Day Trippin in Austin

Ok, so I lied. I was going to post these pictures yesterday, but...well....life got in the way. However! I'm here today to remedy the lack of photos.


Note: I'm currently sitting in the little laundry room at the campground, doing the weekly laundry. So please forgive me if I have to get up from time to time to check on the clothes.


Ok! So we decided a few days ago to go to Austin, since Noel found out he didn't have to go back to work until Monday. We've heard good things about it - great music scene, nice restaurants, and apparently it's really hip with the young kids. I'm pretty sure that last sentence just sealed my fate as an official Old Lady.


We drove down on Sunday to check it out. It's a few hours from where we're staying, not too bad, especially since it was a nice day for a drive and also I could knit.

For those of you who may have failed 6th grade history (heh), Austin is the capital of Texas. The courthouse was quite lovely (from a distance, we didn't go right up to it).

The city is pretty good sized. There was a metropolitan downtown with highrises. I liked this one:

There were some very pretty buildings downtown too, but the camera was having a hard time with fast photography. (That or my trigger finger just quit working like it was supposed to). I kinda like this picture though. :)

Lots of condos and apartments too! We found the downtown area and walked around there for a while. It's obvious there are lots of young people in Austin, and a handful of colleges and universities, because most of the businesses in that area were either restaurants or bars.

Logan, we found this one, just for you!

The people there are really polite:

(Delicate readers? You're welcome.)

We were hungry (of course) and decided, as is our tradition, to find an Irish pub. B.D. Riley's Pub fit the bill perfectly. Nice interior (a bit swank, but still very friendly and pleasant!). Not too crowded, and they had reuben sandwiches! They made them with coleslaw instead of sauerkraut, which made them taste...healthier, for lack of a better word. Ironic, since they probably weren't. Mmmmm...mayo. But despite their pseudo-healthiness, they were very good!

We sipped our drinks and had a nice little date there:

After a bit more sightseeing (sorry, but I forgot to take pictures of this music store that had a resident cat and tons of Elvis stuff, including a tree full of Elvis miniature ornaments. Awesome!) we decided to head back toward home.

So, all in all, I'd have to say that Austin seems like a really nice place. Very clean, lots to do (particularly if you like live music and the night scene). There were some rather aggressive homeless people, but other than that, it was nice.

Mom had sent our Christmas presents to us, but we unfortunately didn't get them by Christmas Eve. For those of you who don't know, we keep a Savannah address as our permanent mailing address. Our mail gets forwarded to us every few weeks from there. That way we can let them know where we'll be to receive it. Sometimes we have it shipped to a Fedex or UPS store and go pick it up, and sometimes we have it shipped directly to the campground, if there's someone in the office to receive it. The postal service apparently doesn't deliver mail directly to this campground, even though UPS does, so Mom's box was sitting at the post office until the office people went to pick it up (my fault - I didn't know about the postal service thing).

Anyway, we got it on Monday morning, and that was just fine! Made Christmas last longer!

Loki was thrilled with the box. Of course. Poe would try to get into it, and Loki would stake his territory by circling the box, then jumping in, at which point Poe would jump out. Someday we're going to build this cat a cardboard fortress. With a moat. And big signs that say "No Trespassing, Poe" and "I brake for tuna."

So thanks for the wonderful gifts, Mom! And Loki says thanks for the box!

Today theyr'e calling for cold weather again and another chance of snow. I went to the grocery store this morning and it was icing and sleeting already. No snow yet though. How funny that we're actually further south than we were in Savannah, but have already seen snow several times here!

I wish I had gotten the ingredients to make chili. It's a chili kind of day.