Austin for the weekend

Here's the background on the Austin trip:

Background fact 1: About a month ago, Stephanie decided it would be fun to get a group of people to go float down some river in New Braunfels, which is between Austin and San Antonio. After sending out a mass e-mail, the only takers were me and Layne.

Background fact 2: Since I moved here, Layne has been touting Austin as the greatest city in the world. He spent two years there while he attended the University of Texas, and he loved it. I believe, at the time, I had just moved to Lubbock and was complaining about Texas in general, and he began his campaign to get me to go to Austin. We actually had an argument a couple of months ago over which was the better city, Austin or Seattle. I think the fact that he has never been to Seattle makes him biased. Having visited Austin before and lived in Seattle for a couple of months, I felt I was the more qualified judge. I said Seattle was better. No heated words were exchanged, but things were awkward and tense between us for the rest of the night.

Background fact 3: We almost went to Austin back in May. Then, we didn't.

So, as you can see, there was a lot riding on this trip. Not only was I trying not to die while tubing a river, I was also-for the sake of my friendship with Layne-trying to like Austin as much as possible.

It turned out neither one of those things was very hard.

We left Friday night and arrived in Austin around 11:00. As soon as we hit the city limits, Layne was like a small child at Christmas. We had dinner at Trudy's, a Tex-Mex restaurant a few blocks from where Layne lived during his college days. Then, we made a pilgrimage to Darrell K. Royal Memorial Stadium, where the Longhorns play, so he could see what renovations were being done.

The next morning, we drove to the river to go tubing. I have no pictures of this because they were very adamant that you not bring anything with you on the river that you cared very much about. So Stephanie brought a waterproof disposable camera, and these are her pictures.

Me getting into the slow-moving river.

There's a shot of me floating by. I don't know what the guy behind me is doing. I didn't even realize he was there until Stephanie showed me the picture.





After 3 hours of floating lazily down the river-Mom's fears about me drowning turned out to be slightly ridiculous as I was never in water that was too deep for me to touch the bottom, and the current was never very strong-we got cleaned up and hit the Austin nightlife.


We had dinner at Stubb's Barbecue, which is famous for some reason, probably the food, which was excellent. Billy Bob Thornton (the actor/director) was performing there with his band, but we decided that, rather than paying $12 to see them, we were going to see the bats.



Apart from being the Texas state capitol, a great place for live music, and the home of the Longhorns, Austin is also known for being the home of the largest urban bat colony in North America. Here is some information courtesty of http://austin.about.com/cs/bats/p/bats.htm

• Every year, approximately 750,000 female bats fly to Austin from Mexico where they lodge in the Congress Avenue Bridge and give birth to baby bats.
  
• Each female has one bat pup, bringing the total number of bats around this time of year to 1.5 million.
  
• It is estimated that the bats consume between 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects.
  

A video of the Austin bats. Probably less impressive than in person.

For some reason, most of the pictures I took in Austin were while we were waiting for the bats.

Here's a shot of Layne and I before the bats came out:

Here's one of Stephanie and Layne oohing and ahhing over the bats:

After the bats, Layne took us on a tour of downtown Austin, and then to a place which I concluded must have been the University of Texas equivalent of Squaw Peak. Let's just say we saw couples. We finished the night off with ice cream, the traditional Mormon reward when people around you are making out.

This has been a long post. We spent a little more time in Austin the next day before heading back to Lubbock. It's hard to believe we were only gone two days.

Here's a shot of me on our way home. Apparently, Mills County, TX is the meat goat capitol of the world (as opposed to the dairy goat capitol, I guess). Obviously, we hit the UT bookstore while we were there. I think it's a little excessive to own two shirts from a school I will never attend, but it's pretty hard to go into that bookstore and not buy anything. I thought the BYU Bookstore went overboard with apparel and weird items with BYU stamped on them that flauted rules of common sense and taste. I saw University of Texas garden gnomes-male and female. And as for the apparel, Layne scoffed at the pitiful amount of clothing the BYU Bookstore carried while he had a struggle over whether or not to buy UT cowboy boots. Clearly, it's a whole different world here.

Returning from Oz, Dorothy finds herself in Kansas once again.