Traveling through Colombia offers abundance: mountain views, unfamiliar birds, cheap beer, and ripe mangos plucked from roadside trees. Waco has something less spectacular but more useful—driving your own car instead of relying on Uber, buying groceries without first rehearsing the transaction in Spanish, and knowing whether a place is really open without consulting three different social media accounts.

The difference is not between adventure and boredom. It’s between discovering how another place works and already knowing how to live in your own.

After four and a half months in South America, host Mark Long prepares to trade a cabin in the Andes overlooking Medellín for Texas heat, avocado toast with his wife, and impending jury duty. Along the way, a coffee farmer channels Barry White, and an openly resentful dog considers whether Mark’s household residency permit should be reinstated.

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Fathers and sons can spend years trying to understand each other, usually with all the grace and precision of two drunks assembling patio furniture without instructions. Sons want to live up to their fathers while being terrified they’ll turn into them. Meanwhile, fathers pass down wisdom, damage, bad jokes, and assorted emotional contraband without bothering to label the boxes.

In this episode, a 2014 film starring Waco-area country singer James Hand opens a door host Mark Long had been perfectly content to leave locked. Thank You a Lot becomes a way to consider estrangement, family humor sharpened into a weapon, and what happens when the explanation a son wants exists only in the movies.

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Hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of Your Waco Weekend—and visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠wacoinsider.stubstack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to sign up for The Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

The wedding industry operates on the sound financial principle that anything involving love should cost roughly three times what it did before somebody said “matrimony.” This episode considers what actually turns a room into a wedding venue—and whether authenticity, personality, and cold beer might matter more than endless meetings with an event planner named Madison.

Last October, host Mark Long and his then-fiancée Angela put those ideas into practice at Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon, a gen-u-ine Texas honky-tonk that charged them nothing as long as its two Saturday regulars could continue drinking beer in peace. Somewhere between the eight-liner machines and Saturday night karaoke, the bar became a sacred space—and then the band closed with Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date” because apparently even perfect endings need a little melancholy.

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Hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of Your Waco Weekend—and visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠wacoinsider.stubstack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to sign up for The Weekly Dispatch newsletter.