Navasota South of 105 (Navasota, Texas)

Google Maps Street View, c. 2013 Following the last exit in Navasota, Highway 6 continuing south becomes a divided highway rather than a freeway. I must say there's not much in this direction. There's Schulte Roofing Company (10842 Hwy. 6 Bypass South) that built a permanent location here in 2006. There's a bridge that goes over railroad tracks, which was the site of a derailment in 2014. Most of the news content I can find for this one (including a video) focused mostly on the spill of diethanolamine but it also damaged the bridge structure; it was down to one lane northbound for several weeks. On the west side there's a church, Faith Outreach Christian Center (11596 Hwy. 6), with the east side holding the facility of Trinity Heads Inc. (11765 Hwy. 6 South). Trinity Heads manufactures pressure vessel heads and, according to their website, was first built in the late 1950s as "Tru-Weld Co." with the current name being assumed in 2001 after expanding over the years. (The rail spur is often in use).

Further south is Hilco Metal Roof Supply & Services (12503 Hwy. 6), J5 Tractors (2476 Highway 6), and finally the point where the bypass rejoins with LaSalle Street. The southern-most business of the Highway 6 bypass. When heading north, the southside split of Highway 6 is a welcome sight after long distances of driving out in the countryside back north (hello dual signs proclaiming Business 6 is to the left), and in my time driving back from Houston there used to be a large clump of cactus growing in the highway shoulder. Going south, though, there's a narrow bridge ahead, with a crossover road that used to be just north of the Navasota River but it closed in the late 2010s.

From there we continue south, with the only real changes since the early 2000s are some restructuring of the crossover lanes (safer but fewer of them) and a May 2016 tornado that took out some trees and buildings, namely a barn that was already halfway collapsing and damage to Global Vacuum Systems. There's Grassy Creek Community (trailer park) near CR-317 and the aforementioned Global Vacuum Systems Inc. (15431 State Highway 6) which manufactures This facility manufactures vacuum tanks for trucks. It was built in 2008 but the 2016 tornado did major damage to the facility, destroying a 2011 building (the paint shop) and causing major damage to the roof of the main building.

At FM 1227/CR-318 there's blinking lights now and St. Holland Missionary Baptist Church (15898 Hwy. 6). I'm not sure of the building on the southeast side of the intersection but a sign points toward WildFlyer Mead Company (may be covered in a future post), a little further more down is Rosa's Plants, Pots & More (16157 Hwy. 6) and then we get to the FM 2 intersection, which will be covered at yet another time...

Grand Rios Indoor Water Park Hotel (Brooklyn Park, Minnesota)

The hotel with the waterpark addition in 2012 (Google Earth)
Seeing as you can't add comments to the original post anymore, I wanted to expand on a post I saw many years ago on a now-defunct site called Dumpy Strip Malls—the Wordpress version of the site still remains but many of the posts were lost. Not lost totally, however, some of them are on Archive.org like the one on Grand Rios Water Park in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The blog covers the sorry state of the hotel as it was in 2012, and within a few years it was indeed torn down for a CarMax.

From what I can find the 224 room hotel opened back in the mid-1970s (first phase open in November 1974) as Sheraton Inn Northwest and featured a number of amenities, with a 24-hour coffee shop, meeting and banquet rooms, and a large indoor swimming pool and other features (no doubt cloned from Holiday Inn's "Holidome"). The original room count at least when it first opened was 140 rooms.

The hotel changed hands a few times, becoming Best Western Northwest Inn in 1990, then "Northwest Inn" in 1999 before becoming a Ramada in 2001. In 2003 a local businessman bought the hotel to transform into a waterpark-based hotel, which seemed to work for a slumping tourist economy and would have the largest indoor waterpark in Minnesota. While it was announced that the hotel would be Four Points by Sheraton (the new name of Sheraton Inn adopted in the 1990s, bringing back the hotel full circle). When the hotel reopened, however, there were differences, the first being it had no seemingly hotel chain affiliation (now known as Grand Rios Indoor Water Park Hotel, though Ramada remained on the road sign) and while it had three restaurants, Beach House Bar & Grill, Soggy Dollar Cafe, and Coconut Charley's, Coconut Charley's served "All American items" rather than the Caribbean restaurant originally promised.

Now you know the rest of the story—it doesn't do well, gets poor reviews, and it's gone within a decade...

Krystal of West Memphis (West Memphis, Arkansas)

Google Maps Street View Located in the parking lot of the defunct Holiday Plaza Mall, this Krystal was built in 2004 (per county records)...but there was something else prior to that currently unknown at the moment.

I ate here on my vacation and took a few photos.

Urban Air Waco (Waco, Texas)

Source: Google Maps Street View I'm not feeling up to an "original" post today (we'll make it up), so here's another import from the the existing "Other Waco Roads" page, Urban Air Trampoline Park at 5701 W. Waco Drive. The address had been alternately/erroneously listed as 5800 W. Waco Drive when it was a Best Buy from 1993 to 2004 (moved out to the Marketplace shopping center). In 2007 it became GymX (before it moved to the old Linens 'n Things building). It became an indoor trampoline park by fall 2015.

The Home Depot in Waco (Waco, Texas)

Courtesy Newspapers.com As part of mopping up the existing "Other Waco Roads" page, today we're covering Waco's first Home Depot store at 5605 W. Waco Drive. The Home Depot opened in March 2000. The property was cut out from Central Freight Lines to the north, and access is from Centerpoint Drive, which was signalized around 2000 (also providing better access to what was at the time Mervyn's and Toys R Us).

