Today was our day to explore the city of Austin, and to get ourselves oriented, we signed ourselves up for a Duck tour of the city. You know, those corny tours in the buses that go on land and in water. On this 100-degree day, it was a better option than a walking tour.
The 75-minute tour took us through downtown, past the (ginormous) capitol building, the governor's mansion, and the University of Texas campus and eventually to the shores of Lake Austin (actually a segment of the damned Colorado River), where the bus plunged right in and motored past all the weekend warriors on their Wave Runners and waterski boats. Our tour guide rattled off a ton of Texas history, and we tried to absorb as much as we could. We now know that the Texas state insect is the Monarch butterfly, and the Texas state cooking utensil is the Dutch oven. We learned loads about the terrible conflicts between the white settlers in Texas and the Comanche indians. And here's a good little morsel: There are six seals on the Texas state capitol building representing the six nations that have ruled over Texas. Can you name them? The answer is at the end of this entry.**
There is plenty of construction going on -- downtown neighborhoods getting the Trader Joe's/yoga studio/juice bar/high-rise condo treatment. And there are clearly areas that have only recently been redeveloped. This city's architecture is certainly sensational; lots of glass and steel and stone enhance an unmistakably southwest vibe, not in a clichéd way, but with creativity and flair. The Austin City Hall, for God's sake, is shaped like an armadillo, and somehow this works.
The traffic, though, is a complete clustercuss -- partly because the roads are jammed with cars (which is absurd, because everyone here is supposed to be riding bikes); partly because the highways are an illogical tangle of loops and exit-ramps and frontage roads and turn-lanes, and the signs notifying drivers of upcoming exits and entrances are woefully inadequate; and mostly because Texas drivers are freaking bullies.
Take merging, which in any other state is an act of trust, courtesy and compromise on the part of the merger and the mergees. But Texans, by nature, are neither trusting, nor courteous, nor compromising (at least in their cars). Texas was founded on the principles of pushing ahead, plowing through and screwing anyone who gets in the way. And even in Austin, a proported Democratic stronghold in the midst of this vast Red State, the drivers look out only for themselves and refuse to give an inch to anyone else. More than once, I saw an on-ramp backed up with cars; rather than merging into the moving traffic and trusting that the other cars would make room for them, the drivers stopped right there in the merge lane. I don't know, maybe they had to wait there all night before they could make a break for it.
After the Duck tour, we headed for Barton Springs Pool, a public swimming hole fed by a natural spring just south of downtown, part of the 350-acre Zilker Park. On this scorching day, a dip in the pool's 70-degree waters sounded just about perfect. According to the map, it was just a couple of miles away. But in this traffic, it took about an hour to get there. It was almost 4 p.m. when we pulled into the overflow lot at the pool. We changed into our swimming suits, slathered on sunscreen and hiked across the park to the entrance of the pool, where we found a line of hot, sweaty people that wrapped around the gatehouse. We overheard someone say that it would be a 90-minute wait to get in. So we turned around and hiked back to the car. The pool opens at 5 a.m. (!) every day, so maybe we can get in gear early tomorrow and make it to the pool before the crowds hit. Not at 5, of course. But I'm thinking 10 a.m. sounds reasonable.
We headed back to McKinney Falls State Park, where we cooled off in a wide, deep spot in the Onion Creek. The McKinney Falls aren't much more than a trickle right now, and the water was rather stagnant, but the kids enjoyed splashing around in it -- until Clare and Charlie spotted a snake in the water and our outing promptly ended.
In the evening, we headed back into Austin to watch the bats fly out from under the Congress Avenue Bridge. The structure spans Lady Bird Lake just south of downtown and by day it shelters about a million Mexican free-tailed bats. Through the spring and summer, just after sunset, the bats stream out from under the bridge, and the spectacle attracts hundreds of onlookers every night. Some people spread blankets on the banks of the lake, others bob in the lake in their kayaks or on tour boats; we found a spot on the bridge and waited there about 40 minutes until the bats emerged. At first they flew out from one spot under the bridge, and the swarm of tiny bats unfurled through the sky like a ribbon. A few minutes later a few hundred thousand more flew out from directly under our feet and fluttered past us, so close that we could have reached out and touched them. They continued to gush forth for five or ten minutes. Then, the ribbon turned into a cloud, hovering over the treeline, swelling and shifting in the breeze until at last the bats were gone, the show was over, and, like after the finale of any Fourth of July fireworks display, people slowly collected their things and started shuffling to their cars.
Instead of shuffling to our car, we trekked farther down Congress Avenue to Amy's Ice Cream stand. And, after that, we checked off another item on our Austin to-do list: We stopped at a food trailer - a gloriously decked-out old Airstream permanently parked on Congress south of Riverside and slinging fried chicken and waffles under the name of Ms. P's Electric Cock. (Yep.) (P.S. Don't google "electric cock" like I just did, to make sure I got the location right.) I needed a late-night snack (to go with my smoothie from Amy's), so I ordered corn on the cob with lime, chilis and cheese. Fantastic.
My original plan was to eat three meals a day out of the celebrated Austin food trailers: at least nine meals total. We hunted all over downtown for a truck around lunchtime today, and discovered that trailers are really a nighttime thing in Austin. Makes sense, I guess. Who wants to be cooped up in a trailer, laboring over a smoker or a fryer or a grill when it's 100 degrees outside?
**There are six seals on the Texas state capitol building representing the six nations that have ruled over Texas. They are: France, Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy and the United State of America.
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