Austin, Texas!

Need I say more?

Driving into Texas, I finally got the feeling that we'd left the east, like we were on the road in a different part of the country. Memphis and Asheville are much different than the northeast, but when the winding green hills started flattening out, the vegetation became beige and the earth got redder, there became less familiarity out the window. We'd gone. 

Arriving in Austin was wonderful. We stayed with Christy's old friend Laurel who was totally awesome, opening her home and taking time out of a super busy schedule to hang out and show us around the town. Oh! Right! So the first night we're there, pretty much as soon as we show up, I start looking through the paper to see if there are any shows I might like to go to. After all, Austin is, as they say, the music capital of the country and we rolled in on a Saturday night. So I went through the whole music section of the alternative weekly and listened online to just about every band listed, to see what would be best to go to.  One venue, the Mohawk, listed a secret show and we had a brief conversation about how it would be crappy if we didn't go but heard the next day that it was one of our favorite bands, or it would be funny if we went and it totally sucked, or it would be Awesome if we went and it turned out to be somebody we were totally surprised and excited to see!! 

Well, I settled for a thrashy punk rock show from what I heard online, then went to a friend's band's myspace page to put their new single on in the background and see where they were on tour the next week. And...WaitWHAT? December 13th!? That's tonight! Guess who we actually got to hang out with this time!? 

Helll yeah! THEY were the secret show!

The Next day we played kickball... in T-shirts and tank tops. By the way we were very sorry to hear about the weather everybody else in the country has been getting. Very sorry indeed. Now look at this!

Kickball in the sun. Christy is the barely visible dot just right of dead center. Eh, it's the best picture I had of from the day.

Austin convinced me that the reviews don't lie. It's a city I could see myself living in for a while. And while I love Vermont more than any other place ever, it might take me a minute to forgive a state that failed through 28 years to introduce me to the deep-fried pickle.