Scott and Jill hiking in Gros Ventre Wilderness outside Grand Teton National Park.

I guess it’s fitting I’ve chosen today, a holiday named for a martyr, to explain how our blog died. Or, more accurately, how I killed it.

It’s Valentine’s Day, 2011. Jill and I have been back at our home in Phoenix for a month. We traveled to 35 states (and one U.S. territory) during the past year, but our blogging stopped back in October, somewhere near the Texas-Louisiana border.

We never documented our travels across the Deep South, Atlantic Coast, New England, Great Lakes, Northern Rockies or Pacific Northwest. We failed to chronicle chance meetings with benevolent strangers and rewarding stays with old friends. Encounters with rattlesnakes, gray wolves and grizzly bears went uncatalogued. Ruminations about regional food, mountain trails and camping gear went unshared. The whole promise of the blog, inasmuch as there was one, went unfulfilled.

Scott in one of the tunnels of the Castillo de San Cristóbal Spanish fort in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The fault for this rests with me.

Last January, a week before we set out on our journey, two of our closest Phoenix friends treated us to a sendoff dinner at Jill’s favorite restaurant of the moment. At meal’s end, after the plates were cleared but before the last sips were drained from our glasses, our friend Stephanie — who is notorious for posing big-picture, put-life-in-context questions — leaned across the table, locked her eyes to ours, and asked, “OK, what is the one thing you hope get out of this trip?”

Jill and I paused, considering the scope of the question. I answered first, saying that I looked forward to leaving behind workaday responsibilities for a life lived spontaneously. I said I hoped to attach personal memories to names on maps, to see at least one new place every day and to temporarily approach life with abandon. It was a stream-of-conscience ramble that could have been distilled to six words: I just want to have fun.

When Jill sensed that I was done, she waded into her own reply. She said she looked forward to practicing her art in concert with mine — that we had spent our respective professional lives taking photographs and writing words, but we had never worked on a project together. She said she hoped we could develop story ideas for magazines, which might — who knows? — lead us to new careers as freelance travel journalists.

“Wow,” said our friend Laura flatly. The perfect yang to Stephanie’s yin, Laura is notorious for making cold assessments and sharing them (among friends, at least) with minimal reheating. “You do realize you have completely different expectations, right?”

If we didn’t before, we did then. After we parted ways in the parking lot, I’m sure Laura must have turned to Stephanie and confided, “They’re doomed.”

We weren’t. But our blog was.

Jill's square feet in an Eno hammock at a state park in Bardstown, KY.

The best blogs are written by journalists and aspire to journalism; their intent is to enlighten and, sometimes, entertain. Other enjoyable blogs are written by regular folks and aspire to sincerity; these blogs bridge distance between family and friends in a more artful way than Facebook, with journal-like writing and digital snapshots.

Jill and I hoped our blog would fall somewhere in between. But I wasn’t sure we could pull it off. Correct that: I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. Not every week. For a year.

It’s not like Jill and I didn’t discuss this. I told her that I worried our different styles of working — her: passionate, ambitious, headlong; me: reflective, meticulous, meandering — might clash out on the road. This worried her, too. At the least, we worried I would slow her down; at the worst, we worried I would drive her nuts.

I ended up doing both. As the country unfurled before us, day by day, I struggled to keep up with my end of the blog bargain. Worse, I lost the desire to try. This devastated Jill, who worked her ass off to build the blog and was proud of the posts we’d done so far. She felt a responsibility to our followers and regularly checked our blog stats, tracking how many hits we were getting each day. More than once I caught her doing this in the car, on her iPhone, as pastoral countryside passed by outside her window and the CD we were listening to began to repeat.

As the blog posts fell farther behind our travels (we blogged about California from Florida), Jill’s anxiety and my guilt swelled in direct proportions. However much fun we were having  each day — and we were having lots — the subject of the blog seemed to worm its way into our conversation come nightfall. It had become a weight, a thing, a cumbersome monkey stretched across both our backs.

Jack didn't think canoeing the boundary waters of Ely, MN was a good idea.

The blog needed to die, but I couldn’t kill it. Not alone. Like some sort of doomsday device, the blog’s detonation required two keys. I do not recall the precise moment Jill finally turned her key — maybe it wasn’t a moment at all, but an incremental process — but I’m thankful she did it. We traveled lighter thereafter. Had we not amputated our figurative 12 legs, I’m not sure our literal 12 legs could have keep moving.

