Sweet Tequila Blues

Travis and I went to Austin, TX, for a few days in January 2014 to see some friends, celebrate friends’ babies that were yet to be born, and generally get out of chilly Denver for a bit. Both of us had been to Austin before, Travis especially since he went to UT Austin, so I got to see some of his stomping grounds and got to visit a few friends of my own as well.

I have a song for every place I’ve ever thought of moving to, and I seriously thought about moving to Austin for a while. So here’s the Austin song:

Guitars

Austin is known for music, obviously, so there are painted guitars throughout the city. This was one of my favorites:

Strange Brew

Our first stop (literally, like right from the airplane and before we got to the hotel) was to a place called Strange Brew, where one of our favorite musicians was playing: Matt the Electrician.

Great show, great venue. It was at Strange Brew that I got up to order a tea and saw a flyer for a concealed carry class right next to posters for organic local eggs, etc. Only in Texas. Possibly only in Austin.

Matt is on the left here, and the guy who was playing with Matt (I think his name was Joe?) happened to mention something called “cedar fever.” I had no idea what he was talking about and figured it was some reference to pot that I hadn’t heard before. Little did I know.

Mt Bonnell

It’s worth noting here that the picture I took below was taken in mid January. And there are green things. GREEN THINGS. In January. This is a wonderous and beautiful thing.

We could see the Colorado River below us:

It was about this time that I started feeling really crummy, inexplicably so. Runny nose, sleepy, headache, blah blah blah. Sudafed did nothing, so I figured I’d have to tough it out and hoped I wasn’t getting sick. As we drove around Austin, I remembered that someone had mentioned “cedar fever” at the concert and idly decided to google it. Boom. That’d be it: allergies! Somehow knowing what it was made me feel a bit better. Drugs still did nothing, but at least I knew I wasn’t contagious or something — important since we were in town for Travis’s friends baby showers!

Cornhole

We found out on this trip that Travis is the best person at cornhole in this group of his friends. By far. There are magic words that make him even better, especially when yelled by the opposing team, but I won’t waste their magic here.

UT Austin

Hey, look, it’s January, people are in college and going to classes, and there are GREEN THINGS and people wearing SANDALS.

We parked on campus and started walking around. The stadium was empty but I got a nice shot through the gate:

UT Austin has a very pretty campus, and it was warm, so warm that we sought out shade when we picked up some coffee next to the campus bookstore. Naturally we had to pick up UT gear since we were right there, and I had to find something for my dog. She hates sweaters but loves Travis, so she tolerates this Longhorn sweatershirt. She will also barely tolerate the Ohio State bandana shown here (my team, she can’t just root for his team) but I get dirty looks. Like the one here.

For the record, she will glower like that for any bandana, not just the OSU one.

We stopped by Travis’s department from back in the day:

We walked through the halls, and he said that nothing had really changed in the almost ten years since he graduated. I’d venture to guess that engineering department basements usually don’t.

We stopped by the fountains in front of campus and a nice person offered to take our picture. He did a great job.

The Driskill

We stopped at one of the more famous hotels in Austin for breakfast. For the record, we’d also stopped here the night prior for drinks, and I had a fantastic blackberry mojito. Really, really good.

This is part of the decor in the hotel. It fit right in. Of course you have a longhorn on your wall. Because Texas.

Mooooooo.

As we headed home through the Austin airport, we caught the tail end of the Broncos/Patriots game for the AFC championship and a shot at winning the Super Bowl. I’m happy to say that most of the people in the Austin airport were Bronco fans, so watching the game this way was pretty fun. Once we won, I grabbed my phone and ordered a Broncos t-shirt from Amazon. What? A bandwagon? Well sure, I’ll jump on it!