Old Kingsbury Aerodrome - The New Airport


To say that my heart was beating rather rapidly when we pulled up to the Old Kingsbury Aerodrome would be a bit of an understatement. I felt like a blue tick hound let loose at the coon trials. We were met by Connie’s brothers, Roger and Steve, who were glad to see our weary bodies. After hugs all around, and though it was right at dark, I was able to catch the last few rays of light and take a handful of great pictures. Connie didn’t seem to mind being abandoned for awhile while I went gallivanting about the aircraft-populated acreage.

“Old Kingsbury Aerodrome” is actually a fairly new airport and has only recently received its FAA designator of 85TE. But, keeping up with Roger Freeman’s WW1 proclivities, he called it an aerodrome like Cole Palen did with his “Old Rheinbeck Aerodrome”. With every passing year I'm finding that "old" is good.

It was like walking back in time. There in front of us was a 1941 Meyers OTW biplane, a 1917 Fokker D-7, and a 1917 Standard Jenny. Even the wind vane on top of the hanger was unique. It was a small Fokker DR-1 Triplane! The place even smelled like an airport. I could tell that it was going to be a great day in the morning when the lighting would be excellent for taking pictures. The strain on the Huggy was obvious at that point but all was well since Connie had spares.

As night fell on Texas, excitement fell on us. We knew that the next day would bring much delight and many pictures.

I had seen the Standard years before at the Porterville Municipal Airport. In fact, I was one of the wing walkers when Chuck Wentworth flew James Cameron’s father around for awhile. Yes…that’s the same James Cameron who is the movie producer who made “Titanic”. But, I was more interested in the Standard than in him (you probably wouldn’t want to apprise him of that, though. It may wreck his day). There are few things as cool as listening to a 1917 Hispano Suiza V-8 engine at full RPM as it huffs and puffs its way into the air.

Roger and Fed Ex captain Steve (aka Boy Blunder who had just flown in from Memphis) had already conspired to haul us out to dinner that evening. Dinner is good; especially in Texas. Only….it wasn’t just any dinner. We were soon to find out just how special it was. Connie and I and a whole bunch of other wing nut friends all caravanned off into the dark Texas night to find this place that served up victuals fit for gourmand pilots and their co-pilots. Never could I have imagined a place like where we ended up.

Try, Gruene, TX. Gruene is only about thirty minutes from our grumbling guts and is the town that has been gently resisting change since 1872. It's also the home of the Gruene Hall where you can scoot a boot or shake a booty to some hot C&W music. You can immediately tell that it's quite the historical place. In fact, the place has been there throughout history. It has never moved even one time from the moment it was founded. It is still 40 miles south of Austin and 25 miles north of San Antonio. And, it’s still on the banks of the Guadalupe River where they left it. So, that means it was waiting at least 135 years for us to come and throw money at the good people who feed other people at the cool restaurant there.

The cool restaurant is the “Gristmill” and I must say that it is one of the best restaurants I’ve ever been to. That includes both the ambiance and the food itself. We sat outside at tables and watched squirrels scampering about in the branches of trees that were just a few feet away. We all sat around and shot some bulls while waiting for a perky bubbly waitress to discover us. Some ol' hairy-legged waiter had seated us and got our drinks but we knew we deserved better.

When the bubbly waitress finally found us and asked for our orders, there was only one item on the menu worth ordering (at least for me). CATFISH! If you’re going to play in Texas, there’s gotta be a fiddle in the band. And, if you’re going to eat in Texas, you gotta have catfish. That is, of course, unless it’s breakfast. Then you gotta have biscuits and gravy. If you have anything else, they know you are a foreigner and they throw you in jail for aggrivated stupidity. I'm not sure what the standard for lunch is in that part of Texas. But, I'm willing to bet that they wouldn't throw rocks at you if you ordered something deep fried, BBQ'd, or at least greasy.