When friends chided me about the dormancy of the blog, I used to joke that I was on the verge of emblazoning a T-shirt with the words “FUCK THE BLOG” and wearing it every day. When people ask me if I’m going to write a book about our yearlong honeymoon, I tell them that, if I do, it will be titled “How a Traveling Couple Learned to Stop Blogging and Start Living.” Jill realizes my jokes are a means of conversational deflection, but she does not think them funny. The blog is a more sensitive subject than either of us have ever let on. (Until now.)

Despite the blog’s premature death, it was responsible for some of the most memorable days of our trip. Once, just to catch up on a few posts, we decided to stop in Natchez, Miss., and spend several days working on the blog in a motel. Only we didn’t stay in a motel; we stayed at the Mark Twain Guest House, on the shores of the Mississippi River. Our room sat atop the Under-the-Hill Saloon and had once been part of a brothel. It was furnished with a four-post bed and an antique card table. Each morning, Jill sat in the former and I sat at the latter, blogging away. The room’s big windows and french doors afforded views of the river, and we opened both to let in the breeze. Around sunset we would walk the dogs along the Big Muddy, and we whiled away the nights listening to the stories of the saloon regulars.

We had similar stop-to-blog experiences at a roadside hunting lodge in Mobridge, S.D., and a lakeside motor lodge in Detroit Lakes, Minn. At the latter, I never even cracked open my computer. I chose to read a book by the lakeshore instead.

Tilson Boshears, 3, convinces his dad to jump in the lake on Halloween. The lake temperature was 64 degrees.

Just because we didn’t blog about every place we traveled to doesn’t mean I’ll forget them. I won’t. And just because the blog didn’t turn out the way we thought it would doesn’t mean this past year wasn’t the best year of my life. It was.

I’d like to say I have no regrets about our decision to abandon the blog, but that would be a lie. I regret not compiling a full record of our time on the road. I regret not finishing what we started. And, most of all, I regret letting Jill down. Jill loved reading my blog posts. I should have kept writing for her, if for no one else. I guess that’s what I’m doing at the moment, because I don’t know that anybody really cares about one more dying star out here in the infinite blogosphere. But Jill does, and I think she could use a little closure. It’s the lamest Valentine’s Day gift I’ve ever given her. (Which is saying something when you consider the list includes a used tire and a plush hedgehog.)

The one silver lining in all this (for me, anyway) is that while I stopped immortalizing our adventure in words, Jill never stopped documenting it in photos. She has thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands. It will take her months to sort through every one. If you’re wondering whether she will post the best of those images here, the answer is no. She has a new blog, one that I can’t bog down with my sludgy prose. You can find it at jillrichardsphotography.blogspot.com.

As for this blog, maybe I’ll finish it one day, for the sake of posterity or future progeny. But I’m not making any promises. If there’s one thing I learned from this once-in-a-lifetime journey, it’s that I really suck at this whole enterprise.

On the flip side, I’m damn good at honeymooning.

A late-night campfire in Wyoming.

— Scott

I’ve taken a lot of pictures during this trip. In fact, Scott and I are swimming in pictures — some good, some bad and some we won’t show. I take them with my fancy digital camera, my not-so-fancy Holga, my underwater point-and-shoot and, of course, my iPhone.

A camera is an essential for any traveler. But I have to admit that the versatility of my iPhone sometimes makes carrying three cameras seem, well, excessive. The iPhone is pretty amazing. Its camera rivals point-and-shoot cameras I’ve shot with, and it allows us to share pictures with friends and family with ridiculous ease and immediacy. As if it couldn’t get any better, the iPhone offers dozens of cool photography applications that turn mediocre pictures into something more.

Take for example, one of my favorite photo apps — the Hipstamatic.

This popular app adds vignettes, discoloration and rough edges to your digital image. The artful distortion varies depending on the lens and “film” style you choose. The basic Hipstamatic download, which costs $1.99, features three lenses (John S., Jimmy and Kaimal), three film options (Blanko, Ina’s 1969 and Kodot Verichrome), and two vintage flashes (Standard and Dreampop). Additional lenses and film are available via 99 cent bundled downloads.

As with other iPhone apps, a swipe of the fingertip lets you change settings on the Hipstamatic, and artificial sounds — a clacking shutter, a gently buzzing flash — heighten the sense of reality and nostalgia.

The Hipstamatic is effortless and groovy, and you don’t have to be a pro to make interesting pictures with it. This messes with my instincts and work ethic as a photographer. For me, making a good photo has always been hard; it’s about quality of light, quality of subject and the quality of my eye. The Hipstamatic is a cheat. In mere seconds it makes images that would take hours to create in Photoshop.

Still, after learning more about the Hipstamatic, I feel less like a schmuck for falling in love with it. The makers of the app are paying homage to the original Hipstamatic, which was an actual film camera. The back of the camera’s body as it appears on the iPhone’s screen looks just like the back of the original plastic camera, which sold for $8 in the early ’80s.

