Southern Hospitality

Roy and I were in Austin this past weekend. Our friend Mike, who has JetBlue's All-You-Can-Jet pass this month, has been flying all over the country and was headed there as well to meet up our friend Ed, who's stationed at Fort Hood about an hour outside the city.

Some of you may already know this, but Roy and I were born in Texas, in a (what I imagine to be) sleepy town called Bedford just outside of Dallas. Our family moved to Southern California when we were 7 months old, though, so we never got the opportunity to get properly acquainted with our birth state. Still, though it may very well be illusory, I've always felt a tie to the state of Texas, what with its softly-hued dusks, wide flowing plains, and smokey scents of home. Of course, it's also entirely possible that whatever sentimental feelings I have toward this hypothetically mythical land may have arisen purely out of my love for "Friday Night Lights" and my blanket affection for a nonspecific idea of the South, itself a misguided conflation of what should be many unique cultures and qualities. Regardless, I gots a thing for Texas and, aside from two previous trips when I passed through Amarillo on my way to somewhere else, this was my first foray into the state since I had left it over 23 years ago.

One of the first things I saw after getting off the plane was a woman wearing a tie-dye T-shirt emblazoned with the logo "Keep Austin Weird." The city managed to live up to the claim, although not in an over-the-top way. Austin is weird, but only because it's filled with so many different kinds of people, places, and ideas. In the middle of the city lies the University of Texas at Austin, which fulfills both your Southern university stereotypes and your more generic partying-college-kids stereotype. Travel a few blocks southward and you'll hit Downtown Austin, which squeezes towering skyscrapers belonging to various financial institutions right next to 6th street, a lively but unassuming stretch of bars, restaurants, and music venues. Sprinkled in are places like the Museum of the Weird and the purportedly haunted Driskill Hotel. On the weekends, the police close off the adjoining streets to traffic to allow revelers to walk down the street unfettered. Head south of the Colorado River and you'll come to South Congress (affectionately abbreviated to SoCo by some), a shopping district with an abundance of food carts selling everything from Tex-Mex to bratwursts. Need a pair of boots and a cowboy hat? You can find those here. Austin has all the traditional makings of a middle tier-sized city, but its charm is all its own.

Roy, Mike, and I arrived in the city first and headed to our hotel to wait for Ed to drive down from Killeen. The lock on our bathroom door was broken, which is only relevant because I was on the can when Ed arrived, and the broken lock meant Ed was able to walk right in and hand me a 32 oz.-er. This is one of many reasons why I love Ed. After a belt-busting dinner of barbeque, we hit up 6th street and were very happy to discover how cheap the drinks were. Much was imbibed, some naps at the bar were taken, and debauchery followed. The only lowlight of the evening was a smoke-choked bar we hit up at the end of the night that did funny things to my appetite for the rest of the weekend. Our second day found us catching brunch in SoCo and sneaking in a little bit of window shopping at Allen's Boots. College football, a second barbeque dinner, and a low-key evening out rounded out our Saturday. Sunday was alternately rainy and sunny. We got some fantastic Tex-Mex from Torchy's Tacos and visited UT Austin, which is also where my parents met some thirty years ago. I e-mailed a picture of us standing on their campus to them and I got e-mails back with more exclamation points than I ever suspected my parents capable of wrangling. We spent the evening sharing one last bar crawl with Ed, as he had to head back to base in time for work the next morning. He deploys to Iraq next month.

Austin was good to us. The only thing I missed doing was catching a movie at the historic Alamo Drafthouse, but that's okay because I now have a reason to come back. It's interesting, only knowing a place as an idea for so long and then finally seeing it in the flesh. Admittedly, Austin probably isn't the best representation of Texas, but it's a damn fine city nonetheless. Next stop -- Dallas, or maybe some booney-ass town in the middle of nowhere. I'm game. May my Texas dalliances continue.

Skyline.

Capitol building in the rain.

Hiding out from the rain under a tree.

Hiding out again.

Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium, where the Longhorns play.

Roy's shirt becomes unintentionally ironic here.

Country-Folk band!

Of course Ed finds the one thing relating to California in the entire state.

Rainy day on 6th street.

On the move.