March 29, 30 2023

This is the continuation story of the quest for wild flower photos in Texas on the west side of Brenham and then near Johnson City on the west side of Austin. This area has Wesley, Industry, Fayetteville. Round Top, and Burton. I also stumbled across the largest antique set of markets in the world which stretches on Route 237 from Route 1291 to Round Top and onto US 290. It went on for miles with permanent buildings, many tents in the fields, and massive traffic jams. Sorry, I didn’t take any photos except this little church that said it was the smallest Catholic church that still had a regular service.

The first photos are from route 232 going southwest from Brenham.

Between Industry and Fayetteville on route 159 we came across a very unexpected sight of zebras mixed in with a white cow herd.

More cows are munching on the blue bonnets or grass – can’t really tell which. Then I have a series of isolated flowers in the blue bonnets.

These last two photos of cows resulted from me calling the cows with a series of “MOOO’s”. They started to walk up a lot closer as a result.

After lunch in Dripping Springs we stopped at Pedermales Falls State Park. The blue bonnets were fairly sparse so I didn’t keep many of them.

We made a loop west of Johnson City for the next series of photos. At the end of this day we had an RV park in Johnson City.

The next day we went to the old farm as part of the President Lyndon Johnson ranch. We were a little short on time so we did not see the LBJ White House on the ranch. I loved the coloration on the turkeys and the little lamb with its mother.

Just a little way down the road is the Wildseed Farm which specializes in growing seeds of wildflowers to sell to folks for their gardens. The red flowers are Flanders Poppies which grow wild in the fields of Europe and became a remembrance of World War I. I used to grow them in my garden in Illinois.

After a very nice lunch in the Auslander German restaurant in Fredericksburg, we took what is known as the Willow City loop. When we started the loop, there was big sign not to stop and trespass, but just around the corner was this windmill and of course there were several cars stopped. All of the fence posts had cowboy boots onto of them. The Ford tractor is from 1950 and we had one like it on the farm for 50 years. Everyone learned on to drive from that tractor from an early age.

That is the best photo of a Longhorn cow that I could muster and it was quite a distance away.