The Reptile that Almost Ate Me

So on Tuesday I flew down on the big D. I knew I was in Texas when the first thing I saw getting off the plane was a guy getting his cowboy boots professionally polished. I'm not dissin' the guy, it just looked funny. (you can tell what a cowboy I am) Our Sales Communication team was having a multi-day meeting at a ranch that was like an hour and half outside the city. Texas is different than other places. I'm not going to make any jokes about it, because I'm told everyone there has guns or at least their mothers do. The time at the ranch was great and we had fun. I left just after lunch on Wednesday and saw this in the middle of the gravel road just outside the parking lot:

For those of you who aren't zoologists, that is a 30-foot long, man and/or woman-eating, fangorious (a word I just made up), hyper-venomous, viper-snake, native to Indonesia, Madagascar, and apparently a corporate retreat in Texas. (Actually it's probably a 4-foot bull snake that's about as dangerous as a gummy worm.) But something you should know about me, and I mean this in all seriousness - I would rather be locked in a room with an ax-murderer who hated bald guys than I would be within a hundred feet of a live snake of any kind. My phobia is as extreme as you can imagine. My hand was actually shaking as I took this photo - FROM INSIDE MY CAR! Make your little jokes, I know it's totally unreasonable. But Indiana Jones has done ok for himself in spite of his snake issues.
As I inched the car closer to get a better shot (and to crank up my own anxiety level) my new fork-tounged friend slithered off the road. Here is my photo of him off in the grass (sorry about the resolution):So our family is supposed to do a camping vacation by a lake in northern Texas in a couple weeks. You can guess how my snake run-in has me feeling about that. If Traci falls asleep while I'm driving, we may accidentally end up in Minnesota.