Texas Road Trip: Visit These Five Places With Odd Names

Texas is a big state, and driving it a big endeavor. If you leave Houston in a car, it seems it takes forever to get to, say, New Mexico. On the other hand, so much space can mean a lot of interesting places to visit, including a few destinations that have odd names. That's where we're going.

Read a Road Map Day is gone until next year, but that doesn't mean you can't ditch your GPS for a bit and go old school, something that Dave Thomas at Austin360 recently reminded me to do. It's good to hit the open — well, around Houston and Dallas and Austin, not so open — road, and checking out Ding Dong and Oatmeal make it all the better.

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I plan, during 2017, to make it to each of the towns on Thomas's list, stopping by on my way elsewhere, and getting the lay of the land. Who doesn't like to see new places?

Here is the Texas odd-name list, as compiled by Thomas:

1. Ding Dong Tx. On Highway 195 between Killeen and Florence. The name is said to have come from a sign on a store owned by early settlers Zulis and Bert Bell.

2. Oatmeal Tx. On FM 243, southwest of Bertram. The annual Oatmeal Festival (in nearby Bertram) began in 1978 as a parody of the then-hot chili cookoff craze.

3. Click Tx. Off County Road 308, west of Texas 71 between Horseshoe Bay and Llano. Now a ghost town, it was named for settler Malachi Click.

4. Dime Box Tx. South of State Highway 21 and Old Dime Box. In the 1940s, a CBS broadcast kicked off a March of Dimes drive from Dime Box, according to the Handbook of Texas Online.

5. Nada, Tx. On Texas 71, between Columbus and El Campo. Even before I learned the name was Spanish for “nothing,” I was always amused by the sign on the town store. “Well if it’s Nada Grocery Store, what is it?” was the joke that never got old. But the name comes from a third source: najda is the Czechoslovakian word for “hope.” Rounding out the odd, the town’s original name was Vox Populi.

Do you have favorite towns or cities with odd names that you like to visit? Let us know in the comments section below.

— Image: Screened.com