The Hipstamatic was born out of a passion for photography and conceptualized by two art students in a Wisconsin cabin. Brothers Bruce and Winston Dorbowski loved the Kodak Instamatic and set out to build a camera “even a child could afford on a small allowance.”  They designed and built such a camera, and sold it through a local electronic store.

There’s no telling how big the Hipstamatic could have been. The Dorbowski brothers produced only 157 before they died in a car accident in 1984. The were killed by a drunk driver. Three years ago, however, their older brother Richard created a simple blog about the creation of the Hipstamatic. The website is a celebration of his two brothers, who were dubbed by neighbors as the “crazy hippies on the lake.” On a post dated July, 29, 2009, Richard wrote, “Today I met with two young gentleman that want to bring back the Hipstamatic … well, sort of.”

Those gentleman were software designers, of course, and their visit with Richard Dorbowski lead to the creation of an iPhone app that has been downloaded more than a million times.

I doubt the Dorbowski brothers could have imagined the Hipstamatic’s phenomenal success, let alone its reincarnation as an app for the iPhone, but I’m sure they would be thrilled that so many people — even kids with small allowances — have access to it. “It doesn’t matter if the photos aren’t prefect,” Bruce Dorbowski once said. “As long as people are capturing memories, I will be happy.”

One App Store reviewer thanked the makers of the Hipstamatic app for creating a “program for the ‘photo-stupid’ among us.” Professional photographers aren’t always so complimentary. Many see it as one more gimmick that cheapens their art form. As one photographer I greatly admire put it: “The proliferation of imagery lately is slowly sucking the creativity out of photography.”

Maybe. I admit that I sometimes feel a little dirty when I take pictures with my Hipstamatic app instead of my fancy Canon. But other times, when I’m in harsh midday light and feeling like a tourist, I just want to make a picture instead of a fuss with my gear. That’s when the Hipstamatic is my best friend. It lets me enjoy the moment, be silly, feel like a kid. I think the Dorbowski brothers would dig that.

— Jill

“Turn off your headlamp,” I told Jill, switching off my own. Her head swiveled toward me, and I was blinded by the blue-white glare of her cycloptic beam.

“Are you crazy? We won’t know where they are.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said, shielding my eyes. “Let’s do the dark for a while.”

We were sitting on a small dock behind our campsite at Lake Fausse Pointe State Park, near St. Martinsville, La. Before us the swampy waters of the Borrow Pit Canal lie still and black, like a forgotten cup of tea. The dogs slept behind us. A flask of bourbon passed between us. The night was warm and clear and breezeless, and for the first time during our trip, I felt enfolded by the arms of the South.

We were watching gators.

If this country has spawned a weirder animal than the alligator, I cannot name it.  Alligators always look as though they just crawled out of a primordial sludge, and for good reason: They’ve been around for 200 million years. They are, in essence, living fossils. If you hang around Cajuns in south Louisiana long enough, you will learn gators can live 60 years, grow to 14 feet long and go through 3,000 teeth in a lifetime. They can crack a turtle’s shell, capsize a johnboat and drown a black bear. Some even keep rocks in their stomachs to help with digestion.

Fascinating facts, all, but do you want to know the coolest thing about alligators? Their eyes shine bright amber — like E.T.’s heart — when illuminated by the LED beam of a headlamp. It’s eerie.

“C’mon. Turn off your light. Just for a minute.”

Jill reluctantly clicked off her headlamp, and the glowing-amber alligator eyes we had been tracking for the past half hour faded to black. The water was smoky glass. The moon hid behind the trees. We looked up — the sky was heavy with stars.

The swamp was quiet save for our words and the periodic call of a barred owl, whose distinctive voice is the wah-wah pedal of the avian music scene. Barred owls are easily the most talkative of the Bayou’s nocturnal creatures, but on this night Jill and I left our tree-perched neighbor in the conversational dust. Still water inspires reflection, I guess, and we talked a lot about how we’d gotten to this point, both figuratively and literally.

Literally, we had wobbled into Lake Fausse Pointe on three wheels. One of the CRV’s rear tires blew out on the levee road that leads to the park, and I spent our first half hour in this former home of the Chitimacha Indians putting on the spare. But, figuratively, it felt like we had begun to fall into a traveling rhythm. Pitching camp and cooking dinner had become second nature, and the dogs had become slobbering paragons of happiness and adaptability. Earlier in the day we had taken them on a hike through the swamp, where they chased each other through the black mud and tannin-stained water, joyfully oblivious to the fact they might be snatched by an alligator at any moment.

