First stop: Texas Tech Museum

After talking with several native Texans about where to begin my Texas adventures, I have gotten some good suggestions. I have already visited Galveston, watched the Longhorns play, seen the bats under the Congress Street Bridge, gone tubing in Hill Country, and heard Charlie Robison play at Gruene Dance Hall. However, as we all know, Texas is a big state. It's sort of one of their things. There are lots of things to see.



So, my tour of Texas began right here in Lubbock, when, this afternoon, my friend Jonathyn said, "I'm bored, let's go to the museum."



My response was, "Tech has a museum?"



Tech does indeed have a museum, and a short car ride later, there we were. It's an interesting museum, in that they have a lot of different, museum-like things, but nothing is particularly organized. They have a planetarium, and lots of dinosaur fossils. There was a semi-interesting video of a giant salamander, and a bunch of African masks, which Jonathyn was skeptical about. Having lived somewhere in Africa (I'm blanking on the country), he claimed it looked an awful lot like things you can buy in flea markets there. Having lived in Chicago, he was skeptical in general about the museum. However, having grown up in west Texas, and having done his undergrad at Tech, he shouldn't have been that surprised.

There was also a huge exhibit of art bought by and made by Anthony Quinn. In addition to being a painter, a sculptor, and a collector, Anthony Quinn also won two Oscars and fathered 12 children. Jonathyn and I both left feeling like we had accomplished nothing in our lives, and spent two-and-a-half hours when we could have been creating art, or at least writing case notes, looking at someone else's accomplishments.

On the bright side, the museum was free, and, had we known about the planetarium, we could have had naps in the middle of the day.