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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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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The people closest to us can look at the same situations and see entirely different worlds. A lasting relationship does not necessarily resolve those differences; sometimes it just puts two people together and asks them to keep moving.

In this episode, host Mark Long and his wife Angela take a drive along Austin Avenue through Waco’s Uptown, where two mini-roundabouts reveal their opposing assumptions about everyone else on the road. She sees ordinary people cooperating to reach their respective destinations; he sees a series of high-stakes showdowns that can only be won by refusing to lose.

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Nothing gets local lifestyle influencers humming like glossy renderings of a tired shopping center being refurbished with somebody else’s money. But before everyone starts ordering fancy coffee drinks on a patio that doesn’t exist yet, it’s worth asking who’s already there—and who the shiny new version is meant to attract.

In this episode, host Mark Long revisits a well-meaning Waco Insider social media post in 2020 about Elm Avenue that earned a deserved rebuke from East Waco residents, then turns to the proposed makeover of Brookview Hills Shopping Center at 34th and Bosque. He isn’t rooting against the renovation; he just wonders which members of the existing community the developers imagine sitting on those new patios.

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Restaurant openings are often treated as evidence that a city is becoming the place its boosters always promised it would be. Closures receive less attention, quietly disappearing from the civic narrative even if a restaurant earned acclaim and became part of people’s routines. But permanence isn’t the only measure of whether a place succeeded—or whether it mattered.

Guess Family Barbecue began in a little red trailer outside Bare Arms Brewing before moving into the former Michna’s building on Franklin Avenue, appearing on television, and earning a place in Texas Monthly’s statewide Top 50 barbeque joints. Then, in 2025, the restaurant suddenly closed without publicly explaining why. In this episode of Your Waco Weekend, host Mark Long remembers the jalapeño-cheese sausage, the Farmer’s Breakfast, and a restaurant whose disappearance complicates Waco’s comforting story of uninterrupted upward progress.

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Craft breweries didn't invent chalkboards with beers listed on them, but over time what began as a practical way to keep up with constantly changing beer selections became shorthand for something else entirely: local ownership, independence, personality, and the sense that someone was making decisions one pint at a time. But what happens when those visual symbols are separated from the culture that created them and reused somewhere else?

In this episode of Your Waco Weekend, a beer list at a downtown Waco restaurant where every dollar sign on the chalkboard is exactly the same leads host Mark Long down an unexpected rabbit hole. That small detail turns into a reflection on why businesses appropriate familiar visual cues, how ordinary objects accumulate meaning, and why one conversation over hot dogs convinced his wife Angela she might never want to eat there with him again.

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Movies too often tell us up front who to trust, who to fear, and what everything means before the characters—or the audience—have a chance to discover those things for themselves. But what happens when a story refuses to rush those judgments? Patience, rather than kneejerk certainty, can produce more honest storytelling and a deeper understanding of the way people reveal themselves over time.

Blur Circle is an independent feature written and directed by Baylor professor and filmmaker Chris Hansen. Shot in Waco, it follows a mother searching for her missing son, but the film quietly sidesteps familiar Hollywood conventions in favor of restraint and emotional complexity. Rather than chasing contrived plot twists, it trusts its audience to keep revising their understanding of the people at the center of the story.

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