Watching the dogs gallop through gator habitat made Jill and me at once nervous and happy — not unlike this trip does when the good times roll in but the paychecks don’t. But sitting on the little dock, sipping whiskey and weaving words into the night air, we felt more peace with our decision than ever. I have no idea what the Chitimacha word for “good place” is, but we were in one.

Maybe 20 minutes had passed since we switched off our headlamps, and in that time the moon had risen to the treetops and our owl friend had ceased his caterwauling. The swamp’s silence seemed to possess weight; I could almost feel it against my temples and the tops of my shoulders. I listened for a gentle ripple or quivering leaf. I heard nothing.

“OK,” I whispered to Jill, “on the count of three, turn on your light. One … two … three …”

Our twin beams lit the surface of the canal and revealed three more alligator eyes — two of them staring directly at us no more than 10 feet from the dock’s edge. Jill let forth a muted squeal. I laughed the laugh of a man who uses chuckles to mask uneasiness.

“Are you serious? Are you serious?” Jill raised both hands to her mouth. She spoke through her fingers. “He’s totally stalking us.”

“Actually,” I said, “I think we’re the only thing keeping him from Jack and Isabel.”

It’s likely the gator had spotted the rising and falling bellies of our sleeping dogs, and was now contemplating whether they might make a good evening snack. During hungrier moments on the trip, I’ve wondered the same.

“Go get more whiskey,” I told Jill. “This is awesome.”

The dogs had become gator bait, and it might be argued I was using them to extend our evening of heightened sensory pleasure. I should probably be ashamed of this. Jill, for her part, expressed serious concern, but I tried to assuage it. Judging by the space between our stalker’s glowing eyes, I estimated he was no more than six or seven feet in length, and gators of that size typically feed on frogs and turtles and other critters much smaller than humans and big dogs. I assured Jill we were OK, that observing alligators from atop the dock was akin to watching sharks from the safety of a boat deck.

“But they can just crawl up on shore anytime they want,” she countered.

Technically, this was true. The dock rose above the water only a couple of feet, and the shoreline on either side of it sloped gently into the water. Still, there was vegetation aplenty in the form of trees and high grass.

“If one crawled out of the water, we would hear it,” I reasoned aloud. “So would the dogs. We’re fine. I promise.”

Just the same, when Jill went to fill the flask, I stepped off the dock to examine the shoreline. I walked the canal’s edge on both sides of the dock, scanning the waterline with the high beam from my headlamp. The left side was clear; but on the right, shining through a tangle of low branches, was another set of glowing amber eyes.

We were darn near surrounded. In my year of Peter Pan adventure, I was beginning to feel like Captain Hook.

When Jill returned, I apprised her of the situation. We stood in the center of the dock, and I illuminated the canal with a methodical sweep of my light, pointing out the position of each gator. We counted five. This included the sly sucker right in front of us, who seemed to have inched closer to the dock. His burning-ember gaze did not waver. At the other end of it, behind the legs of our camp chairs, Isabel stretched and sighed and settled back into a state of slothful inertia. The great Killer of Cats had no idea 600 pounds of scaly karma lurked just below her sight line.

Jill and I sat down and clicked off our headlamps. The moon was high enough now that we could see the shadowy forehead of the closest gator. I reached for Jill’s hand and planted a kiss on her forearm. She smiled and passed the whiskey.

Back in Phoenix, one of our favorite evening pastimes is sitting on our back patio watching the sprinklers. This is where, many a night, we talked for hours about the trip ahead, conjuring possibilities and particulars, assessing rewards and risks. We knew life on the road would be good, that there were bound to be pleasant surprises, but even in the dreamiest of our sprinkler dialogues, we never imagined this.

—Scott

Freeport, Texas was merely a pit stop on our path eastward. Neither of us had seen the Texas coastline, and we were due for a night of camping — both for our souls and our budget. As always, we seemed to be the last guests to arrive at the campground — this one Quintana Beach County Park — but at least, for once, we were able to pitch our tent and cook dinner before dark. We also were happy to see a flat expanse of grass, which is a luxury for tent campers accustomed to sleeping atop dirt and rock and roots. The dogs chased seagulls across the open field, and later zigzagged through the sand in pursuit of crabs during a late-night walk on the beach. It was a perfect pit stop, and it set us back only 17 bucks.

—Jill

Our bellies full of brisket, Scott and I made our way toward the Texas coast. We cruised through rural roads, past cattle ranches and pastures filled with horses, goats and yellow wildflowers. The scenery was breathtaking. I’ve never known this Texas. My previous trips followed Interstate 40. I remember eating country-fried steak at a Grandy’s in Amarillo, and I once interviewed for a job in Houston — in August. Had I known Texas was so splendid in spring, I would have bypassed I-40 and opted for a 600-mile detour through the belly of the Lone Star State when the bluebonnets were blooming. I now have a better idea why Texans don’t want their state messed with.

