The biggest attraction of Oklahoma City is something that the city would be much happier without: Oklahoma City National Memorial. But since there is no way to undo what happened, it has to be some consolation that it is a hauntingly beautiful place. It captures the horror of the bombing and it honors the dead. No description gives it justice: you just have to go there and stand between bronze gates and look across the reflecting pond towards 168 empty chairs.

Oklahoma City National Memorial

We now know with a terrible certainty that comes with a foresight, that it was not the most destructive and not the last terrorist attack in the US. The world is full of mad determined people who think that blowing up buildings, flying planes into skyscrapers or shooting politicians to make a point is somehow justifiable.

There is a price we pay for living in a democratic society. Lucky people of the United States rarely realize that, since they were born into it. I remember being a teenager in a country with no politics, no terrorist attacks and no stupid election commercials. I doubt very much anyone who despises the so called partisanship and is upset by divisiveness of democratic institutions would find a one party state a better solution.

Recently both in Poland and in US crazy people violently attacked politicians. And in both countries the attacked side was quick to make an argument that the worsening standards of political debate made such attack possible. The editorials in the US newspapers in January 2011 may as well be translated from Polish press of October 2010. The shock, the outrage, the hope for the more responsible behavior in public space are uncannily similar.

But I am not rushing to sign any petitions. We all do know better. Democracy, republic, rule of law: those are not easy concepts. It's actually amazing how well they work most of the time. And when they don't we can't just start blaming the other side or looking for easy solutions.

Few problems tackled on a national level are simple. Solving them requires a lively debate. Partisan and contentious politics is better than no politics at all and better still than civil wars. There must be a way of running a political discourse and running the state that decreases possibility of terrorist acts. But cure cannot be worse than the disease. Outlawing hate speech, censoring election posters, installing cameras on every corner and scanners at every building entrance does help to maintain order. But is this really what we should be aiming for?

JFK Memorial in Dallas, TX

Sure I would prefer my representatives to come up with a healthcare law that actually has a non-zero chance of, you know, improving access to the affordable healthcare. Preferably the law I could read in its entirety without devoting the rest of my life to it. I would like the government to be better at protecting its secrets instead of engaging in shameful and hasty scapegoat search. I would rather the opposition concentrated on criticizing government real flaws instead of engaging in populist name calling. I would like the leaders to be worse at speech making and better at leading. And most of all, I would like the world to be a place where neither random people nor politicians are getting shot at.

I don't like the current state of gun laws in United Stated. Polish crime was committed with a knife. Here, in US, it seems like every wacko can get a semi-auto and start shooting indiscriminately. Mexican drug lords find it ridiculously easy to import guns from north of the border. Arizona, the state of the recent shooting, allows to carry concealed weapon without a permit.

But I know that the gun rights activists have a point. If you think they don't just replace guns with cryptographic algorithms or drugs and see if your opinion on the subject of access vs. regulation changes. It's all about how much we let the government limit individual freedoms for the good of the society.

Checks and balances is all we have. That sounds like so little. And I am sure it provides no consolation to those affected by the crimes. But I'll take that over a promise of some kind of earthly paradise where we all agree with each other all the time and politics is not needed or allowed. I am not hoping to live my life in peaceful oblivion. I am just hoping for fewer beautiful memorials.

I have had it with gold bugs. Historical precedent notwithstanding there is nothing special about gold. Any commodity can serve a role of store of value. I get that people are scared of economy declining but that's no excuse to blow the gold bubble. Haven't we just learned how that story ends?

Despite all the talking about inevitability of its flow, time is actually quite a flexible concept. We are driving east on the interstate 90 and out of a sudden there is a sign: Central Time Zone. We didn't cross any state borders and - judging by the total blackness on both sides of the highway - we are in the middle of nowhere. And without much warning one hour of our day is gone.

