Advertisement
Published: November 17th 2013
Edit Blog Post
Our Two Day in Austin, Texas
Austin was our next stop and it was the one city in Texas that I was most looking forward to visiting, mainly because it was one of the two cities to which many musicians displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina settled in. It is the capital city of Texas, but unlike any of the other Texas towns we have visited on our drive in that it has a lively and vibrant and people-filled downtown area. It seems to be where all the Texans who don’t want to be Texans go!
Austin defines itself as the ‘Live Music Capital’ of the World and there is certainly an incredible amount of live music happening on East 6
th Street. There must be 50 bars along that strip nearly all of which feature live music. The type of music played is called ‘Rockabilly Blues’ which is an amalgam of Rock n Roll, Country and Bluegrass, Hillbilly Music and the Blues. It is primarily party music and is composed of loud electric guitars, screeching fiddles, wailing drums and poor singing. (For Irish readers, it is very like a super charged Temple Bar!)
We found a basement
jazz club called the Elephant room, and while the music still had an electric guitar and electric keyboards it was more pleasant to our ears. The leader, a local tenor sax man, was adequate if not exceptional and the club a proper jazz club: small and dingy!
We had driven in to Austin in the morning and headed, as usual, first to the visitor’s centre where we picked up a city map and an armful of brochures and some advice from an elderly attendant. Joan asked about a nice place for lunch and she recommended a restaurant called Moonshine located behind the Convention Centre so we began our walkabout exploration of Austin heading in that direction. While walking we encountered a gang of men coming from the convention centre and entering a bbq smokehouse overlooking the river. We asked them about the restaurant and they told us they were visitors and the local police had recommended it as one of the best places in Austin for smoked meats. We walked further along to Moonshine where Joan inspected the menu and decided it was a bit formal and more expensive for lunch than she wanted and we returned to the
smokehouse and had a wonderful heaping plate of various smoked meats.
That set us up for a long day walking the town. We must have walked the best part of 10 miles during the day. We found a wonderful bookstore where we spent some considerable time browsing and also a very well-stocked music store called Waterloo records whose logo was a London tube sign. There was an older man there who was a jazz enthusiast too and admitted that while there was lots of live music in Austin there was very little jazz. He recommended a few jazz cds by local players and i bought three of them. He also recommended the Elephant Room where we went later that night.
The next morning we got on the bicycles and visited the South Congress Street area which is filled with Tex-Mex restaurants. We waited for a table at a very popular place called Guero’s Taco Bar where the food presented to us was so disgusting that we sent it back and walked across the street to a sausage vendor and had a cheap and tasty sausage roll and Texas root beer. Then we cycled the rest of the way
into town and around Lady Bird Lake, a damned reservoir of the Colorado River. While the lake water is stagnant and a bit green, the 10 miles of hard-pack dirt trails encircling it are excellent and were being fully utilized by other cyclists, joggers and runners, walkers and families.
The next day we headed to San Antonio to visit the Alamo!
(We always seem to be a state behind on our postings! When we arrive into a city or town we park up Rudy V and then either cycle or use the public transport to explore. By the time we get back, sometimes very late, we are too exhausted to write. And the next day we do it all over again – either driving 200+ miles or cycling and walking 10+ miles. This new life adventure on the road leaves very little time for relaxation and reflection and writing. We intend to catch it all up ... eventually!)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.048s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 12; qc: 26; dbt: 0.0192s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb