Thursday, December 26, 2013

More From Tahoka!

I had the opportunity recently to speak to someone who knows a bit about Tahoka. It seems that the city council is deeply divided, some wanting no change whatsoever, while others would like to revive the community. All are clueless. Years ago, for a brief period, the town hosted a motocross event but it was so poorly managed that it made no money. There were no vendors, for instance. Tahoka today seems content to curl up and die.










More to come...

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

TAHOKA!!

(Note: This is an old post and I have not visited this place in years. By this time it might be the best place in the world to live.)

Tahoka is not a joke-ah, but a small town of not much more than 2000 inhabitants about 40 miles south of Lubbock on Highway 87. I've driven through the place over the course of many years, but never until recently have I taken one of the three exits into the town. My wife and I did that last Sunday. I took with me a Canon A610 Powershot camera I bought for $2.50 at an estate sale the day before. The camera had no case or instructions. It had no SD card and the shutter button was gone. I downloaded instructions from Canon's website, read reviews online, and installed a spare 1 gig SD card, and made a shutter button from a standard thumbtack and a bit of double-side foam tape. Works great. I failed to check the lens before I used the camera in Tahoka. It was smudged but I cleaned the lens later and now this camera is perfectly useable. I had a spare USB connector that mates it to my computer and downloaded the software I needed to make the camera and computer communicate. This dirt cheap camera is so good, I found a used one on eBay for $30 and bought it for my wife. That one has the CD ROM, an SD card, and a connector, and the instruction manual. 

Tahoka is losing population and is rather depressing. This small town has been by-passed by the oil boom. Most of the streets are in poor repair, the downtown area is full of abandoned buildings, and I can't understand why anyone would stay there. There is a lot of low-income government housing. Tahoka offers NOTHING. No festivals, no tourist events, no attractions of any kind. I wonder about the city's leadership. Tahoka, at present, seems to have no future.

Here is the first set of photos, a mixed bag. I will do several installments of these.









More to come...

Friday, December 20, 2013

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Last Group Of Photos From The Scary Place

These are the last photos in this group, taken in that scary place on a hill--- I'm not sure about telling where it is. It just might not be wise, for a variety of reasons.











If you've lived in Lubbock a long time you probably know where this is, and might have wondered why it hasn't been torn down long ago.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Even More From The New Lubbock Photo Series

These are all from the same sinister location.












I am not suggesting that all of Lubbock is like this. Only the interesting parts...