I must say that it had been decades since I had eaten catfish out under the stars. I recall only having done it under the Kansas stars as a kid. I tried to do it under the Oklahoma stars but it was too warm that night in Broken Arrow in 1981. I ordered the all-you-can-eat catfish at the "Hush Puppy". I hadn't had catfish in many years so I just wore out the little dark haired waitress as she ran back and forth for refills. Rumor has it that she needed new tennis shoes after that marathon. I wasn't disappointed by the Gristmill's offerings either. The catfish were none too happy about it but my greasy smile proved that I was no longer hungry.

Needless to say, we all had a great time of fellowship and stomach stuffing. Afterwards, we headed back for the motel for some trip recovery time. We hadn't been there but a few hours and almost needed an antedote for fun poisoning. Roger had previously made arrangements for us in Luling about 15 min. away from the airport. Luling is probably an old Indian name meaning something like, “quaint little cool town in Texas”. Works for me. Other than for the anachronistic automobiles, we absolutely couldn't tell that it wasn't 1955. That ranks as "big time cool" with me.

“Cool” is also when you wake up in Luling and find that they a water tower that is cleverly disguised as a watermelon. It is also when you find that they have a breakfast buffet smack dab in the middle of their quaint little burg. And, you can bet I wasn’t about to leave Texas without totaling a biscuit.

Now, this wasn’t just any buffet. No siree, Billy Bob. First of all, it was cleverly disguised to look like just another Buster Brown shoe store in a real town in southwest Texas. It didn't look at all like some fancy shmancy uptown buffet. Uh-uh. Then, they cleverly served great coffee. They had quite a spread too. You can (and we did) help yourself to a heapin’ helpin’ of biscuits, lumpless sausage gravy (except for the lumps of sausage), scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, and coffee. There may have even been other clever items on the menu but I had perceptual filtering that morning. All I could see was the biscuits and gravy and coffee. I was tempted to eat until I made money but thought better of it. Thankfully, there was a lady present or things could have been really ugly and messy. But, I wasn’t hungry when I departed, that’s for sure. I don't think it took them all that long to clean up afterwards.

After slaughtering the sausages, we couldn’t wait to get to the airport and hook up with the guys, gals, and aircraft there. Luling wasn't far from the aerodrome so we got right to it.

Talk about “hog heaven”! Sheese! While Connie was visiting with family and folks, my Minolta took a beating as I went snap happy all over the place. I looked like a cranked up kangaroo with a Japanese camera hung around his neck hopping from plane to plane taking picture after picture after picture.

Though the weather was a bit “iffy” and occasionally trying to spit a mist at us, planes were starting to fly in from all over the place. Not a single one of them escaped having their picture taken. Just about every kind and type of airplane showed up for the fly-in. A number of the planes were homebuilt while others were WW2 vintage aircraft. There was a BT-13 Stearman and an N3N biplane that were of note. They flew a couple of formation fly-by’s. That was nice. Nothing like a couple of big noisy radial engines to make your day, I always say. Then, there was the OTW. Ah, yes. Now, there's a real airplane. And, she was calling my name.

Stay tuned for the next episode of “Connie and Randy do Texas in the almost good weather”.

On To Texas

Our time in Memphis was over only too quickly. The rumble of the big Pratt and Whitney engine on the DGA was still vibrating in my back pockets and my ears when we departed the next day for Texas. There were hugs all around as we departed with full tummies and a full tank of fuel. Our greatest of thanks are to Steve and Paulette for their generous hospitality. They were awesome!

Rather than return on I-40 we blazed a trail south to Mississippi. We were thankful for the paved roads as we blazed along, though. There's an aweful lot of gorgeous territory to be seen in the US of A and Connie I were taking a lot of it in. We then cut across at Jackson to Shreveport, LA. I had been to Shreveport back in ’03 on my way to New Orleans but had not come in from the east. Like I said; there was a lot of nice scenery to be soaked in so we did a lot of soaking. After a nice overnight stop just a few miles east of Shreveport we boogied on in to Texas. Abilene was the next destination.

The trip though Dallas and Ft. Worth was uneventful aside from the traffic snarling truck vs auto wreck in the middle of the Interstate (the truck won). We had plenty of snacks on board so were prepared to wait out the massive traffic jam ("Be Prepared"; it's not just a Boy Scout thing). Thankfully, it didn't take all that long and we were back to cruise speeds.

