THE THREE STATES OF BBQ

A few weeks back, alright it was  November 2015 actually, I took an epic road trip to nowhere in particular that saw me pass through 11 states in 9 days. Roughly the path you see in that image to the right.

Now I'm not going to drive through 11 states and not stop and eat some BBQ somewhere. However it will take me almost two years to finally sit down and write about it, and actually since I'm going to be basing this on some notes I've kept on my phone, which I'm about to upgrade, so I figured I'd better write this before I lose the notes and photos, this will be mostly pictorial.... Which is probably good as discombobulated as that explanation was.

I FELT LOVED AT HATEFUL HUSSY'S MINING CAMP

Sometimes things don't always go as planned in the life of a two-bit, hack, wanna-be, Q-blogger.

The plan for the day was to meander our way from Ardmore to Denton. Eat at a couple of Q-raunts I had heard about there and then mosey on down to Kuby's Sausage House and load up on goodies from their German deli..... Absolutely the best chicken salad on the planet comes from Kuby's and the sausages are all top notch too.

Unfortunately the screwdriver, that's right I said screwdriver, you can see sticking out from the tire in that picture pretty much derailed our plans for the day.

We had made it to Collinsville Texas when we picked up this extra piece of hardware. A 45 minute wait for AAA to show up and put on the spare and then a 15 minute drive back to Whitesboro just to find out the only tire shop in Whitesboro didn't have the size tire we needed left us with a decision..... Drive 20 minutes to Sherman or 30 minutes to Denton..... We chose the 20 minute drive to Sherman.

WHERE THERE'S TEXAS SMOKE BBQ CO THERE'S FIRE

Update 08-07-15: Texas Smoke has closed their Sanger location and are catering only.

I never thought I would be in downtown Sanger Texas to eat anything other than fried chicken at Babe's.

Then I heard about Texas Smoke BBQ Company and I had a tough decision to make because Babe's is like comfort food kryptonite to me.

I had heard that Texas Smoke regularly sells out. So we decided to get there when they opened to make sure we wouldn't miss out on anything.

There was only one other person waiting for them to open when we arrived but by the time we left the place was starting to fill up and was doing quite a few take out orders as well.

WE SKIPPED TO LOCKHART SMOKEHOUSE

My day job has been doing it's very best to interfere with my BBQ addiction lately. It has been so succesful that I totally forgot that I had not written a blog about my trip to Lockhart Smokehouse, while I was on vacation last month, until I was clearing space on my phone and ran across the pictures I took.

The plan for the day was to go to Dallas and do a little shopping and then hit Pecan Lodge. I knew we needed to be to Pecan Lodge early but a slight time management miscalculation put us there about 30 minutes after they opened for lunch, on a Friday, and the line was about two blocks down the street already.

So I pulled up the Texas Monthly BBQ app on my phone and found the next nearest Texas Monthly Top 50 Q-raunt to us and hoped for the best.

LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I LIKE ABOUT TEXAS

So my wife tells me that our friend from California is going to be in San Marcos for a couple of  weeks and asks if I'm interested in going to see him. Now all I really heard was San Marcos. That was all I really needed to hear and the next words out of my mouth were "Can we go on a BBQ road trip? Can we?? Can we??? CAN WE?!?!?".

So over several long weeks of anticipation. I put together a BBQ dream trip... Snow's, Zimmerhanzel's, Luling BBQ & Luling City Market, Southside Market & BBQ and a few others if we have the time and the appetite... 200 and some odd miles and over 5 hours of driving though central Texas to eat BBQ.