Austin

For the last several days I've been on a school-related trip that has has taken me to Austin, Texas, and now on to California. I'm familiar with California of course, but Texas was pretty new to me, and Texas people talk it up so much that I was kind of looking forward to going there in person.

I was sort of predisposed to liking Austin before I even got there. My first night, however, came close to upending that predisposition when my Google Maps directions doubled the amount of time it should have taken me to get from the airport to my hotel at the north end of Austin. The map first sent me east when I needed to go west, and then south when I needed to go north, and then I learned the hard way about streets that change name without warning (something I should have been prepared for after living in northern Virginia and Ann Arbor).

But fortunately my first impressions started earlier than Google maps. I got off the plane in the Austin airport and was greeted by brightly painted guitars on the luggage carrels and Texas stars on the floor, and my baggage came off the belt within five minutes of my arriving at baggage claim, and the car rental guy who helped me out was friendly and big-haired and enthusiastic about Texas, and the husband-and-wife gas station attendants at the scary, out-of-the-way Shell station I stopped at to make sure I didn't head 13 miles in the wrong direction were equally friendly, and even though I was half-lost and it was too dark to really take in the city, I was already liking it by the time I got to my hotel.

The next few days solidified my impression. I think of Texas as a big, wide-open, dry, tumbleweed-filled wasteland with big trucks and Texas flags and country music. But Austin, which I have in the last few days heard described as the "gem of Texas," the "Michigan of Texas without the weather," and "the only place in Texas that I would actually choose to live" (sorry, not my words), is pretty and green and young, and at least half the radio stations are neither country nor Christian rock.

I had a lot of open time on Thursday, so I swung through downtown, and then I drove to the outskirts of Austin and saw the river and rolling hills and large estates and city parks. The evening and Friday were devoted to work, but on Saturday Jonathan, who had driven out from west Texas, picked me up for breakfast and showed me some of the sites I had missed. We went to the Magnolia Cafe and had awesome cornmeal pancakes, and then into downtown Austin where we saw the river area (bustling with runners and dogs and runners with dogs), the state capitol, the campus of UT Austin, and more Texas stars than I could count. I also got to meet some of Jonathan's family, including his mother, and I finally went to the Cheesecake Factory for the first time in my life.

Texas star at Mount Bonnell

View of Colorado River (the Texas one) from Mount Bonnell

Magnolia Cafe. Notice the Texas star in the corner. They're everywhere.


Austin city skyline

Texas state capitol. Built to be taller than the U.S. capitol. Lots of Texas stars inside and outside.

A really, really big Texas star. Jonathan wouldn't let me post the closeup, but if you look really closely,
you can see evidence that he was, indeed, with me in Austin.

One thing that Texans do is talk up their state, and after eight hours in Austin with Jonathan, I had been sold on Austin. I think I would add Austin to the list of places I'd be interested in living post-graduation, but I haven't converted to Texas quite yet. At the very least I do feel like I need to come back, see more of Austin, hear some live music, swing down to San Antonio, maybe check out Houston. What a fun weekend :).

[Also, check out two new book reviews on my book blog: City of Thieves and The Rest is Noise.]