Izoro, TX

     I am guilty of being a "One More..." type of person. That is, I'll always play "Just one more round" of Civilization. Or have "Just one more" Dorito. Then, after six hours have passed and the Doritos are all gone I'll realize that I have "one more" timed myself into a sleepless night with orange fingers. So it was when I left Briggs I thought I'd just go another mile or so up the road. You know. Just to see if there was anything there.
     After twenty one more miles I ended up Lampasas. Lampasas is not a ghost town, although it has a sort of old timey look to it in the down town area, so I won't be going into much about it. Except that a couple of the early settlers in the area were brothers named Moses and Nimrod. Moses is a name you still see used every now and again. Nimrod, on the other hand, seems to be largely forgotten as something to name your child. Like Butch. After doing some research on Nimrod I'm a little surprised that anyone would name their kid Nimrod, as he sort of rebelled against God. But this isn't about Nimrod, or Butch, so let's move on.
     Lampasas brought me to an HEB parking lot where I stopped and decided to see how far away I was from Izoro. Once again, I got into a kerfuffle with the lady that lives in my GPS. I looked in the Cities list to see if it was there. It was not. I went to the Point Of Interest menu. It was not there. That wasn't surprising. I could put "Sea World" in there and it would list every Sea World in the USA, except for the one in San Antonio. Just to spite me.
     Being a man of livers, I used my phone and Google maps. It turns out it was another 20 miles up the road. I thought about not going, but, welllllll, I had already driven twenty miles from Briggs. What's another twenty? With that decided, how was I going to get there? I could use the phone GPS but it's easier to use the car's.  Luckily, there's an option to use a place on the map as a destination.
     I knew I had to take U.S. Route 281. According to Wikipedia, U.S. Route 281 is the longest, continuous, three digit U.S. Route. If you look at it on the map it basically bisects the country, starting about two miles from the border of Mexico and ends in North Dakota at the Canadian Border. None of that matters, though, because I wasn't going to be on it for quite that long. No, I'd be turning off on to FM 1690 and rolling through the scenery until I reached Izoro.

Scenery

Pattern matching

     One would think that was good enough, but I wanted it on the GPS so I poked at the screen going up 281 and tried to match the roads on the phone to the roads on the GPS. It wasn't working. Now, I know I'm an intelligent person. The problem here, it turned out, was that on the phone North was up. On the GPS, up is whichever direction the car is facing. So, while I was swiping to go up on the phone, I was actually poking to go south on the car GPS. Again. Intelligent. Just not too smart, sometimes. Anyway, after I got that straightened out, I realized that the highway numbers on the car GPS didn't match up with the numbers on Google Maps.
   
Much cursing and threatening ensued until I finally found the intersection I was looking for. By shape, if you believe it.
     TSHA doesn't have a lot of info about Izoro. There doesn't seem to be a lot there. Texas Escapes has a bit more info which, boiled down, would be that there was once a Romeo & Juliet thing going on that resulted in a gunfight, boll weevils invaded the cotton crop, and there was a woman who delivered the mail and assassinated questionable looking flowers.

No gas for you!

     But, as they say, it's about the journey -- not the destination. Unless you need gas.

     I wonder if this is the same Izoro Gillam. She would have been 13 when the town was renamed from Higgens Gap.