Lessons from Austin

We miss Austin. 
No we don't. 
Yes, we do.
Sort of.  
Ok, we miss some things about Austin.

We had a blast during our 4+ months hiding from the Colorado snow. We met a bunch of interesting and cool people. We ate a ton of tasty barbecue (and a couple of meh barbecue meals.)  The wife ate a bunch of tacos too.

We walked a lot, explored some caves, saw interesting wildlife (the wife wanted to pet the bats), attended JuggleFest, got a good start on our summer tans, and the husband got more tattoos.

We also drove A LOT.  Too much for our tastes, but since the nice RV park that we chose was 30 miles north of Austin proper, and most of the interesting stuff, as well as our jobs, was far south of us, we just did it.


The best things about Austin for us were:

The people are so freakin' nice!
Lots of outdoor stuff to do - hiking, walking, biking, caves, lakes
Texans know how to eat!  We became frequent flyers are a couple places: 

Terry Black's Barbecue
We're not usually "take pictures of your food" kind of people, but damn, this was some pretty brisket!

 

Torchy's Tacos  

Creative, nontraditional yummy yummy tacos. Also, there was queso.  (More on this in a second..... ) The wife was working her way through the menu and hadn't finished before we left.  Lucky for her there are a few locations in the Denver and Fort Collins area now😵

 

Blue Cat Cafe   

Cat people that we are, we had to check out the local coffeehouse/cat rescue.  Blue Cat has a couple of "house" cats and usually about 15 adoptable cats.  All the cats are free-roaming - in fact, they rule the house - completely.  They have no sense of personal space and will invite themselves into your face or lap without provocation.

Two ginger cats :)

There were a few bad things:

Driving:
As mentioned above, we drove A LOT.  More than we ever did in Denver. (Except for when the husband was training BJJ in Boulder.)

With all the driving, we got to experience the phenomena that is Austin traffic.  Our observation was that the volume of traffic isn't all that different from Denver.  The difference specifically is the drivers.  It appears that they pretty much all drive however they want (fast, slow, weaving, no turn signals, eating a cheeseburger, texting or reading a book - no kidding!)

The weather:
We went to Texas to avoid the cold and snow in Colorado.  We got cold and snow anyway..... darn! And when it wasn't cold, it was warm or hot.  And it was waaay more humid than we expected.  Both of us had 4 bad hair months 😱



The WTF things:

No french fries with barbecue?? 
Anathama!  Any barbecue joints we've ever been to usually have some kind of fries or onion rings or fried okra.  Of all the barbecue joints we tried in Austin, only one offered anything fried.  They all did have a condiment bar with at least pickles and raw onions- some even had pickled jalapenos too.  (That was a thing that we could get behind!) 

Also missing was Texas toast - plain, untoasted white bread always accompanied barbecue.  Odd, but tasty.....


The bird thing:

The Austin area has a large type of black bird (maybe a type of crow??) that congregates in flocks of thousands in parking lots and terrorizes the humans.  They seem to enjoy it, in fact.  They also imitate car alarms and cell phone ringtones..... a lot.

The taco/queso thing:

Apparently, Texans will try and put anything in a taco.  (Honest!  A born and bred Texan told me this.)  We saw a chicken and waffles taco?!?!   The good news is, pretty much everything tastes good as a taco!

Queso seems to also be a thing. Again, queso is pretty darn good, but we saw it on all sorts of foods that didn't seem to be queso-compatible.  (See above chicken and waffles taco thing.)




Per the husband: And that's all there is to say about that :)