Sloan: Happenings at every vacation stop

This concludes my three-part travelogue about my recent Texas vacation.

Wendel Sloan

Mt. Pleasant

• In a clearance store, I passed on steeply discounted mismatched Nike sandals — size 6 (left) and size 8 (right).

• A friend, arguing with a cashier at a liquidating Hastings that their “Cash Only” sign was too small to notice, got madder when I offered her reading glasses.

Mt. Vernon

• I saw an arrogant goat standing in a feed trough glaring down at intimidated peers.

Mesquite (Dallas suburb)

• I took my 4-year-old great-nephew swimming at a municipal pool. I guess everything is bigger in Texas: They told me I was too short to go down the water slide.

• At the adjacent city-park lake, my nephew chased ducks — catching a baby one. The duckling’s mother then attacked my nephew — then me when I staged an intervention.

• I mistook ubiquitous Trump-Pence yard signs for bluebonnets — an ironic legacy for Democrat Lady Bird.

Highways

• God’s representatives rented numerous billboards, including: “You Think It’s Hot Here? — God.” I wanted to put up: “Thou Shalt Not Speak for Me. — God.”

Post

• Contradictory population signs — 5,376 and 3,708 — were yards apart.

• Founded by cereal magnate C. W. Post, several buildings still had fading cereal signs.

• A year-round Christmas store and miniature “Silent Night” shopping village were a block apart.

• The town has an incredibly wide residential street — 40 paces across and a half-mile long. A couple walking a service dog told me it was once the downtown before Highway 84 came through, and is still used for parades. I envisioned goose-stepping soldiers.

• Smelly, pumping oil jacks dotted residential neighborhoods.

• I resisted taking a selfie on a discarded commode behind a nursing home.

• A muddy, camouflaged pickup’s bumper sticker showed a donkey’s rear with: “I Was Obama-Nized!”

Littlefield

• Near a water tower with “Waylon Jennings Hometown,” I photographed a Confederate flag with “I Ain’t Coming Down” — and sped off when the enraged owner emerged.

Portales

• I knew I was home when I met a gentleman in Wal-Mart wearing a public-service-announcement T-shirt: “Save the Country: Spay or Neuter a Democrat.”

Contact Wendel Sloan at [email protected]