On the Road: The Hen Party

When last I wrote, we had just left Centerville, Texas, at around 3:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, June 5th, heading for Austin. We said our goodbyes to the Mercedes Benz gang, put on our baseball caps and rumbled out of the parking lot, convertible top down, (you gotta try to look cool), and the air-conditioner on (gotta try to get cool). Jim was falling asleep at the wheel in the hot sun, so we stopped, put up the top, and traded places. I managed to get behind every dawdling farmer or rancher with a pickup truck for the next hundred miles, turning a two-hour drive into three.

On Sunday, Robert and his girlfriend, Sarah, drove with us to Dripping Springs, a town about 25 miles southwest of Austin. That area of Texas Hill Country is home to several wineries, and we were headed to the Driftwood Winery tasting room. I had read that the owner, Gary Elliott, had been hired to fly for Continental Airlines some years back, and Jim was hoping to talk with him. He found Mr. Elliott hard at work installing a fan in his new pavilion. According to Elliott: “If you’re thinking of throwing everything away to go into the wine business—don’t.”

After sampling half-a-dozen wines in the tasting room, we each bought a glass of our favorite and then wandered out to a ledge overlooking the vineyards and a field of sheep grazing far below. There we found tables and chairs scattered under the trees where we could sit in the shade for a while, sip our wines, and enjoy the pastoral view.

The Anniversary Party.

Next it was a dash back to Austin so I could check off Number Four on the Texas Monthly "Bucket List: Play Chicken Shit Bingo at Ginny's Little Longhorn Saloon." Ginny’s was NOT one of those trendy, downtown Austin Sixth Street destinations. It wasn’t even downtown. The building looked rather like a little old country church plopped down in the middle of an industrial strip of Burnet Road on Austin’s north side.

Just inside the door was an empty chicken-wire cage sitting on a platform; the floor of the coop was covered in numbered squares. The place was packed. At the front of the bar a band played loud country western music, and judging by the bobbing heads a couple feet from the band, it appeared that people were dancing. Jim estimated that there were easily 200 people inside the tiny bar. We ordered some Lone Stars and huddled at the back of the place, a few feet from the cage.

The Texas Monthly “Bucket List” article had suggested that the place gets busy, so get there early to play bingo. Who knew that Sunday, June 6, 2010 was the 10-year anniversary of the Chicken Shit Bingo tradition?

How They “Doo” It.

When it’s time to start, everyone who wants to play lines up, pays $2.00, and gets a ticket with one of the numbers that’s printed on the floor of the chicken coop. Sissy, the hen, is delivered to the coop and fed a combination of chicken feed and dried bread. When Sissy stops and drops on a square, the ticket holder with that number wins the $114 purse. Because it was the 10th anniversary, the purse was doubled—and so was the crowd.

The Honky-Tonk Sauna.

The band welcomed everyone to their little “honky-tonk sauna” and announced the game would start at five o’clock. The place was stifling hot, there was hardly any room to move, and people were still coming in. At last we were told to line up if we wanted to play bingo, and a chicken appeared in the coop. There were so many people by then that I didn’t even see the owner arrive with the hen just a few feet away from us. Robert got in line for me, and I sat down in a suddenly empty chair next to a pretty blonde lady at a nearby table. I told her about my blog and that I was working my way through the bucket list from Texas Monthly.

“Oh,” she shouted over the noisy crowd. “You’re working on a bucket list?”

“Yes,” I shouted back. A few moments later, Robert returned with my two dollars.

“The tickets are all sold out,” he said, handing me my money. “Sorry, Mom!”

People are good.

The blond lady’s husband returned to the table with their two tickets, waving them proudly, and I gave him back his chair. A moment later, she was holding her tickets up before me shouting, “Pick one!” When I questioned why, she repeated that I should pick one and her husband agreed. I rationalized that I couldn’t check off number four on the bucket list if I didn’t play, so I said thanks and picked the ticket with number thirty-one on it. People were gathered around the coop, yelling and cheering, and cameras were flashing. Sissy, the hen, was on the move.

The couple was so nice to me. They made sure I could see the chicken and told me where she was strutting and what number she was pausing over. They even offered me one of their chairs. Suddenly it occurred to me: “They think I’m dying! They think I’m working on my own bucket list.” I kept wondering what would happen if number thirty-one was the winner.

When the hen finally dropped the doody, (on someone else’s number), I asked the nice couple if I could keep the ticket.

“Of course!” they both answered. About then they ordered another round of beers and I pressed a twenty into the woman’s hand.