We've gained some notoriety. Or at least our truck has. We stop at a roadside exhibit and a lady and her granddaughter are asking us if we were in Langtry 2 days before. We strongly suspect ours is the only truck with Vermont registration plates here. It's easy to spot us. People remark we are far from home. They have no idea. A border patrol officer at the checkpoint - yes there are checkpoints in US - seems confused. Is it Vermont or is it Poland we are from? But he stays polite. Looks at our Vermont driving licenses as if they were not real. I cannot blame him. They don't look real to me either. We try to produce passports but he doesn't want to see any other documents and waves us through.

Texas has some wonderful laws: when you own the land you can pump out as much groundwater from underneath as you want. Comes really handy when your land is arid but you desire to grow some water thirsty lettuce or pecan trees. If that dries wells of your neighbors so be it. It's about who has the biggest pump after all.

We decide to spend couple of nights in the Chisos Basin in the Big Bend National Park. It takes us almost 2 days to get here and we are not leaving without having a closer look. The park stretches from Rio Grande north. There is a desert here, but there are also very picturesque mountains. Chisos Range is the highest and the most beautiful. And since the park was created by the CCC it's all about public access: there is a road leading to the basin, a hotel and some cabins. The lack of the Internet is more than made up by the sunsets views and night sky full of blinking stars. We try to sleep with our windows open but unfortunately some people insist on using AC despite the fact that we are over 5500 feet above the sea level and temperature drops comfortably at night. I suspect many guests have absolutely no idea that one can open a window.

San Antonio and Austin appear to be poised for competition: Mexico's northernmost city vs. live music capital of the world. Texan keep their serious businesses in Houston and Dallas. These two cities are supposed to be fun and quirky. Also Austin is supposed to be the Texas capital: the responsibility it does not take too seriously.

There are more Texas surprises as we drive through the rugged hill country.First of all the scenery. It's lush and green here. Maybe because it's been a very wet year. Green hills give us an unmistakably Tuscany vibe. Especially since cowboys are still few and far between. There are canyons, vistas, serpentine roads, even mountains. There are also ranches. With deer, bison, goats and... antelopes.

We expected a lot of things of Texas: cowboy boots, Stetson hats, big cities, oil rigs, huge ranches. But we didn't expect Germans. We knew they settled in Pennsylvania. But it looks like they got here as well. Texas is a big state - bigger than any European country unless you count Turkey or Russia. We did of course expect Spanish. They came here first via colonies in Mexico. Later Americans started arriving through freshly purchased Louisiana. After a brief stint as an independent republic, Texas joined the Union in 1845, only to secede and join CSA 15 years later. After Civil War a new wave of immigrants from Europe started arriving and Germans were among them.

You might think presenting space travel is attractive and thrilling in itself. Images of the blue planet from the orbit, the famous first words on the Moon, the first docking in space, the first space walk, exploring one of the few remaining frontiers should be enough to hold everybody's attention for couple of hours.

There are people who believe taking photos steals small pieces of their souls. And there are museums that contend taking pictures devalues works of art that they own. There might be good reasons to restrict photo snapping. Sometimes you just want to look at something without the risk of tipping over a crouching photographer, or maybe you want to concentrate for a while without constant noise of cameras. By the way: many point-and-shoots nowadays do not really have to make all that noise but surprisingly few models let you configure a silent mode. And even if they do most people do not bother opting for annoying clicks, beeps and recorded shutter sounds.

Houston is a maze of multi-lane superhighways crisscrossing a forest of office towers with pockets of isolated residential neighborhoods. This is a city built for cars with multitude of garages and parking lots to accommodate all the people driving to town: one driver per vehicle. Buildings are designed to look good from the highway as if that was their primary objective.

The Lonely Planet guide suggests a trip through Louisiana Cajun Country highlighting a wild and jubilant French-speaking culture punctuated by crawfish boils, all-night jam sessions and dance parties. It calls Lafayette the grooviest town in Cajun Country [...], full of beautiful people, tasty Cajun cuisine, and abundance of live music. Our guide to Texas that we've just bought after realizing that we are about to venture into the largest state in contiguous US completely unprepared, has Port Arthur under Lively Cajun [...] noted for [...] its superlative seafood and its Cajun nightclubs with their fiddle music and rowdy atmosphere.