—Jill

A sure sign of maturity is that the more a man knows, the less of a know-it-all he becomes.

A truly evolved man wears self-deprecation better than cockiness. The smirk of his youth gives way to a gentle and knowing smile. He values curiosity above zealotry, and he asks questions even when he might already know their answers. He knows there is an art to letting a conversation come to him, and there is grace in suppressing his own opinion to allow another’s to breathe.

As I ramble across the country with my 40th birthday on the horizon, this is the man I strive to be. I really do. But two things stand in my way: SEC football and North Carolina-style barbecue.

My opinion of these two things is so lofty, my conviction of their peerlessness so assured, that any differing or disparaging view toward them, be it issued from a bar stool or church pew, causes my outer Charlie Rose to be elbowed aside by my inner Glenn Beck. I don’t care who you are or where you live: My football and barbecue are better than your football and barbecue, and I will lecture you as to the reasons why as long as you will listen (and sometimes longer). I might manage to speak in measured tones, but they almost certainly will drip with condescension.

For the first three months of this trip I didn’t have to worry about barbecue and college football corroding my interactions with strangers, because these topics aren’t conversational priorities for most people in California, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

But then along came Texas.

Texas is home to the college football team that was defeated by my beloved Alabama Crimson Tide in last season’s national championship game, and the state’s byways and backroads are dotted with joints that serve barbecue I consider inferior to similar fare in North Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama. Put simply, I found myself in enemy territory, a place that challenged not only my allegiances but my quest to become a reasonable man.

(I will not bore you with football boasts here, other than to say it was Jill, not I, who verbally assaulted a drunken frat boy wearing a Texas Longhorns cap when he wobbled off the sidewalk and into our car’s path in downtown Austin then had the audacity to swear at us. Our parents read this blog, so I hesitate to print what Jill shouted at the young man, other than to report it began with “Roll Tide” and ended with a four-syllable epithet that insulted his lineage. Yet another reason to love her.)

Jill and I had already decided that, from Austin, we would follow the Texas BBQ Trail, a circuit of barbecue purveyors scattered throughout four small towns — Elgin, Lockhart, Luling and Taylor — within a hour’s drive of the state capital. My intention was to give Texas barbecue a fair shake.

Photo by Scott Dunn

Best I can tell, the Texas BBQ Trail is the creation of the aforementioned towns’ chambers of commerce, with plenty of help from Richardson Media, a Texas-based marketing company that produced a website and brochure about the trail that makes it seem vaguely official to tourists.

Placing these four towns on the BBQ map (literally) was a stroke of genius, because I cannot imagine another reason to visit them other than to satisfy one’s appetite for smoked meats.

Elgin, Lockhart, Luling and Taylor share a pan-flat landscape crosshatched by wide, straight streets and unfettered by buildings over two stories. The expansive horizons insulate the towns from the big-city silliness of Austin and provide a blank backdrop for Friday-night football games. A sense of provincialism envelopes each locale like a sausage casing, which is probably why Elgin and Lockhart were chosen as settings for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Waiting For Guffman — movies that deal in their own sweet way with small-town disaffection.

The towns on the Texas BBQ Trail share something else: They all were settled in the late 1800s by German, Polish and Czech immigrants who brought their expertise in butchery and sausage making to central Texas. That’s how barbecue began here. These transplanted butchers didn’t have the luxury of refrigerators or deep freezers, so they either had to sell meat fresh or smoke it before it spoiled.

In 1886, a butcher named William J. Moon, having grown tired of hauling meat to town day after, opened a storefront in Elgin and called it the Southside Market. He ground his beef trimmings, doctored them with salt and spices, and packed the mix into casings made from intestines. Moon smoked these “hot guts” and sold them to the townsfolk, and Texas’ first barbecue joint was born.

Southside Market has changed hands and locations a few times over the past 124 years, but it still serves smoked sausage to the people of Elgin and, now, travelers on the Texas BBQ Trail. The restaurant has been in its current location on Highway 290 since 1983, and it was our first stop on the trail.

Southside Market — like Meyer’s, the other Elgin barbecue restaurant on the trail — is famous for sausage, so that’s what I ordered. For variety’s sake, I also sampled the beef brisket and pork ribs. Let’s get this out of the way right now: If you can help it, don’t order pork ribs from Texans. It’s just not their thing. Ribs need to be accentuated by a good dry rub or a tangy sauce, and Texas barbecuers tend not to specialize in either. Brisket is always a better choice in the Lone Star State, and sausage usually gives you the most bang for your buck.