“This is for your beers; enjoy!” I said. I thanked them for their kindness, and Robert, Sarah, Jim and I hurried back out into the sunlight and headed off for dinner.

Faith in our fellow humans can be confirmed in the most unusual places!

Donna

On the Road: The Centerville Rally

A few months ago Jim bought a pretty little previously-owned Mercedes Benz. It’s a fun car, but I need to fold up like a jackknife to climb in, and I look like a giraffe being born when climbing out. Well, it seems there’s a club for owners of that automobile brand, and the Austin, DFW, Houston and San Antonio branches held their 5th annual rally last weekend in Centerville, Texas. Centerville, a town with 900 plus people and twenty-eight churches, is at the junction of Interstate 45 and Texas Highway 7, halfway between Houston and Dallas.

According to the club’s website, Fort Worth area “BenzNuts” were to rendezvous at 9:30 a.m. at Starbuck’s in Waxahachie, about 30 miles south of Dallas. A half-hour later we were to caravan to Centerville, where we would meet for lunch at Woody’s Smokehouse and then head out to Fort Boggy State Park for the rally.

Jim and I arrived at Starbuck’s right on time. We were surprised that we were the first ones there, and a little nervous when, a half-hour later, we were still the only Mercedes Benz there. We left Waxahachie at ten o’clock sharp and cruised on down to Centerville—apparently the lone ambassadors for all the Fort Worth, Texas BenzNuts.

Centerville is about a hundred miles south of Waxahachie and is one of those “wide spot in the road” kind of towns. There was Woody’s Shell station, Woody’s convenience store and Woody’s Smokehouse. There was a stately old courthouse and a few other businesses in what might be called a downtown, but it doesn’t take much commerce to support a population of less than a thousand people. Woody’s was definitely the gem in their crown and the main attraction of the little burg. Billed as the "Jerky Capital of the World," Woody’s was an oasis in the middle of nowhere.

Inside Woody’s there was a cavernous private room set up for us and a barrier chain with a sign that warned, “Mercedes Benz club members only.” There wasn’t a soul in there. I asked Jim, “Did you actually join this club?” He mumbled something I couldn’t hear, but assured me it was OK to scoot around the barrier. Fearing that we might be the only two to show up for lunch also, we decided to shop a while first and see if anyone else wandered in. I didn’t want to look pathetic—or pretentious—sitting alone at one of a dozen or more picnic tables in a private banquet room.

Woody’s was a supermarket of cookin’ and eatin,’ and it was packed with diners and shoppers. The meat counter held stacks of gorgeous fresh meats, sausages, cheeses and jerky. There was a wall of cold drinks stretching the length of the store and a small bakery area displaying pies and cookies next to the checkout. Here and there were a few souvenir hats and T-shirts, greeting cards and a smattering of collectibles. By far the most interesting area was the sprawling “jarred” section, where it seemed everything that grows in dirt was preserved, jellied, canned, or bottled.

After looking around the store for a while, we noticed four people seated at one of the picnic tables in the Mercedes Benz room, so we strolled over to the lunch line. Woody’s offered standard barbeque cafeteria-style service, but with a salty old guy giving orders as well as taking them. “You gotta tell me if it’s take out; I don’t read minds,” he smilingly growled at a woman in line ahead of me.

Jim and I both ordered the brisket, but he decided to play heartburn roulette and sample the sausage—he lost. The server behind the counter slapped our meat orders on some butcher paper directly on our trays and ordered us to “Take some beans and sauce, ‘cuz their free.” There were little cups of jalapeños and sliced onions to accompany our meat, but I got heartburn just looking at them. The brisket was delicious and possibly the best I’ve ever had. The banquet room eventually filled up with more club members, and the growling meat server brought all of us Woody’s baseball caps and koozies and samples of jerky. I tried the buffalo jerky, and I must say it just tasted like dried beef to me.

Following lunch, we caravanned out to Fort Boggy State Park for the rally. There the Mercedes owners voted for the best cars in four categories, depending on the age of the vehicle. I guess for some Mercedes Benz owners, it’s not enough to just own one. While Jim joined the voting—we didn't win—I found a shady spot at a picnic table and sat down. Everyone we met seemed friendly and sincere, and if it hadn't been 98 degrees outside, we would have called it a real nice day. We left Fort Boggy around 3:30 and set out for Austin and "chicken shit bingo" on Texas Highway 79—a road that could only have been designed by John Deere himself.

Donna

Next: Austin and Number Four on the Bucket List.