Austin

So...at the rate I've been posting I guess this is going to be a biannual blog. Oh well. Let's get to it.

To deal with the many ups and downs, highs and lows, lefts and rights, etc in life, one of those old cliched adages still holds true; I have been doing my best to turn bad situations into good ones.

My latest example, and blog post subject, is my trip to Austin over April 19-21, 2011. This was the result of a Cisco furlough. I really did not want to be furloughed. I really could not afford to be furloughed. I really could not afford to go anywhere on furlough. But if I'm going to have forced time off, the last way I wanted to spend it was at home being miserable about being furloughed. My mom was already headed down to Austin during that week to check out the culture and decide if she'd ever want to live and work there, so I decided to join her.

For those of you who know me well, you are already aware that the relationship I have with my mom can be...interesting...at times. What mother/daughter relationship isn't though, really. When it comes to vacationing we have usually been ok, however, I think this may have been her first out of state trip with just me. It went just fine, but I didn't eat any meat during the trip because I gave it up for lent. Yes, I went to Texas and had no red meat whatsoever. Just fish/seafood. I know I am strange. So it goes.

Oh, and did I mention I bought a new camera right before this trip too? I'm not sure if it will make a difference for the photos in this blog, but we'll see. And no, I couldn't really afford the camera either, but my last was over five and a half years old and it was barely holding any charge anymore (from disposable batteries) so it was time. Onward to the photos:

Art exhibit at the airport

Fancy hotel room at the Omni Austin in downtown Austin. This hotel had a roof top pool and hot tub!

Enchiladas Verdes con Camarones at Takoba - My first meal in Austin. It was pretty good and different TexMex style. My mom picked it out after reading the local papers - I guess it was award winning, but really kind a lone well-kept place in an otherwise rundown neighborhood, just outside of downtown.

State Capital Building. Just as the stereotype goes, everything in Texas IS bigger. I think Texas's state capital building is even bigger than California's.


Breakfast in bed! Thank you Omni Hotel room service.

Back to the state capital to tour inside and then walk around more downtown

Ancho’s Blue Crab Melt at one of the hotel restaurants. It looked nice but it wasn't very good. Neither was the service. Our waitress disappeared for most of lunch and my mom and I would up tipping the busboy instead as he wound up doing all of her work and was very nice.

My mom in front of the Texas History Museum

After a disappointing lunch, I asked one of the locals operating a clothing boutique on her favorite place for dinner. She named The South Congress Cafe which was a modern, kind of eclectic place. It was absolutely excellent - great food, great service. The host actually bothered to host and came to just chat with us multiple times and the waitress was very knowledgeable and attentive.

Barramundi Almondine - a type of fish from the south Pacific that I'd never even heard of before this dinner. It was delicious. I had some really good wine to go with it, and my mom had a dish that also featured barramundi as well as two margaritas that she swears were the coldest she had ever had in her life.

Dessert was dried cherry and pecan bread pudding with bourbon sauce and Amy's Vanilla Ice Cream. Heavenly.

Then we went to go see the bats on the South Congress St Bridge - apparently one of Austin's major tourist attractions. I didn't get any good photos of the bats, but we did see them!

Here is my not a good photo of the bats. They were small and fast.

Here is a photo of the bridge and downtown Austin at night.

Overall it was a good trip and my mom enjoyed the time as well. Next time I think I would like to travel outside of downtown more and also try eating some of their meat. The city was nice, but it is still clearly a work in progress, and not nearly as elaborate as other cities I have visited.

I would have really liked to go to Chicago again to see people there, or to go even farther away, but Cisco kept going back and forth on whether or not I was actually even going to get furloughed, and which week it was even going to fall on, that this was an incredibly last minute trip. I think this was the probably best option for me on limited resources, and honestly I'm just glad to have been able to travel somewhere at all. The next trip I take will be to go back home for my brother's graduation, and hopefully the vacation after that will be somewhere overseas.

Have a good night everyone.