What's your favorite thing about Bastrop?

My favorite thing is the fact that I get to know more folks in town than in the big city. I know my pharmacist, my doctor, their staffs and many of the folks who work in the restaurants I patronize.

I particularly like keeping my money in the community as much as possible. So many businesses in today's world are chains that are owned by mega-corporations. Others, although American owned, sell so much chinese crap that they might as well be foreign owned.

Lock's is a favorite store of mine. They know my name and take very good care of me. David Lock always has something to say as well. Going to Lock's is truly like living in Mayberry, R.F.D. where you feel like you are Andy Taylor going to the drug store.

I love going to Anita's and the Deli Depot and Baxter's because the people who own those restaurants and who work in them truly value your business. Anytime I've had a problem in any of these places they are instantly addressed and solved, usually by the owner herself. They're all restaurants on Main Street in Bastrop, and they are great places to eat. That's where lots of my friends often go and I've had lots of good times and meals at each of those places.

As I said, I like local businesses. For example, the independant music store in cities and towns large and small has mostly gone the way of the full service gasoline station. Bastrop has an excellent small music store, Owen's Music. They rent and sell band instruments to the area kids in the band programs and give lessons and sell guitars and bass guitars and such. If you're needed standard musical instrument accessories, they've usually got what you need.

Lots of small town Texas towns had independant local businesses like pharmacies and musical instrument stores and record stores and sporting goods stores and tire stores and the like when I was coming up. As someone who has been playing guitar at a beginner level for the past 30 odd years, I've always enjoyed shopping trips to local musical instrument stores when visiting friends and relatives through the years in small town Texas.

From East Texas to South Texas to West Texas, I've visited all kinds of very cool music stores that usually had great deals on guitars. There's a killer guitar store down in Alpine, Texas that I love to visit, and I used to buy a lot of strings at Mundt Music in Tyler as a kid. There's a score of Austin music stores, my favorite of which is South Austin Music, conveniently located next to The Saxon Pub on South Lamar.

I like small gun shops and fishing stores as well, and both of those, like the independant music store, have been replaced by big box retailers like Academy, Cabela's and the like. Bastrop also has a pretty decent gun shop, being John's Guns. Again, like Owens Music, not the biggest selection, but I've bought a gun from them and it was a good deal for a very nice used weapon.

Lake Bastrop Marine offers some limited fishing tackle, and the outfitting store on Main in Elgin likewise has fishing and some hunting gear. I hope the outfitting business in Elgin is still open, as I haven't been to downtown Elgin in at least a year now.

Used to be, Gibson's Discount Center, K-Mart, Western Auto and True Value Hardware stores used to have very respectable gun and fishing departments. These stores used to vary their inventory by region, so if you were in Corpus you'd have an entirely different selection than you would in Longview.

We're lucky in Bastrop to have a few independant stores like these. I patronize them often, if for no other reason than to try to make sure they'll be here tomorrow when I really need something.

These small independant stores were once the backbones of local towns ability to get those kinds of products without driving to the nearest town big enough to absolutely have those kinds of stores.

What are your favorite local businesses in Bastrop County?