"Are y'all okay?" she asked. "Why don't y'all get the bus?"

"We're pedestrians," I said. I asked her if she could steer us to some points of interest on down the line.

"Well, it's back the other way, but y'all really should go to Cane's. Well, it's called Raisin' Canes, but it's this chicken place, and it has the best sweet tea. I'm from southeast Louisiana and I love sweet tea. I used to go Chick-fil-A for the tea, but Cane's is a lot better. They brew it just right there."

"Well, that's in the other direction," I said. "We can't backtrack. We're on a mission."

"But it really is the best sweet tea," she said. "I'm a Southern girl, and I really love sweet tea. And they use that little bitty ice. It is so good. You can even get it with the lemon brewed in it if you want"

And so on. She kept coming back to the tea at Cane's. That was the pinnacle of her Westheimer, if not the cultural and artistic apex of the entire Greater Houston area. Tick and I were unswayed.

Just before we hit Fondren, we came upon the Westheimer Pub, a place that served up a brew more to our liking. The generic name fit the bar — it was a classic strip mall-type place. At a little before four, we were the only customers. The tall barmaid served us a couple of pints and then turned her attention to Dr. Phil on the tube. During a commercial break, she vanished into a back room. A Korean lady came in the bar carrying bags of food, looking for the bartender. Tick told her about our trek. "Great! Walk! Super!" she said. Or as Loel Passe might have said, "Hot ziggity dog and sassafras tea!"

A few minutes later the barmaid claimed her lunch. A wiry guy with a couple of tats on his arm came in. He seemed to be a regular. We told him we were walking down Westheimer, and he liked the idea. He was an ex-Marine. A shoulder injury he concealed from them for two years was finally discovered, and he was honorably discharged before he got to go to Iraq — "And now look at me — I'm a drunk 30-year-old waiter," he said. He really wanted to be over in Iraq with his buddies, he said. I told him about the brother of a friend of mine who enlisted in the Navy to work his way through med school in the early '90s, only to be called to the front lines as a MASH-type combat surgeon 12 years later.

I told the marine about the horrific stuff this guy had to do — patch up Iraqi kids who'd been mowed down in cross-fires and stuff like that. "See," said the marine. "That's the difference 'tween us and them. They would never do something like that. They would just let them die in the street. But we go over there and patch people up — doesn't matter if it's one of ours or theirs. And then everybody says we're the bad guys."

Broad, Majestic Westheimer

At Fondren things got interesting again. The squalid bus stop at the corner of Fondren and Westheimer announced that we were crossing over into a more definably urban zone — there was trash everywhere and a middle-aged black woman was sleeping on a blanket on the ground in the shade of a few trees.

Here's what Stephen Fox wrote in the Houston Architectural Guide about this stretch: "Nowhere is the 'anything goes' image that adheres to Houston more blatantly displayed than along the stretch of Westheimer Road between Chimney Rock and South Gessner Road. Middle-class subdivisions of the 1950s flank this strip, but they are hidden behind broad bands of commercial development that face Westheimer. Most of these date from the 1960s and early '70s, when Houston's suburbanizing ethos was at its least constrained. Not only do shopping centers, gas stations and fast-food restaurants line up along Westheimer — each flashing signs or theme-style inducements to passersby — but mega-garden apartment complexes compete for attention in a mixture of dimly recognizable 'traditional' styles. The order of the strip is economic, rather than visual or experiential. The biggest-grossing land gets the prime footage."

CVS has some prime footage. We stopped in and belatedly bought sunblock and the worst jam box in the history of the universe. Hell, it was only ten dollars, but we could barely tune it, and the only thing we could pick up at first was smooth jazz station The Wave, which was spinning Spandau Ballet's "True." "I feel like we have achieved the pinnacle of mediocrity," Tick announced. "The absolute summit of the average and mundane."