Weekend Travels

So I traveled to Austin, TX for a family wedding this past weekend, and boy is Austin a nice town. I was excited to get there, for the barbecue (wish I had found this site before I left!), the warm weather, and the simple fact that I'd never set foot in Texas apart from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.

The weather was consistently in the mid-70s to 80s the whole weekend, with a bit of humidity that reminded me of summers in Boston, and that warmth extended very nicely into the evenings as well.

Some of my cousins and I decided to explore the nightlife Austin has to offer on Friday night, since we had all heard great things about the city, and we happened to come across Sixth Street, which we very quickly found out is the center of Austin's live music scene, and a veritable paradise for the college set. The streets get blocked off by the police, and thousands of twenty-somethings (and not-quite twenty-somethings, for sure) are out roaming from bar to bar and club to club (grainily depicted in the cell-phone photo above). I've honestly never seen anything like it that wasn't a special occasion of some sort, and the whole ordeal made me feel quite old, since it seemed as though the vast majority of the University of Texas' 50,000 students had all descended on this one street that evening, with most of them appearing the better part of ten years younger than me. In any case, I fulfilled my goal of drinking a Lone Star, the "national beer of Texas", and it really wasn't any worse than your average Bud or Coors, with slightly more flavor, even. In fact, it tasted surprisingly like a PBR, which isn't so odd, considering that Lone Star is now owned by Pabst.

Austin, however, didn't feel like Texas, really. I don't know what exactly Texas is supposed to feel like, but I suppose it involves "liberal, left-coast, San Francisco" me feeling slightly uncomfortable at the "gun-racked, mud tired, carbon-spewing evangelical Republicanness" of it all. I guess Austin was too easy for me, in a way; a place that I could actually envision myself living at some point in my life, whereas my conventional view of Texas as being a great repository of all that is not-me has always made me somewhat intrigued yet fearful of the state.

On flying out from Austin on Sunday en route to Phoenix, I was able to see some of what I had thought were steppes out towards the western end of the state, but it turns out I was wrong as to what I saw. Those formations were quite beautiful from 37,000 feet up, and I really want to go back, either on a motorcycle or in a car to explore the West Texas backcountry further.

Ideally, I'd like to find out more about the Texas the recently departed Molly Ivins profiles below; the one that speaks of the mythology of the old west (and the terrible "ort" that goes with it) enjoy.