Holiday Inn & Suites Owatanna (Owatanna, Minnesota)

Not the greatest picture. It seems it was supplied by the hotel to Yelp back in 2010 (cropped)
Back a few years ago when we covered the Grand Rios Indoor Water Park Hotel in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, I had linked to an article mentioning another Minnesota hotel that was built a waterpark hotel in 1999, not trying to retrofit one onto a struggling hotel as part of an attempted turnaround attempt. What happened to that hotel?

Well, we know that this waterpark was far more modest than the more elaborate (outdoor) one in the Lake Buena Vista area (even before the partnership with Nickelodeon). It's also very isolated, between a Cabela's (now Bass Pro Shops) and a mostly-failed outlet mall.

Up until 2019 this remained a Holiday Inn & Suites with the waterpark (yes, before COVID) when it closed for a reason I'm not sure of (see article here). Within short order the hotel became Motel 6 and at the time I wrote the post on (I assume the waterpark never opened after COVID) and at the time I wrote about the Brooklyn Park hotel, it was closed. From what I remember reading of some of the reviews was that the waterpark may have been open in some capacity, but not to its full extent.

HotelPlanner.com currently has a description of the hotel when it was a Holiday Inn.

The Holiday Inn Hotel & Suites Owatonna home of the Great Serengeti Indoor Water Park! Come experience the adventure! Our award winning hotel, located just 40 minutes south of Mpls/St Paul and next to Cabela's, features 130 guest rooms and suites, including Kidsuites. We offer amenities for business or pleasure. The Great Serengeti Indoor Water Park features the exciting Kilimanjaro Tube Slide, Python Body Slide, The Relaxing Lazy Zambezi River, Zero Depth Entry activity pool, Water Basketball and relaxing waterfall spa. Our African Serengeti themed water park is decorated with trees, life-size giraffe, hippopotamus kids slide, spraying elephant and a mischievous monkey. The park features Café Zanzibar, our pool side café for snacks, drinks and even dinner. The Lion's Den features a large selection of the latest video games, as well as interactive games for adults and children of all ages. For the business traveler our guest rooms feature a spacious work desk, we offer complimentary high speed wireless internet, and a business center. Our Meeting/Banquet facility features 5 meeting rooms with multiple room combinations for up to 400 people. Events at the Holiday Inn Owatonna feature personalized menu planning with a wide range of food and beverage selections available. We have banquet and meeting specialists, as well as support service, on staff to assist with your event. For shopping, we're located adjacent to Cabela's – MN 2nd largest tourist attraction, and the Medford Outlet Mall is only 2 minutes away featuring several new stores, including Old Navy.

In June 2025 it reopened as DoubleTree by Hilton Owatonna with the waterpark apparently scheduled to reopen in January, from reading elsewhere. Unfortunately, if you go to their website (as of this writing), there's a message that "The swimming pool will be closed January 16, 2026 - September 30, 2026 for maintenance purposes. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Well, I guess that's that. Here's the scan of my 2002 Six Continents directory for this particular hotel (located at 2365 43rd Street NW, Owatonna, Minnesota) during better times.

Cavender's Boot City (San Marcos, Texas)

Picture by author, December 2022
The new update to Carbon-izer is just a few days away, and a huge part of it will be the city directories, with featured updates for Houston in particular with dozens of new entries. But for the Austin area ones, there's not nearly that number. A while back, I redid a page for Austin and Interstate 35 and in the process, cut out the San Marcos entries, including Cavender's Boot City.

While this particular store is an outlot of the Tanger Outlets outlet mall (and here since 2000) the Cavender's Boot City has an even more colorful sign that the Houston 290 one (when that sign has worked, and it's been a bit flaky as of late). I'm not sure on the blue hat but it's definitely one of my favorites and these are cool signs. The picture, even when zoomed in, doesn't do it justice. (4331 S. Interstate 35, San Marcos). Hopefully I'll cover Tanger Outlets a bit more in the future...

Former Super Saver Wholesale Warehouse Club of Memphis (Memphis, Tennessee)

Picture from Loopnet, as a Garden Ridge.
I came across this in Eastern Memphis, it's an At Home (rebranded Garden Ridge) now but sure doesn't look like it started out as such. Indeed it did not. While the Loopnet link above says the building was built in 1972, it actually opened in October 1986 as Super Saver Wholesale Warehouse Club, a new chain launched by Alton Howard after Howard's BranDiscount liquidated (still based out of Monroe, Louisiana). In Memphis, this opened in October 1986, but sadly was short-lived, as the chain was sold to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in 1987, and in summer 1987 it closed for a new Sam's Wholesale Club, which in turn moved out in 1994 after a failed attempt to own the building instead of just leasing it. Instead it was leased to Garden Ridge, which moved in around 1995 and became At Home in the mid-2010s.

