Wends of Texas
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Shiner Bock, brewed by the Spoetzl brewery, also started by German immigrants, brewing the kind of beer they were used to.
And of course between Dallas and Texas, you have the Czech Stop in West, Texas (which is not in west Texas) which is a great place to stop for some kolaches on the rip.
There are also some hidden historic dance halls that are great if you can make it by. I know one dates to 1912 and a buddy's family refurbished it last year; lovely place.
Coupland was cool- cooler than Gruene, at least to me. We played there once to about 4 people and I quit the band because that night was supposed to be the "paid" gig after the band hauled me all the way from Lubbock to play the Saxon for free.
It was still $16.
The cottage cheese and the peaches and cream are the best two, in my opinion, followed closely by the cream cheese and the apricot.
If you're eating lunch behind the wheel, their sausage and sauerkraut "kolaches" (more like sausage rolls, but made from the same dough as the sweet kolaches) are an excellent option. One is a heavy snack, two are a solid meal.
Discovering that there were kolaches over the border in Czechia after moving to Central Bavaria: happiness!
Discovering that those are more like what Americans would call a danish than a Central Texas kolache: heartbreaking.
Anyway those "sausage rolls" are called klobasneks (or Klobásniks).
It's a bit of a shibboleth since the only people that seem to know that are the Czech. ;)
Interestingly we never called anything a danish—but we did have a lot of strudels.
For me, Shipley Donuts is pretty wide spread in parts of Texas and has good kolaches. There’s found at most donut shops but there’s a thing here too now where most donut shops are owned by SE Asian folks and it seems they all use the exact same dough premix and I think it all tastes pretty bad. Also, if you like cheese in it there’s a big difference as places like Shipley puts more in there and it’s quite a good meat to cheese ratio. The other places only buy sausages with cheese already mixed inside and it’s not cheesy enough IMO.
The kolache market in Dallas is abysmal compared to Houston and Austin and up to West, and pretty everywhere inside that triangle. It seems like Czech folks never ventured north of West lol. Pretty much ever road trip I take from Dallas I’m seeking out a “good” sausage and cheese kolache
And yes, there's a painted church in Shiner as well! :-)
A set of my great grandparents were actually a Czech immigrant who married a German immigrant. First part of my life I thought everyone in the world ate kolaches every weekend for breakfast, lol. Also, when modern Texans say kolaches they generally mean a sausage klobasniky. The Czech stop is a well know spot, but the thing that distinguishes them and some other places in West is they still serve a wide variety of actual kolache (fruit/sweet).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelsverein https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Germans
Das Yehaw
And a few generations in America later, and their children and children's children had indeed strayed.
It's saying something about your religion if the only way you can get your kids to practice it is to isolate them!
If I can massively oversimplify, it's a theology where Jesus came to redeem only the Elect that God had already chosen to be saved while he had chosen to send everyone else to hell, so that the Elect could see His mercy (to them, not those poor bastards on the down escalator).
And, perseverance of the saints is the icing on the cake, because it came to mean that if you ever disagreed with your church or its elders, well, you obviously weren't one of the Elect at all, enjoy the hellfire.
So it's a great theology if you want to run a small, obviously better than everyone else, in-group of the Saved, vs. all the unsaved sinners God has already condemned.
To see how perverse it could become in the extremes, look at the role it played in apartheid.
It's an internally consistent view of the world. But it turns all the biblical events where humans appear to have agency into just silly scripted scenes, and it also turns the passion and self-sacrifice of Christ another scripted scene (with the Gethsemane episode thrown in for sadistic melodrama, apparently).
I'd say that (strict) Calvinism is the least Christian of the various sects that have attained mainstream success. Paradoxically, it produced some very sober and ultimately successful approaches to the earthly life.
To answer your question as well as I can from their perspective, the reformed understanding of pneumatic presence vs their understanding of the sacramental union and being forced to participate in the eucharist in that heretical way, would quite literally be grounds for leaving the continent.
Really lucky that these dialects persisted long enough that we have recordings of them.