Another helpful road rule for the BBQ trail: Don’t go overboard when ordering. By the time I polished off a half rack of baby backs and several slices of brisket at Southside Market, my decision to save the sausage for last didn’t seem like such a good idea. Still, it proved the best of the trio — smoky, juicy, coarsely textured. New York food critic Ed Levine calls it “simply the best smoked sausage I have ever eaten.” It’s not the best smoked sausage I’ve ever eaten — I prefer mine a little spicier — but I don’t pretend to be the culinary authority Ed Levine is.

I will say Southside Market’s sausage is the best I ate in Elgin — a town that was founded as a railroad stop called Glasscock before growing into the “Sausage Capital of Texas” — because the beef sausage down the road at Meyer’s left much to be desired.

To be fair, I arrived at Meyer’s at closing time after consuming a full meal at Southside Market. Still, the link I was served was wrinkled and odd tasting, and the tomato-heavy sauce I dipped it in ranks among the worst barbecue sauces I’ve ever tasted in a restaurant. Every bite triggered a childhood food memory for me, and it was not until I drove away, a tomato-y taste lingering in my mouth, that I tracked back to its source: Chef Boyardee SpaghettiOs with Sliced Franks.

I must confess that my underwhelming barbecue double feature in Elgin brought out the worst in my regionalistic posturing and dissuaded me from following rest of the Texas BBQ Trail. Grumbling around a toothpick, I boasted to Jill that I could name a hundred places that served better barbecue than what we had just eaten, and I mockingly questioned how a place with sauce as lousy as Meyer’s could stay in business for half a century. Why, I asked, should we waste time driving around the middle of Texas in search of decent barbecue when the sauce-slathered promised land of Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee lie ahead?

Jill, no fan of barbecue, was quick to agree with this logic, and the next day we headed eastward. Alas, our path carried us straight into Lockhart, and we happened to pass Smitty’s Market at lunchtime. A massive pile of post oak was stacked in the gravel parking lot, pungent wood smoke swirled from the pit, and a line of customers snaked out the front door. I decided to give the place a chance.

Smitty’s is named after Edgar “Smitty” Schmidt, the father of owner Nina Sells, and it occupies a red-brick building that housed Schmidt’s Kreuz Market for more than 50 years. Smitty’s pit is indoors, and it’s the first thing you see — through a haze of smoke — when you walk through the door. A soot-stained menu posted on the soot-stained wall reveals that all meats are sold by the pound — no plates, no sandwiches, no combos. The gals taking orders at the cash register move fast and talk fast, and the front of the line is no place for indecision.

I ordered a pound of brisket, and it arrived on a big square of butcher’s paper. I paid in cash and proceeded through a pair of glass doors into shotgun dining room filled with long wooden tables and jolting light. I purchased a sweet tea at the “side counter” and found a seat. While I waited for Jill to arrive with her bowls of potato salad and avocado(?), I searched for a fork. I wandered the length of the dining room, twice, surveying every countertop and cranny, but found nothing. Finally, I turned to a busboy.

“Could you point me to where the forks are?” I asked.

“We ain’t got any,” he replied, then went back to his work. I had outed myself as a tourist.

Next, I looked up and down the rows of tables for a bottle of sauce. Again, I found nothing. This time I wasn’t about to ask for help. It was quickly becoming apparent that, at Smitty’s, you eat meat with your fingers, and you don’t defile it with sauce. I explained this protocol to Jill (who did get a plastic spoon with her potato salad), and we dug in.

I generally refrain from taking the Lord’s name in vain, but … oh my god. The first bite of Smitty’s brisket was a revelation. It was a hot, juicy amalgam of smoke and salt and grease. A glorious blend of flesh and char and fat. I chewed, swallowed and licked my fingers. Then I handed a slice of meat to Jill.

“Try this,” I said in a tone that might easily be mistaken for disgust. Jill gave me a wary look then took a bite.

“Oh my god.”

She shared my amazement, as well as the instantaneous realization that we had just discovered brisket so good it redeemed the barbecue reputation of the entire state of Texas.

Going with the flow of food euphoria, Jill launched into a mini soliloquy about how good her avocado was and how pleasantly surprised she was to find such a Cali-like treat in a Texas barbecue joint. But I tuned her out, mesmerized by the taste of the brisket and the echo of my own mastication. I reckon my evolution as a man hasn’t reached the point where I can discuss avocados while eating the world’s best brisket with my bare hands.