Former Walk-On's (Waco, Texas)

From Loopnet, see link below.
As of this writing (6/25, though will change in about...five days from now), I've got this listed on the Loop 340 page, but today's subject is on 5601 Crosslake Parkway, developed as part of "Legends Crossing", a development of mostly restaurants surrounding what is now the Baylor Scott & White Hospital.

This opened as Walk-On's Bistreaux & Bar (as it was formally known back then) in July 2018 and operated for a few months shy of seven years, closing in May 2025.

As it's a vacant building and on the market, I got a picture from Loopnet in case they decide to take them down in the future. (They also have some pictures of the empty restaurant).

Former CEFCO #47 (Bruceville-Eddy, Texas)

Google Maps Street View c. 2016, cropped
Another gas station today, but this time it's one removed from Carbon-izer (the "Carbon-izer"/"original" posting system is no longer in effect). This entry originally appeared on the "Interstate 35 in Waco" page, though since adding it there were some updates. From what I can tell this opened as CEFCO #47 in 1996 featuring a Texaco gas station (evidence to suggest this was that many Shells in this area were Texaco stations prior to 2003, and an older gas canopy that remained was similar to Texaco's) and had a Subway inside, with the station converting to Shell in 2003 (it was a Shell in 2007). However, the station closed September 2012 (source: a since-dead Foursquare link) and although the convenience store and one of the gas canopies survived, they were demolished between 2019 and 2021. There wasn't any parking in front of the actual building anymore, and the conversion of the frontage roads to one way westbound made access very difficult for local traffic or eastbound travelers.

Obviously this location did not and will not convert to a Casey's. I'll be in the Midwest this summer, though, so hopefully there's some born-and-raised Casey's I can visit and report back on.

7-Eleven at 8124 Forest Lane (Dallas, Texas)

From Google Maps (Alan Calderón), with minor color touch-ups and cropping done.
One of my plans for Carbon-izer circa 2023 was a Dallas page to complement the pages on Bryan-College Station, Houston, Austin, and Waco-Temple-Killeen, and one of the things I was to write about was this particular 7-Eleven, which I had previously made notes about. This gas station started out as a RaceTrac in 1994 (though may not have officially opened until early 1995). However, by the 2010s, nuisance and crime issues led RaceTrac to shut down the store (this happened between April 2015 and August 2015) with the store boarded up a fence erected around the property. So according to this RetailWatchers comment after the nuisance issues shut down the store, neighborhood pressure eventually had RaceTrac do a full renovation and reopening of the location in 2017. Around late 2020/early 2021 the property was sold to 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven never did add permanent signs as the photo above was taken in March 2023. Bad sign—between February and July of 2024 7-Eleven vacated the property, leaving it empty once more, with the gas canopy demolished by February 2026.

Albertsons at Kings Crossing (Houston, Texas)

The former Albertson/H-E-B, sitting empty. (Picture by Mike A., 2024).
The following article is a split from the original The Grocery Heart of Kings Crossing article at Houston Historic Retail (I traded with another article I wrote on H-E-B Pantry in the Heights). As of this writing the original post is still there. The photos however, aren't mine—they're from Mike of HHR.

The first grocery store to be built at the intersection of Kingwood Drive and West Lake Houston Parkway was Holiday Foods, which anchored the Kings Crossing shopping center. It opened in April 1985 as a 45,000-square-foot store. Holiday Foods was a new chain, having been split off from the Minimax co-op and Fleming less than a year prior (see HHR's page on Minimax). There aren't any pictures of what the Kingwood Holiday Foods looked like; however, based on aerial photos of the shape of the store, it almost certainly looked like their Santa Fe store spread over a larger footprint.

Holiday Foods would operate for the next decade (even as a massive Randalls opened in 1992 across the intersection) and outlived all the other locations of the small chain. In February 1995, Frank and Sam Glass, the owners of the store, announced that they would switch to being IGA-affiliated. (I assume the ad announcing as such was supposed to be Wednesday, March 1. By the end of April, however, the store was liquidating the last of its fixtures. What likely happened was that despite Holiday Foods cutting ties with Minimax, they didn't cut ties with Fleming, who owned the store itself, and thus when Holiday Foods tried to go with IGA, Fleming reacted. Over the next two years, the building would sit vacant, and Albertsons, who was looking to expand in the area, purchased it.

