

 We ate lunch at pretzel and hot dog stands, which were all very, very good. We stayed and looked around the town for a couple more hours, then left to go back to the train station to get the right train back to Zell am See. When we reached the main roads, though, we found a bike race had closed most of the streets, and the bus we’d planned on was out of commission. We crossed the river and walked for a good mile and a half before we found another stop. 

 The train ride back, which was spent sitting down, was much enjoyed by everyone in the group.

Austria 5/28: Archery

Late in the morning, Dad dropped some of us off at an archery range close to our house. It was the off-season, so the archery range’s small shed was unattended. We knocked on the door of the companion restaurant (everything in Austria comes with a companion restaurant) and the gracious owner soon appeared to show us what we needed. 

We each borrowed a wooden bow, a leather arm guard, and four arrows. We proved ourselves by shooting at practice targets, and the owner set us loose on the range. 

We split into three groups: Peter and Nick went first with Rob and T. Rex to make sure they both had help. Sam and I went second. Mom, Uncle Reagan, and Monga were the last group. They were better than all of us, even though Monga had just learned. We’d all forgotten Mom used to be a camp counselor. 

The archery range ran along the side of a mountain. There were 28 stations total, spread out in a large loop. We shot at sturdy foam animal targets, climbed through to retrieve our arrows, then continued along the path until we came to the next set of targets. 

The forest was beautiful and very wet. It reminded me a lot of the forests back in East Tennessee. After we’d spent a while on the course, we realized the hike was more difficult than the archery challenges were. Except for the thin paths and foam targets, the forest was largely untouched. Soil was loose and rocky, and the path was steep. 

I didn’t get to see the other groups shoot their arrows, but I had a great time with Sam. Here he is with one of his bullseye shots. 

Sam was a little forest arrow-spirit. Every time he walked behind a target to collect our stray arrows, all the arrows of days past would abandon their hiding places and appear right in front of Sam’s feet. I kept hearing the phrase “Oh hey, look at this cool arrow I found.” 

At one point, I lost a thin metal arrowhead. A wayward arrow hit the soil and when we took it out, the tip was missing. Sam and I decided to dig for it so we could fit it back onto the shaft. The arrow had been shallow, and the soil was loose. We pushed our fingers into the mossy turf, turned over a half-inch of soil, and gaped. There, where we’d hoped to see our arrowhead, sat the greenest earthworm we had ever seen in our lives. We set it on top of the nearby foam deer to take some pictures. 

When we’d shot at about 20 stations, we decided to walk the rest of the course. We’d had a VERY good time and were amazed at how many stations there were. 

The youngest two were completely worn out by the time we turned in our gear, so most of our party remained at the restaurant. Sam, Peter, Uncle Reagan and I set off to fetch Dad and the van. We took a paved sidewalk that ran along the river all the way back to our rental house. We did not meander. 

There were lots of slugs along the path: long black ones that stayed close to the edges of the concrete. When we were quite close to our house, Sam and I looked down and noticed the biggest slug we had ever seen. The king of all slugs. It was about five inches long and one inch thick. We stopped in our tracks and looked at it with amazement and horror. Peter was approaching from behind, so we called to him to come check it out. He looked down without changing pace. With one square step, he brought the king of all slugs to an end. 

Thus ends my account of the day. We reached the house in good time and Dad drove to the range and brought back the rest of our group.