Sometimes, a simple afternoon trip “away from normal” can make a world of difference. Especially when your budget is strapped a little from other trips looming on the horizon, but you need to get out of town.
We were recently faced with just such a situation. The Houston weather had been a little too close to wintery and we finally had a bright, sunny day and nothing in particular that we had to accomplish. And so, the idea to visit nearby Old Town Spring was floated around and readily adopted. Old Town Spring is about a 30-minute drive from our neighborhood, Houston Heights. Spring itself is like any other suburb, sort of bland, full of strip malls and churches, gas stations and random dance halls. But Old Town Spring is something else altogether.
Picture a cluster of bungalow-type homes, all gathered together, but refashioned into small boutiques, tea rooms, wine rooms, antique stores – every type of specialty shop you can imagine. Handmade leather cowboy boots, wrought iron art and hand-carved wooden home bars that look like they came straight from a magazine spread featuring a celebrity’s home. The antique stores are a chaos of old furniture, tables and plant stands gathered as closely as concertgoers in a mosh pit. A German store offers goods straight from Germany and a British store is full of Cadbury and chocolate biscuits imported from across the Atlantic. A little Dutch shop sells stroopwafels and tiny wooden windmills – the kind of knick-knacks one expects to find in such a shop, even if it seems impossible that they stay in business with such wares for sale.
On this unusually sunny and pleasant day, we found ourselves headed for the tea shop. It seemed like the perfect day for afternoon tea, complete with tiny sandwiches and scones. It wasn’t quite a Yorkshire-style tea; the scones were a little hard and unfortunately, the only option was raisin. But the tea room was sufficiently cozy with mismatched chairs and floral tablecloths. There were oohs and aahs when our tri-level tea stand appeared from the kitchen and it’s almost impossible to be anything but happy when three levels of treats appear in front of you. We ate up, one sandwich flavor at a time, feeling excruciatingly fancy while sipping the tea, as one must.
When we finished our tea, we came out the front doors and spotted a wine-tasting room across the street, a family restaurant with a real locomotive train car sitting out front, its days on the rails long over. Another tiny store seemed to sell nothing but different types of rocks and minerals, and behold – down the street a few houses was a toy store. Of course, it was not possible to pass by without a loud complaint from a small boy who has never seen a shop of any kind that he couldn’t find something within that he needed.
We made a few dips into random junk shops for souvenirs of Old Town Spring and Christmas ornaments with armadillos wearing scarves, stained glass angels and stars made from anything you can imagine to symbolize the Lone Star State. There’s always a lot of families walking about in the Old Town – mothers pushing strollers, fathers with kids on their shoulders, teenagers holding hands or looking glumly at their cell phones. It’s busy, but unhurried, everyone moseying, enjoying, taking in this little village that is very obviously a tourist trap. But, it’s cute and the small bungalows-turned-shops are welcoming, recalling a sort of “Andy Griffith” time that never existed but gives us happiness, nonetheless.
It was a simple afternoon trip that got us out of the house and on a short, temporary escape from the ordinary. Sometimes, these little holidays make all the difference.
