Texas Tuesday: The Texas State Cemetery

My son Finn is a huge Navy Seal fan so you can imagine how excited he was to find that Chris Kyle–the ultimate Navy Seal–was buried here in Austin at the Texas State Cemetery. We’d heard lots of people say that visiting the cemetery is a cool thing to do. And we love cool things to do. So, after coercing a few members of the family, we headed to downtown Austin.

There was almost nobody around the cemetery except a bunch of little kids from a local daycare. (Who’s idea was that?)  And it was, indeed, pretty cool. We brought along some flowers and I let each of the kids have some to put on any grave they chose. Finn chose Chris Kyle’s. His grave is the most surprising because there nothing there. Just a little placard. Say what?

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Apparently the family has something planned but as of now there is only a little makeshift shrine. The groundskeeper told us it’s the most visited grave by far. Also the only grave with offerings of chewing tobacco.

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We found some interesting tombstones. This is where I laid my flower. How could I resist? Although it’s funny to note that Flora wanted to make sure everyone knew she was a Christian, not one of those crazy cult Mormons, no matter what her name was!

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I always take a picture when I find something with “Davis” on it. It’s my maiden name and I still dream of the days when I was at the beginning of the alphabet and everyone could spell my name right on the first try.

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This tombstone made me laugh. Of all the things a person could have on their gravestone this is what his relatives chose (it’s the last line).

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This grave was both interesting (It’s not every day that you see a gravestone with a 3-D image of the dead person. But what I really liked was the guy’s first name. How awesome is that?

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We saw most of the famous people’s grave (Stephen F. Austin and Bob Bullock–who I really only know because the local history museum is named after him). I wish we could have stayed longer but it was a bajillion degrees, as is so often the case in Austin;  It’s amazing how much I stop caring about things when the sweat starts to roll down my back. Let me just say that we particularly enjoyed the little cemetery history center which is both air conditioned and has bathrooms.

Then we went and had tacos at a food truck. The end.

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| Filed under Family, Kids, Texas, Things We've Done

One thought on “Texas Tuesday: The Texas State Cemetery

  1. Darn it – something in your blog doesn’t allow me to leave comments on older posts! So I will just use this space to say that I, too, have absolutely no energy left for all the stuff I used to do. That wax museum thing sounds horrific. And how can York and India POSSIBLY be old enough to jet off to Brazil on missions? When did that happen?

    Was it just a coincidence they both got Brazil, by the way? I thought you weren’t allowed to choose.

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