Ingles in Farragut (Farragut, Tennessee)

Author's picture, July 2024 This Ingles (around 97k square feet) was built in 2008 to replace a smaller nearby store (35k square feet). The store was great; some good bakery options (half price on donuts after hours) and a bulk section but the center store was rather pricey. Guess you get what you pay for. I took some pictures of things I found interesting, including a convenience store-like counter for the deli, the difference between "Kids Cereal" and "Adult Cereal", and a few others.

The Ingles replaced Farragut Towne Square Cinema 10, which operated from 1993 to 2005. Ingles Market #91 is located at 11847 Kingston Pike in Farragut, Tennessee.

Village Flowery and Wagner Hardware (Houston, Texas)

I couldn't get a good shot of Wagner Hardware. (2013 Street View). I titled this post the way as it was these two businesses on the 6100 block of Kirby that imprinted on me and those two businesses kept those names between 1989 and 2010. The first one, the current River Oaks Plant House which I best remember as Village Flowery (after all, it had that name for about 25 years) goes back to the mid-1960s when Tom Payne Typewriter Co. moved to 6125 Kirby from 6103 Kirby as by 1966 a new restaurant out of California that had begun fast expanding in California and the Southwest was built...Jack in the Box. Sometime around the mid-1980s the restaurant closed (relocating to 5114 Kirby Drive) and by 1989, Village Flowery was operating out of the space. It had common ownership with River Oaks Plant House, a garden center operating at 3401 Westheimer Road. For over the next twenty years the two garden centers operated in their respective parts of town. However, in late 2013, River Oaks Plant House got kicked out of its old location at 3401 Westheimer Road, and as a result, they simply rebranded Village Flowery to River Oaks Plant House (despite not being near River Oaks anymore).

The other building was Wagner Hardware. When it began construction of a building fronting Kirby in May 1948, it already had been a known name moving from the Rice Village area, and after completing the building, continued to operate for the next 60 years. That all started to change in 2009, when it introduced a store-within-a-store for eco-friendly products called "New Living". Not too long after, the store changed hands and the store was remerchandised and rebranded to the "New Living" concept.Most of the hardware lines were dropped for furniture and mattresses in addition to paint, and in 2014, New Living dismantled the old Wagner Hardware sign above the store. Between 2015 and 2017, New Living refocused from "sustainable design and furniture" to simply "organic mattresses". I'm not sure how the transition between New Living and Houston Natural Mattress (the similar replacement tenant) occurred, but it happened between October 2019 and March 2020. They seem to have different phone numbers. (This post is adopted from something on Carbon-izer.com, but removed in a later update. Street View here).

Shoney's on Donelson Pike (Nashville, Tennessee)

Photo by author, 7/24 When it came to "try new restaurants" on my big trip, Shoney's was on that list, and the Shoney's at 546 Donelson Pike was the one I ended up going to.

It was "Flavor Fiesta" that day (or in layman's terms, Taco Tuesday) but I stayed with the traditional stuff, getting only two modest plates, one composing of pork chops, mac-n-cheese (would've preferred potatoes but they were out), vegetables, and a few rolls (I do enjoy bread), the other salad and canned fruit.

The oldest reference I can find is that this Shoney's was here in 1977 and rebuilt at some point in the 1990s for reasons unknown. Also, note the Buick Reatta in the parking lot; there's not too many of those around.

Neat.

Carpet, Texas (Jersey Village, Texas)

"The Super Floor Store" as of c. 2011 With the page on the fast food restaurants restored on Carbon-izer, they weren't the only victims of 290 near Beltway 8. Another building, visible from the freeway easily, was a large green-roofed warehouse known as "Carpet, Texas" when opened in February 2001 at 15815 Northwest Freeway (though the advertisement has its old location at 14900 Hempstead). It closed in 2010 but was soon picked up and reopened by Jack's Carpet with the same bunch of logos below it. Unfortunately, this only lasted a few years before it was closed in 2012 (along with most of the other Jack's Carpet stores, though the Webster store still operates). There's some more pictures on Google Maps Street View (if you can fiddle around to get to the pre-2014 configuration) and on Carbon-izer servers, an older shot when they still did 3D views. (This was adapted from this page on Carbon-izer.com).

Albertsons Texarkana (Texarkana, Arkansas)

This is how the Albertsons appeared in 2013 per Google. I don't have my own picture, it was overcast and I was losing daylight fast. In what was perhaps the strangest state line crossing I have ever encountered, I turned left on State Line Road into Albertsons #611 (that's the store number today and I don't know if it was ever changed) at 3710 N. State Line Avenue, Texarkana, AR 71854. Tax records indicate the 64,793 square foot store was built in 1974 as Skaggs Albertsons and some newspaper archives from Shreveport do in fact indicate this became Skaggs Alpha Beta by the 1980s before its brief time as Jewel-Osco and finally getting renamed as Albertsons in 1992.

Given the fact that the exterior got a facelift sometime around 2015-2016 I'm assuming that's the last time the interior was updated though there seemed to be construction on flooring on my visit. My photos are below.

This is about what H-E-B charges, but does H-E-B have miniature versions?

A clean, bright store.

The flooring's torn up here.

All real soft drink brands as far as the eye can see.

Can't say Sunkist Orange Diet is very common.

No card required but added anyway.