I’ll work on that. In the meantime, allow me to list my favorite barbecue joints. Allow me also to admit that I know somewhere in Texas, far off the BBQ trail, there are little towns with no chambers of commerce, and in those towns are little barbecue shacks with no fancy websites, and in those shacks is prepared barbecue that might be even be better than the glorious stuff served at the restaurants below. I admit that.

But I don’t really believe it.

12 Legs BBQ Hall of Fame

Best wet ribs: Dreamland BBQ, Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Best dry ribs: Charles Vergos’ Rendezvous, Memphis, Tenn.

Best pulled pork: Scott’s Walk-Up Bar-B-Q, Cartersville, Ga.

Best smoked sausage: Rudy’s Country Store and Bar-B-Q, Leon Springs, Texas

Best brisket: Smitty’s Market, Lockhart, Texas

— Scott

According to the Nielson Company, which invented the concept of “market research” some 80 years ago, the people of Austin read and contribute to blogs more than residents in any other U.S. city. An outfit called Scarborough Research seconds this, estimating that 15 percent of adults who live in Austin are bloggers.

That’s about 573,000 people. Blogging. In one city.

So when Jill and I rolled into Texas’ famously free-thinking state capital — a place referred to in less progressive Lone Star circles as “300 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality” and “the People’s Republic of Austin” — I turned to her and made a rebellious declaration: “We’re not going to blog about Austin.”

My rationale: Austin needs another blog post like it needs another burned-out hippie or boot-wearing state senator. Besides, after 37 cities and 10,000 miles, I figured Jill and I needed a break. I suggested we find a weekly rental, wander aimlessly around town, read books by the lake, catch a live band or two, and generally take a vacation from our vacation.

I wanted, too, to see Jill saunter down the sidewalk unburdened by her camera and the constant artistic demands that come with having it slung across her shoulder. Is it fair that she squints at our every destination through a viewfinder while I amble at her side hardly ever scribbling a note? The answer, Jill reminds me frequently, is no.

I must also admit to another, more selfish motive for my proposed blog boycott of Austin: I don’t really like blogging.

Maybe its Austin’s countercultural spirit that compels me to make this declaration. Or maybe I’m just copping out, threatened by the creative class of thirtysomethings who mill about the city carrying laptops in leather messenger bags. Surely their blog entries are cleverer than mine. I bet they shoot video and post daily and have advertisers. I hate them.

I am generally not a man who’s prone to self-consciousness, but Austin is one of those cities — not unlike Boulder, Colo., or Cambridge, Mass. — that tweaks my nose and makes me question my credentials. Austin is Lance Armstrong. Austin is South by Southwest. Austin is Dazed and Confused. Whole Foods is headquartered here. “Austin City Limits” is filmed here. Wes Anderson matriculated here. Austinites who aren’t smart are pretty: Tattooed girls sunbathe topless in Zilker Park, and Matthew McConaughey jogs shirtless around Lady Bird Lake.

I contributed to my own private unease by finding us accommodations in SoCo, a neighborhood sandwiching South Congress Avenue that is the steady-thumping heartbeat of all things cool in Austin. From our garage-top studio apartment we were within walking distance of the city’s hippest hotels, coffee shops, fashion boutiques and food carts.

Jill quickly became obsessed with the latter — old trailers, trucks and buses that have been converted into food stands that serve everything from fried avocado tacos to grilled quail to bacon doughnuts. (That’s right: bacon doughnuts.) It’s like being able to eat every day at a magical state fair where the concessions are operated by the Food Network.

Jill ate at Torchy’s Tacos three times in five days. Its trailer shares a graveled plot of picnic tables with two other food carts (Man Bites Dog and Holy Cacao) to constitute the South Austin Trailer Park & Eatery. Jill also drooled over Odd Duck Farm to Trailer, where she ordered the grilled quail and I tried a pork-belly slider. I wasn’t crazy about the fancy food most of these trailers dish up, but the price was right, and I did enjoy being able to dine outdoors with the dogs.

When not filling her gullet with trailer food, Jill was stuffing her feet into cowboy boots. She had decided she would not leave Texas without buying a pair as a souvenir, and she tried on two-dozen varieties at Allens Boots. Pulling on and pulling off new boots ain’t easy, and Jill emerged from Allen’s with beads of sweat on her upper lip and blisters on the undersides of her index fingers. (She also emerged bootless. Her quest would have to continue at boot stores beyond SoCo.)

Congress Avenue is also home to the Continental Club, a live-music institution in the Live Music Capital of the World. The Continental Club began its life as a private supper club in 1957, when it hosted acts like Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. It is purported to be the first place in Travis County to sell liquor by the glass. The Continental morphed into a burlesque club in the ’60s before returning to his musical roots a decade later, when Austin icons such as Stevie Ray Vaughn, Joe Ely and Kinky Friedman played to audiences bathed in cigarette smoke and neon.