Albertsons assigned its stores numbers, by this point its pre-existing Houston-area stores had gotten the 27xx numbering, and while its numbering suggests it should've opened in 1997, it wasn't opened until a few years later. The new Albertsons wasn't in the original Holiday Foods; it was demolished, along with the Eckerd next door, to allow for a much larger, fancier supermarket on the site of the old store, and opened the modern 60,000 square foot store in January 2001. Just about 15 months later, Albertsons announced it was pulling out of the Houston market with its stores to be sold or closed. The Kingwood store was one of four stores to be purchased by H-E-B and reopened later that year.¹

H-E-B was building its own full-size stores in Houston around this time with some unfortunately tacky designs with the former Albertsons looking much nicer, and in my opinion, the Kingwood store was the best looking of all of them (by extension, the entire H-E-B chain). In 2016, H-E-B relocated to the northeast side of the intersection where Kings Crossings Apartments used to be (more on that later), building a far larger store that they owned rather than sharing a shopping center with other tenants.

Looking at the other tenants, they're a fairly standard mix of typical strip tenants. The center itself² received a facelift in 2022 the rest of the center received a facelift, mostly changing the ridged concrete facades (like what Kmart used to have) to stucco and some new construction (it also changed an old leasing requirement about only using all-white signage). Going down the list as of 2024 from the former Albertsons / H-E-B we have Trek Bicycle (4311, formerly the home of Sylvan Learning prior to 2019), Hallmark Gold Crown (4313), Domino's (4319), PostNet (4321), the new location of Sylvan Learning (4323), Hunan Garden Express (4325), Ann's Teahouse (4327)⁴, The Flying Biscuit Cafe (4329), Parry's Pizzeria & Taphouse (4331)⁵, Pet Ranch (4411), Club Champion (4417), Yonutz (4421), S&A Nails (4423), H&R Block (4425), Subway (4427), Lynn Tailoring (4429), Next Level Urgent Care - Kingwood (4435), and Walgreens (4445). The Walgreens opened in 2000 to functionally replace the old Eckerd; the original tenant was a Crafts Etc. store.

But what of the former Albertsons? In April 2026, a Sprouts Farmers Market opened as part of an expansion in Houston (a few years after closing some locations in the Houston area that weren't working). It uses the address but not all the space.

While I don't have any pictures of the center, there are a few other pictures of the former Albertsons/H-E-B specifically. (H-E-B tore out much of Albertsons' decor).

1. The only store of this type to remain as an H-E-B is at Kempwood and Gessner with their Clear Lake store closing in 2021 for a modern store and their Pasadena store being converted to Mi Tienda.
2. The best I can find is this one that touts the redevelopment of the center, likely created around 2022, when the center received a facelift renovation, here and archived here on Carbon-izer.) It doesn't help that the former Randalls center is also apparently called "Kings Crossing" (archive), but this seems to be entirely different ownership).
3. The PDF previously linked indicates that there was to be a tailor between the former Albertsons and Trek Bicycle but it didn't seem to be there in reality, there's no door for it.
4. This part of the strip center was one of the sections reconfigured. Previously this address was used for Famous Footwear, which faced south.
5. The original 4331, Hunan Garden, was located in the demolished section. It closed in 2021 (not 2025, look at the bottom of the article).

Cedar City Neon Sign Company (Cedar City, Utah)

Don't be fooled by the dusty, exterior front, the real prize is in the back.
I stumbled across Cedar City Neon Sign Company while looking at Cedar City, Utah and its diverging diamond interchange as seen in this Road Guy Rob video. It's not much...it's at 563 North Airport Road and looks to have been located here for years. It's got a "sign graveyard" in the back (clearly visible from Google Street View with the older Chevron and Shell signs I like. (Sparkle Sign Company in Houston used to offer a similar sort of thing but it looks like a change in ownership "cleaned up" the lot). I'm not sure if they offer tours but it looks fun.

Bagby Quik Pak (Waco, Texas)

Picture courtesy MCAD from 2003. As I continue to change things around in Carbon-izer, it's time for another Waco story (originally seen on this page). Quik Pak opened its gas station and convenience store at 5601 Bagby Avenue and Loop 340 sometime around 1997-1998 when this was a somewhat isolated area, and I have fond memories of the store being here (looking like the picture above) from when the way to get to my grandfather's new house (he lived in Waco before, but he moved over five miles away as I got to see a different side of Bagby Avenue en route to the new place, an emptier, newer side, as it was before the major developments Central Texas Marketplace or Legends Crossing, or reconstructing the interchange at I-35. By late 2007, it was a Chevron/CEFCO. Quik Pak had switched brands to Chevron by 2006 (when Citgo pulled out of Waco) and they sold most of their stores to CEFCO that year. (1702 West Spring Valley Road was the exception and was sold later).

In December 2021, CEFCO opened a new store at 6201 Bagby Avenue less than a mile away. By early 2026, this was Waco's first Casey's, while Casey's has kept this CEFCO here for now (likely staying as such since it's a smaller store).