I hadn’t seen my son, Jeff, his wife, Sandra, and their son, Randall, since the ’03 trip (but for about 2 hours when they were out here to see Disneyland in ‘04). When we got to Abilene I immediately knew something was wrong with my grandson, Randall. Some nasty unscrupulous modifier had been feeding him and he was growing up! *Sigh*. He is now 8 years old (that’s ocho to all y’all that live in Texas and California) and as sharp as the beak on a hungry Eagle.

According to one source based in California, Randall is probably the best and brightest grandson on the planet. That’s just an opinion, of course, but the source has reason to believe it to be factual. I mean…the boy plays soccer , football, baseball (and has sports cards to prove it!), does well in school, and even has participated in (I like to use the word “starred in”) a local tire commercial on TV. Not a bad start in life for a Texan, I should suppose. Oh…did I mention that he’s as handsome as his dad and at least one other older relative?

Now that we have that part straightened out……I like Abilene. I’m not sure why but I do. I like mustard and sugar sandwiches too. I even like sashimi, sushi, and a few other weird items that some people wouldn’t touch with their hands much less put in the face. Perhaps it’s the occasional plague of crickets or the smashing thunderstorms with their Texas twisters. It may be the "Frontier Texas" Museum with it's incredible holographic displays and dioramas about the early days on the frontier in that region.

Naw…I think maybe it’s the incredible eats there. Harold’s Pit BBQ and Harlow’s are a couple of places that come to mind. If Harold is up to the task (on any given day) he comes out and sings a hymn for the customers. He's quite good. Another couple of places include Johnny Carina’s and Grandy’s. If one is suffering the throes of a growling stomach in the morning, Grandy’s is good for a large order of biscuits and gravy. “Man does not live by bread alone…he has to have biscuits and gravy” (the book of "Third Randy" I believe is where that’s written in case you were wondering).

One unbeatable place is “The Texas Roadhouse”. Jeff is one of their managers so he made sure that my opinion was biased toward the place by treating Connie and I to a top-notch steak dinner. It worked so I am committed to as much word-of-mouth advertising that I can offer. Let me tell you…..any attempts by the Devil to starve us to death were entirely defeated that night. We ran out of places to stuff our meal. One more bite of juicy steak would have popped out of my mouth and ended up in my lap. We quit before things got ugly.

“The Texas Roadhouse” is one of those cool places where they serve you a bucket of peanuts to snack on while you wait. This wasn’t the first place that we encountered that had this neat idea. The first was in Memphis at Carlson’s when Connie’s brother, Steve, took us out for lunch (trust me….order their catfish). The nice waitress gave us a bucket of peanuts so Steve and I took to shucking shells into a pile on the table. Then, being the occasionally tidy guy that I am, I dragged the pile of shells onto the floor. Now, it had not occurred to me in the slightest that Connie had yet to be in such a place where peanut shells belong on the floor. As I raked the shells on to the floor with my best raking ability, she looked at me like I had a sudden noisy gaseous digestion issue in church. I found out later that her first thoughts were, “I ain’t cleaning this mess up. He can do it himself!”. Soooo…she wasn’t tossed overboard this time when she saw Jeff and I shoving shells onto the floor. She tossed one or two as well but I still think she had a guilty conscience about it. I guess she was thinking that normal people don’t throw their food on the floor. I sure hope she’s not correct about that.

After spending a couple of days in Abilene with the “fam” there, we had to get on down the road to San Antonio. Roger’s fly-in was beckoning us and we didn’t want to be late for the event. I left a chunk of my heart in Abilene; not a big chunk; just enough to make me want to return to retrieve it as soon as I could. Many many thanks to Jeff and Sandra for their generous hospitality and bending over backwards to accommodate us. It couldn't have been better.

After a nice full day of driving and seeing some incredibly beautiful and interesting countryside, we pulled up to the “Old Kingsbury Aerodrome” 30 min. east of San Antonio. We got their right at dark but immediately knew we were in for a huge treat. There were awesome aircraft everywhere! We were greeted by Connie’s brother, Roger, but….it was the 1941 Meyers OTW biplane that I hugged first. That’ll all be on the next post, don'tcha know.