February 18, 2016
Gill Has Knocked It Out of the Park Again
There are few greater pleasures on a long bicycle trip through rural America than stepping away from rural America for a day or two. For as great as small towns and quiet back roads are, dipping a toe back into the kind of food and drinks and culture we're more used to feels like a wonderful reward for all of that cranking and all of those gas station pastries. College towns are almost always a sure bet for this stuff. When I think back on past rides I remember with fondness places like Berea, Kentucky and Bozeman, Montana and Davis, California. That's how we happened to choose riding into College Station over continuing straight west into the rolling hills of Central Texas and beyond.
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But the sprawl and chain stores we saw riding into the city and walking around near our motel last night turn out not to have been all that unusual for this place. I see a lot of people on bikes as I walk toward downtown, but there aren't any bike lanes outside of campus. This puts anyone on the sidewalk forever within a few inches of getting run down by a sophomore that's late for class. The crosswalks aren't much better; in a mile of walking I'm almost hit by a car twice. At least I can meet up with Kristen and we can get delicious burritos that make us break out in goofy, satisfied smiles.
We both agree that we've never seen a college town like College Station. Where I expected to see old three- and four-story brick buildings with local businesses on the lower level and apartments above, it's chain stores and high-rise student housing. It's a place heavy with religious influences and cowboy boots and tucked-in polo shirts. The student bookstore has a giant election sign for a politician that bills himself as a Conservative Republican hanging in its front window. I want to hang out and read the local weekly newspaper but I can't find a coffee shop that isn't church-sponsored and closed, open only to students living in a dorm, or a Starbucks.
Instead I end up in a bar with walls of rough dark wood where taxidermied animal heads look down at me with frozen eyes and a NASCAR practice session plays on each TV. Over a two-dollar beer I read the lead music review in the Maroon Weekly. It's glowing praise of the newest Vince Gill album ("Gill has knocked it out of the park again"). I've never before seen a weekly paper in a college town where there isn't a single article about politics or style or the performing arts.
That's College Station in a nutshell. It's still a place with plenty of bars, some food trucks, a hookah lounge, and signs telling students not to consume or have open containers of alcohol in public. It's far and away the most racially and ethnically diverse place we've seen since we started riding. And yet it's in so many ways different from any college town I've ever passed through. It's all the more unexpected in a place where 50,000 students go to school and where, without the presence of the university, the city would be some small fraction of the size.
But there's still decent Italian food and top-shelf on-tap beers to be had and when evening rolls around we have them. We feel happy, healthy, full of life, content. We also feel ready for tomorrow, when both nothing and everything are about to change.
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