Will Dad and I Ever See Texas the Same Way?

In this moving blend of travelogue and memoir, Dorothy Guerrero retraces the historical road trips her father took her on as a child, revisiting Texas landmarks. Guerrero’s journey becomes a quiet but powerful reminder that the real destination is time itself—especially the dwindling time we get with the people who first taught us how to see the world.

I promised to complain no more than necessary and to leave the itinerary up to him. Bursting with enthusiasm at the opportunity to bond all over again with his middle child, he chose a route that would take us through Texas’s deep and not-so-deep history by way of our shared past. We traveled from our homes in Austin to San Antonio and Goliad and then farther south to Corpus Christi, where he spent much of his childhood, and through the coastal prairies and river valleys where, as Dad frequently reminded me, so much world-shaking history happened: the Texas Revolution, the beginning of the Mexican-American War, the last land battle of the Civil War, the dawn of a new space age. When we returned after three days, nine hundred miles, and multiple Dairy Queen stops, we sat down at our respective laptops and compared notes.