We were lucky enough to catch Dale Watson and his band on a Monday night at the Continental Club. Watson has the salt-and-pepper pompadour of aging greaser, the tattooed arms of an ex-con, and the gleaming horse teeth of a televangelist. His performance is pure SoCo: smooth, retro, satirical. Watson’s act would be considered campy on any other stage in any other city — listen to “Whiskey or God” and “Mamas Don’t Let Your Cowboys Grow Up to Be Babies” — but the guy was born to play the Continental Club in Austin.

Walt Wilkins and the Mystiqueros

Dale Watson provided the opening set for my and Jill’s near-nightly musical tour of Austin.

We saw Walt Wilkins and the Mystiqueros play at Saxon Pub and were treated to an amazing show by Lucero — Shooter Jennings, son of Waylon, opened — at Emo’s on 6^th Street.

Really, if you can’t find good music in Austin, lean your face toward the nearest plane of glass and see if you fog it — you might be dead.

Maybe the only thing better than Austin’s food and music, in my book, is its walkability. In five days there we barely moved our car. Besides strolling around SoCo, we walked the length of Congress Avenue to the Texas State Capitol. This Italian Renaissance Revival marvel was the seventh-largest building in the world when it was completed in 1888, and it remains the biggest (if not tallest) state capitol building in the country. Its construction also prompted one of the largest barter transactions in U.S. history — the capitol’s principal builders were paid with tracts of land in the Texas panhandle. (The laborers who built the capitol weren’t compensated quite as well; most were convicts and migrant laborers who earned a pittance for six years of toiling.)

Even though Austin’s population is about the same as San Francisco’s, its downtown skyline is comparatively unremarkable. The state capitol is the reason for that. For decades, building restrictions prevented the construction of any skyscraper that would obscure views of the capitol from other parts of the city. Those restrictions have recently fallen by the wayside, however, and in their void have risen condo towers and a cloud-kissing W Hotel. Even in a progressive city like Austin, not everybody can agree this is progress.

Texas’ magnificent state capitol is responsible for one other thing, too: Jill finally finding the perfect pair of cowboy boots. During our meandering walk back toward SoCo from to the capitol grounds, she spotted a small downtown shop bearing the sign “Heritage Boots.” She went inside and fell in love with the first pair of boots she tried on.

So we left Austin feeling good. Miles of urban hiking had awakened our leg muscles, a new playlist of country songs rang through the car speakers, and Jill’s ideal souvenir sat upright in the back floorboard as if worn by an invisible cowgirl.

I have a feeling, though, that my shins are going to lament the purchase of those new boots when Jill — whom I implored not to carry her camera in Austin — finds out America’s most blog-crazy city has inspired me to write a 1,300-word post that is in desperate need of photographic accompaniment.

Oops.

—Scott

Rod and Amy Burkert might just be as crazy as we are. The only difference between them and us is they have paying jobs and a Winnebago.

The Burkerts are the creators of www.GoPetFriendly.com, an online resource for people, like us, who travel with their pets. The site lists pet-friendly hotels, B&Bs, campgrounds and RV parks throughout the U.S. and Canada. GoPetFriendly.com allows users to search for the best deals and make reservations, and it also includes a handy Roadtrip Planner.

To keep their website accurate and up-to-date, the Burkert’s have hit the road in a new Winnebago with their two dogs, Buster (a German Shepard rescue) and TY (a Shar-Pei).

Courtesy of GoPetFriendly.com

Rod and Amy launched GoPetFriendly.com in 2009, leaving behind their business-appraisal firm. Since then, they’ve spent 80 percent of their days on the road, researching and blogging.

Scott and I have a lot in common with the Burkerts: We, too, quit our jobs to hit the road and now live every waking moment together. And, like us, Amy and Rod acknowledge their dogs’ flaws. It’s nice to know other road-tripping dog owners struggle with mutts who bark, tug on their leashes and act like fools when meeting other dogs.

We “met” the Burkerts through our blog.  A mutual love of traveling and being with our dogs made us instant friends. Somehow, in our six months on the road, we’ve managed to travel on opposite sides of the country from the Burkerts, but we’re bound to cross paths eventually and meet face-to-face amid a cacophony of barking. Until then, we do our best to keep each other informed about worthwhile pet-friendly finds.

Rod and Amy know just about everybody in the dog-loving cyber community, so we were flattered when they invited us to be featured on their blog, Take Paws. Check out our Q&A.

—Jill