Texas Tim's Texana Tours

The premise of the tour was to "see the seven painted churches in Texas and to tour the Shiner Brewery."  The clear draw to Average Brew Guy.  The tour, taken over two days, finally met most of its objective if the objective was to look at houses, stop at obscure places, get some tea, get back on the road, look at more houses, and see a church every now and then."

"Most people who take my tours say they like it better when I'm not on it."  Thus was my introduction to the Texas Tim's Texana Tour on Saturday as we sought to view the Central Texas Hill Country sites in and around the towns of Shiner, Hallettsville, Flatonia and La Grange.

Texas Tim, as he calls himself, is an old fraternity brother of mine from the days of our youth at the "stately college on the plains," Texas Lutheran College (TLC), now university. A fellow history major and retired educator as well, Texas Tim has made a life of traveling internationally as well as in the US during his lifetime, seeing much of what the world has to offer.  As he notes, in his early days of travel, he designed a course at TLC to tour the Civil War battle fields with a group of guys from the college. It was during a time called "interim" where you only took one course and had some time off. 

I was aware of this course, and when I signed up for his tour this past week, I should have paid heed to what happened on his Civil War Battle Field Tour back then as a precursor for our trip.  In short, the classmates on the tour held a coup and tossed his idea out the window after two battlefields and went to Disney World instead, somewhat of a backlash it may seem.

Tim has a nose for locales that are not just out of the way, but they aren't even registered on Google Maps.  Consequently, the first stop on the tour was a local tavern in Moravia appropriately called Moravia.  This was originally a Czech settlement and town dance hall, meeting place, and beer tavern in the 1800s.  Today, it is a beer place on an FM and county road crossing, somewhere between here and there, after a turn or two and putting a wet finger out of the car window to test direction. Tim's driver for the event, another fraternity brother named Jeff (also a retired educator), kindly obliged Tim at every request.

This was Saturday, the supposed start of the tour, and the Shiner Brewery was on the schedule, but as we pulled out of the "parking lot" in Moravia, Jeff suggested to Tim that we go back to Jeff's ranch and relax. Relax in this environment is a relative term since I didn't know I was stressed, but Jeff and Texas Tim assured me that we would eventually get to the churches, the "Piano Bridge" (tossed in at no additional charge), and then the pinnacle of the tour, The Shiner Brewery.  Of course, for what I was paying, I realized Tim's tour's motto, "Sit Back and Enjoy the Ride" was exactly what I was going to do. 

We adjourned to Jeff's ranch, checked on the cattle, built a fire, put on some music, and I served up some Baldner Select Pecan Ale.  They appeared to like it and we enjoyed the fire.  More later about the churches and the tour of Shiner Brewery.