Early in the week my Stepfather died, so I drove down to visit with Mom for a few days. It’s a long way between OKC and Harlingen, TX. On the way I captured this dashcam shot of the slope up into the Arbuckle Mountains of Oklahoma. The mountains here are few and small. This is a major landmark indicating that one has driven almost to the southern border with Texas.
Close to my mother’s house sits this old abandoned mansion. It’s quite beautiful, but you can’t even drive up close to it anywhere. The driveway is hidden in grass and weeds. I got as close as I could on a side street without crawling through the underbrush. This is actually the backside of the place. There are a surprisingly large number of abandoned houses of all sizes NW of Harlingen.
This is the old downtown section of Harlingen. I’m not at all used to seeing palm trees, especially on the main street. These things drop big chunks of woody skin and wilted fronds, so it requires constant clean-up. These are kept trim to prevent them looking ratty, as most of the palm trees around here are rather disheveled. Believe me, they could look a lot worse. Parking wasn’t too bad on the day I went.
The old industrial section of Harlingen is loaded with older buildings like this one. Most of them are still in use. There was no place I could park my car to get some of the more dramatic specimens. It made me really miss my bike, from which it was a lot easier to do this kind of photography. The railroad tracks run very near here, so a lot of heavy industrial agriculture processing facilities are here. Big structures with odd shapes and awful smells abound. In this are, cotton seed oil milling is a major enterprise.
This is just a glimpse of the newer business district in Harlingen. As before, the lack of safe stopping places for my car limit what I can shoot. There is an intermittent Interstate 69E running down from Corpus Christi, and it intersects here with Interstate 2, which runs along the Red River Valley. I came down on Interstate 35W, and it was a massive mistake, with hideous traffic, complicated by heavy rainfall during my passage. I went back on Interstate 69, which drops in and out, but is based on US Highway 77.
Within Palm Valley proper, there is this nice little veterans’ memorial. Since my stepfather lived here as a veteran, his name and service record were included on the walkway up to the monument. I’ve outlined it to make it more obvious. He started in the Navy, then moved to the Army, and ended his career as a recruiter. He was also a POW in Korea during the war there.
The US Marines sponsor an academy in Harlingen. This is a copy of the Iwo Jima monument standing out on their parade ground. On the same grounds is a nice little museum with some rare artillery pieces and such. It was worth a visit for me.
On the way back, I saw hundreds of things I dearly wished I could have stopped to shoot. If I had done that, I never would have gotten home. It was some 14 hours of driving as it was.
That mansion is definitely an odd bird, at least from the vantage point of where you photographed it. It looks just slightly too tall or too narrow to me, like a giant pinched the roof and stretched it up a little bit. Hah.
It’s definitely a little fanciful with that castellated roof line of the far side.