Yesterday was the 2011 installment of the annual BBQ Road Trip. (Previously.) This year’s edition went out to Texas Pride Barbecue in Adkins, near San Antonio. (Sorry about the auto-play video on that website; I don’t like it any more than you do.) After the jump, photos and commentary.
How was the barbecue? I thought everything I had (baby back ribs, pulled pork, brisket, and sausage) was pretty good. I also liked their pecan cobbler, and the fresh-cut fries were excellent (especially straight out of the fryer).
Outside view of Texas Pride.
When I was younger, my family owned a Suburban (which got used pretty heavily for towing a trailer and family vacations). The Suburban we rented for the trip this year brought back some happy nostalgia. And it tuned out to be a pretty decent car. We were able to seat 7 people comfortably, plus we had plenty of room for a cooler and other stuff in the cargo section. (I didn’t get a chance to do the AR-15 test, though. Sorry, guys.) I only had two issues:
- Gas mileage. The overall average reported by the car computer was 17 MPG. Cruising mileage may be better, but traffic between Austin and San Antonio is stop-and-go enough that we didn’t really get a lot of chances to cruise. We had to stop and put gas in the car (having run it almost all the way to “E”) and $40 didn’t even halfway fill the tank. On the other hand, it is nice that the big V8 revs pretty low (I don’t think it went above 2,000 RPM doing 80 MPH on the freeway); there was no sense of strain from the engine.
Don’t get me wrong; I knew what I was getting into when we rented something that could haul seven people. But at $3.89 a gallon and 17 MPG, I wouldn’t want to drive this puppy as a daily driver unless I owned an oil company. - Power points. There were two up front: a standard 12-volt port and a USB port. The USB port both provided power for those of us who had USB chargers or charge cables, but also handled the iPod interface to the car audio. Unfortunately, plugging in anything that wasn’t an iPod got you an “unknown device” message from the audio system. Other cars I’ve been in with USB ports will treat an unknown external USB device as USB mass storage, which I think is a better approach. There was also one 12-volt port in the cargo area. It would have been nice to have at least one, and maybe two or more, power points in the passenger section: perhaps one in the window sills next to the cup holders (I believe our final count was 11 cup holders total) on each side.
Fit and finish were pretty decent, though, and I liked the console between the driver’s and front passenger seats. It made for a pretty good table, and the internal compartments were big enough for a full-sized 1911. (If I had thought of it, I would have grabbed one of mine. As it is, we made do.)
“Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.”
I love this sign.
Isn’t this a blast from the past? Louis, Foreman, Cosell, and King?
If we can’t photograph barbecue restaurants, the terrorists have already won.
Edited to add: As an experiment, I created a Google Maps view of the trip with the Google Tracks software on the Evo 4G.
View 2011-05-13 10:42 in a larger map