Ray:"I was driving down South through Texas on the way to visit relatives who had recently moved to Austin. I hadn't been to Texas since I was in the Air Force in basic training at Lackland Field.

"Texas was as I remembered it: The usually long, dusty and mostly empty Texas roads. I hadn't been paying much attention to the road signs off to the side of the main highway we were on-- they were mostly country road numbers-- when one sign off to the left caught my eye. It was 'Golf Road.' So, I mused to my wife and kids, 'Hey, maybe they're gonna open a golf course out here in the middle of nowhere, in this Godforsaken wasteland! Or maybe Mr. Golf was some famous hero from Texas's great history. Maybe he was at the Alamo!'

"Later, we passed another road sign, and I announced to the family, 'I know what the name of the next road after this will be.' My wife was skeptical. How could two completely unrelated signs, Golf Road and this other one that I had just noticed, predict the third street we were going to encounter? Sure enough, though, we came to that road a few minutes later, and it's exactly as I'd predicted."

There are two possible answers to this puzzler.

This puzzler was loaded with hints, if you were paying attention.

Don't forget, at the very beginning I said that this guy had been in the Air Force, basic training.

He's in a part of the world where there are lots of Air Force bases, and there's something called the aviation alphabet, which is used to replace letters with words. And the beginning of the aviation alphabet goes Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India. So going up he saw Hotel Road next and knew that India was going to be the third, or he saw Fox Trot, and he knew that Echo was going to be the next.

TOM: That's not half bad, that's quite good. I am shocked, and so is J.R. Tingle from Richmond, Virginia.

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]