Saturday, August 17.
For the Husband’s birthday this year, I decided we were going to visit the Historic City of Jefferson Texas. We started our time in Jefferson around lunchtime, at a restaurant that I had read rave reviews online about – The Riverport Bar-B-Que. We can confirm, you should not leave town without experiencing their menu.
Next up was the “Historic Jefferson Bus Tour.” We met the bus at the Historic Kennedy Bed & Breakfast. Both the bus and the B&B were owned by the same people. It was fun to go inside the B&B and look around, and get a brief history of the place, including the renovations the owners had done to make it a B&B. Then we boarded the bus and were driven around for an hour and given an overview of the city. The Husband especially enjoyed this part of our day, since he didn’t need to drive… he just sat back and relaxed and looked around.
After the bus tour, we headed out on foot to some of the places that had been mentioned in the tour to take a deeper look. Several of the places I had previously marked in our plans for the day – such as the Bigfoot Statue, the previous Rail Car Tour (now closed because the owners retired last year), Jay Gould’s Rail Car and the Jefferson General Store. The aura in the Jefferson General Store was so neat. I could easily imagine it being a place where folks would buy their required necessities (fabric, flour, groceries) and the luxury fun items (candy out of buckets and ice cream). Since they now offer pre-made clothes and no groceries, we bought candy we can’t easily find anywhere (UNO bars, anyone??) and ice-cream (because it was super hot outside).
We finally decided we were hungry enough for dinner and headed to McGarety’s restaurant for the Husband’s birthday dinner. Unfortunately, they were “reservation only, or you can sit outside” – ha ha ha! I did mention it was hot, right? So, we walked a block away and saw an Italian restaurant named “Tony’s Pizza, Pasta & More” that the bus tour guide had mentioned for their pizza. Even though there were no cars parked out front, and no one inside but the employees, we bravely wandered in. Afterward, we agreed we were pleasantly surprised – the food was delicious and plentiful.
After dinner, we tooled around for awhile, got gas, went to the Dollar General, stopped at the tiny Brookshire’s grocery store and finally went over to the Kahn Hotel, where our Historical Jefferson Ghost Walk was to start just before sunset.
As we gathered outside the Kahn Hotel and our tour guide started sharing some of the history of the Kahn Hotel, one of the elderly ladies in the group collapsed. People were running to pick her up and carry her inside the hotel where it was cooler… it was SO hot outside. She was a fairly tiny person, and everyone thought maybe she just hadn’t hydrated very well. Thankfully, the ambulance showed up pretty quickly to make sure she was OK. With that start of the ghost tour, I wondered how you proceed from that kind of situation.
There were 27 people and we just all murmured amongst each other, sipped our water, and waited to hear how things would go. Our tour guide came back out, after making sure the lady would be OK, and briefly reassured us and then continued talking about the Kahn Hotel. We then crossed the street and were invited into the historic Jefferson Hotel, where we were allowed to wander around and look into the rooms that weren’t occupied by guests. The Jefferson Hotel has themed rooms – the “Mirror Room”, the “Doll Room”, the “Sasquatch Room”, the “Pirate Room” and many others. It was very museum-like, as the hallways were filled with collectibles and such. We were all fairly speechless afterward, other than to say amongst ourselves how awesome it was that the owners allowed us to do that.
The tour guide made sure everyone had plenty of opportunities to go inside to cool down inside some of the historic buildings while she shared more history of the town. One of the places we were allowed to do that was in the upstairs meeting room at the historical Haywood House. The last place we visited on the tour was warehouse area above the Myers Antiques building. It was mostly vacant, just some random things up there while they start to remodel it.
All of the places we visited allegedly have had ghostly activity. None of us saw anything that night, but it was cool to go inside the historical places, hear ghost stories and hang out with everyone.
Jammie J's Quest 