a.d. elliott - Take the Back Roads

Dear Henry, Have you ever heard of the "Tequila Train"? I have just recently discovered this epic journey and have now added this journey to my bucket list of adventures. Tequila is a distilled liquor that must be explicitly produced by the blue agave plant in the Jalisco state of Mexico. It is not mezcal,  which can be made from other types of agave plants and can be found locally produced throughout Mexico, although most commercial mezcal comes from the state of Oaxaca. While mezcal has been produced by the indigenous people of the Mexican region since the very earliest times of their civilizations, it was the Spanish Conquistadors who, after running out of their own stocks of brandy and decided to give the local "mezcal wine" a try, that put the beverage on the world map. Around 1600, the Marquis of Altamira, Don Pedro Sanchez de Tagle, opened the first commercial distillery and created the first distilled liquor in the Americas. Mexico is (and should be) fiercel...

Dear Henry, Right before Easter, I drove back to Arkansas to see some friends.  It was such a great time. I've felt so isolated in Tulsa and have missed my friends from Arkansas terribly. Of course, I spent the entire visit complaining about how uncomfortable I have been since moving - a trait I should really work on; no one likes to talk to someone who complains all of the time - but complaining brought me the wisdom of the remarkable Mrs. R.M., and she always has the best advice. She told me I needed to go to the Philbrook Museum of Art. The Philbrook Museum of Art is housed in a building named Villa Philbrook. It was designed by architect  Edward Beuhler Delk and constructed in 1926 by the John Long Company as a private residence for the early oil baron Waite Phillips, his wife Genevieve, and their two children. The three-story, 72-room house was designed to look like an Italian villa, although most of the building materials were American-sourced, and it is situated on 25 a...