Metal Longhorns

Today we visited Joshua in Waco, TX, where he is participating in a physics research project at Baylor University. Apparently, if you are a physics major, you must engage in some kind of advanced research before you graduate; Joshua was very glad to be accepted to the National Science Foundations’ Research Experience for Undergraduates (which pays a stipend and some travel expenses).

Daniel always wanted to be a missionary cowboy when he grew up. I just never expected this day to arrive!

Since Joshua is here all summer, we decided to include a visit to Baylor during our trip to Texas — we were so glad to get a chance to see Joshua. He gave us a tour of his cool lab building and joined us for a quick jaunt up to Dallas. We’ll go to church with him tomorrow, and then be on our way.

Waco has some interesting history to it, including some rather horrific racial atrocities in the early 1900s and the Branch Davidian siege in the 1980′s. Most recently, there was the biker gang massacre at the Twin Peaks restaurant that left nine dead and more than 170 arrested.

But Waco seems a sleepy town, with some real beauty to it. Baylor’s campus is very nice, and the parks along the Brazos river are very lush and shady, a lovely respite from the hot Texas sun. Apparently Waco was also a famous stop for many cattle drives from Texas to Kansas — charging $0.05 per head of cattle for using the suspension bridge.

Nobody charged us a nickel to cross this bridge.

These goofballs really took the whole ‘suspension’ part of the bridge very literally.

In commemoration of the cattle-driving history, a herd of twenty metal cattle and three cowboys were recently added to the park as a tribute to the cattle drive and cowboy culture in general.

Although hollow, these metal cows are very sturdy.

Fortunately, I had my own cowboys with me, and so we paid a visit to the park while we waited for our hotel rooms to be made available.

I’m not sure the cows were really designed to be ridden …

Traveling with boys is interesting. Their desire to conquer (and to climb on) everything is a reminder of my own youth — albeit now a rather distant memory.