By Steve Hill – Special to the Gazette

Texas in August isn’t my preferred vacation destination. Much of where we went there recently is, both literally and figuratively, among the hottest of hot spots, but any who find themselves there also will find plenty of ways to stay cool.

Virtually all of those ways revolve around water in some form or fashion. So it was for the Hill tribe when we returned to visit family recently, a two-week trip that ended with our journey home just a day before it became common knowledge that Hurricane Harvey might cause widespread catastrophe.

This column began as a vacation story, but some ideas now seem inappropriate, so I’ll return to them in later columns. Our water-centric Lone Star vacation included some of the state’s best-known locations, well worth talking about, but the context has changed.

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