Bastrop, Texas has normally been associated with me as (traditionally) a passing-through point en route to the annual family reunion, emerging just after the Lost Pines area through 21 (which unfortunately, looked very different after 2011), and over the years, I saw how Bastrop is transforming from a small town to a bedroom community for Austin, including slowly transforming the southern bypass into a full freeway.

The bypass was where all this was happening, and the route would always go with 21, jogging south along Highway 95 (which went north toward Elgin) and then the main bypass which was more commonly known as Highway 71, as 21 splits off south west of town. 71 continues toward and through Austin to the west, and to the east goes down to Columbus on Interstate 10.

I should begin by saying that because Bastrop was almost always a once-a-year experience, that I may be relying on other sources for help with dates. Some of this I actually added to Wikimapia at some point but like I learned with Wikipedia, better your own stuff than a collaborative effort that often gets lost and misused (like the actual Wikipedia).

Sadly, I wanted to cover a lot more than is just here. For instance, I'd like to discuss the McDonald's in Bastrop, once a unique restaurant (but no longer), but I don't have any pictures or articles to talk about that. I hope to discuss it in the future, however! Also, for some reason, I remembered the Wendy's in Bastrop having a salad bar, one of the first and last I saw to do so. But Wendy's began phasing out salad bars in late 1997 through 1998, and the Wendy's was a relatively new restaurant, opening between January 1995 and January 1997. So, it's POSSIBLE if I'm remembering that far back and it was just one of the last restaurants to install salad bars but I can't verify that for a fact.