Yesterday, I wallowed in memories of Italy and Switzerland. Today I enjoyed the reality of having the Texas Hill Country on my doorstep. As avid readers of these pages will know, I occasionally review automobiles for Autosavant, the thinking driver's car journal, and this week I have the pleasure of putting a Lexus LX 570 to the test. As I generally try to spend most of a day behind the wheel of my test vehicles, the Lexus and I headed west and had a sprightly time on the roller-coaster back roads of the Hill Country between Blanco and Fredericksburg, with a pause in Luckenbach, once famous as the venue of Willie Nelson's Fourth of July bash and now just a blink-and-you-miss-it hamlet tucked away under spreading live oaks. The midday heat resounded with cicadas, and somewhere a guitar was being incompetently strummed. The town's motto, suitable for a community of about 30 inhabitants, is "Everybody's somebody in Luckenbach." Feeling briefly like somebody, I parked behind the saloon, reclined the sumptuous leather-clad driver's fauteuil, turned up the a/c, and refreshed myself with a nap. I really should have been at my desk, banging away at the book I'm ghost-writing, but the weather was fine, the roads were empty, and there was a Lexus in my driveway. That's an irresistible formula for feeling almost young again. Now I'm back at my desk. But there's still tomorrow, and the wide world beckons....
