After more than two weeks on the road including lots of camping and car-camping, by the time I left Houston I was feeling ready to get home. I made the massively long drive on mostly back roads in a marathon day and a half of driving with only one short sightseeing stop. Most of Texas is boringly flat and fairly ugly, so not much missed along the way.

Less than two hours outside of Houston I stopped at the George H .W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, the town where Texas A&M University is located. If the library/museum is technically on campus it's not very obvious since it seemed to be off by itself far from any apparent academic centers. I’m also not sure how Texas A&M got chosen as the site of the presidential library since Bush got his oilman start in Midland but then lived in Houston for part of his career which he represented in Congress. I didn’t learn of any specific strong connection to Texas A&M and the Aggies in the exhibits.

I’ve been making it a point to visit the presidential libraries/museums in my travels across the country regardless about how I feel about the presidents and their legacies. It may be a while, though, before I can manage to bring myself to visit the George W Bush Presidential Library & Museum soon to open at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. When do bad memories pass become historical events in one’s mind?

Bush’s four-year presidency was entirely within my young adulthood, so his is one of the few libraries focusing on events I can remember rather than have only read about as history . Although I actually worked for Bush’s election while I was in college, by four years into his presidency I was no longer enamored with him and voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Eighteen years later, though, his legacy doesn’t seem all that bad, especially compared to his son’s truly inept presidency. Bush, Sr. was a statesman who served his country well in many capacities up through his presidency, and in retrospect the first Gulf War and his breaking his "Read My Lips" pledge not to raise taxes were best policies for the country.

The official presidential libraries begin only with Herbert Hoover, so they aren’t all that numerous. I only have a few left to see. I find each one to be a little different and to somewhat reflect the president’s personality. While Ronald Reagan’s library in Simi Valley, CA is stridently ideological, perhaps reflecting the influences of his supporters than Reagan himself, Bill Clinton’s in Little Rock is especially flashy and grandiose, housed in an imposing glass building along the Arkansas River . George HW Bush had a reputation for being reasonably humble and down to earth (as far as presidents go), qualities reflected in his presidential library/museum which glorifies him as a man and his achievements significantly less than those of other presidents.

From College Station it was a few hours and well over 100 miles of uninteresting flat terrain to the Waco area where I had dinner at a chain Texas-style steakhouse and car camped for the night. West Texas took almost the entire day to drive through, and I think it was almost dusk already by the time I got to the New Mexico border. Then just my luck that I ran into some fairly heavy snow in southern Colorado between Raton Pass and Walsenburg. By the time I arrived home around midnight I was bushed and the most bleary-eyed from driving that I’ve been in many years.