Tejas, Vol. III
After a fairly legendary night in College Station, haggard as we were the following morning, we were keen to hit the road and unleash the full brunt of White Heat’s mighty 4-cylinder engine on the unsuspecting Texas interstate – our destination: Austin. I am sad to say we never took a picture of the highway demon that was White Heat, but see below for a photo of a similar chariot. Beauty, eh?
Before we could get on the road, we needed to fuel up on gas and burritos at the previously mentioned “Freebirds World Burrito.” Let the record show: I was the only one of the three of us who sacked up for the Monster-size burrito, itself still only the 2nd largest burrito size on the menu. The largest-sized burrito on offer was the aptly named “Super Monster.” where the Monster Burrito was roughly the size of a Nerf football, the Super Monster was closer in size and shape to a small child wrapped in a beach towel. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when the cashier mentioned they sold, on average, at least 2 Super Monsters per day. God bless Texas.
A Tale of Two Austins
Folllowing a pretty drive through the lush, springtime Texan countryside, we rolled into Austin by mid-afternoon. We dropped off our bags and parked White Heat at our hotel, and proceeded to explore Austin on foot. We checked out an outdoor art fair that had some pretty interesting pieces on display. One booth was selling kitschy lawn ornaments, constructed out of discarded metal debris – most of these were selling for around $500, and the sculptor/booth guy admitted to selling quite a few of his creations over the weekend. Clearly, Austinites had money to burn – at least the newcomer Austinites that came along with the tech boom of the 1990’s. Dell Computer is based there, and so Austin’s high-tech industry appears to have grown around them, and it shows in the kind of yuppiedom that exists North Congress Street. You see a lot of fit, outdoorsy, frequently nerdy 30 and 40-somethings, driving Lexus hybrid SUV’s.
It’s a stark contrast to the “Old Austin,” South Congress street area, steeped in Country and Rockabilly music culture. You could call it “Quirky Hipster Austin” vs. “Square Yuppie Austin.” Ultimately, the two tribes do appear tolerate each other well enough – though one can sense the undercurrent of passive resentment with the “Keep Austin Weird” t-shirts that sell so well South of downtown. At the the end of the day, however, the two Austins have plenty in common: they’re both overwhelmingly white, fairly secular, and tend to vote Democrat. Whether they prefer to accessorize with horn-rimmed glasses and neck tattoos or “Live Strong” bracelets and yoga mats seems pretty irrelevant.
Moreover, if there’s one event that seemed to unite both camps in shared awe, it was the daily flight of the Congress Avenue Bats. No, this wasn’t an amateur sidewalk trapeze team, but rather a nightly occurrence in the Spring and Summer months: between 750,000 and and 1 million bats, that reside under the Congress Avenue bridge, fly out from under the bridge at dusk every night, in search of food. Seeing 1 million+ bats fly out all at once from under a bridge to form dark, fast-moving moving clouds is a spectacular sight, regardless of whether or not you’re a software millionaire, an inked-out hipster, or a hard-livin’ country musician.
Sorry for the tease: Guns and Tubing, as part of Vol. IV, will be for the big finish tomorrow – this much, I promise, amigos.
- Those black smudges are actually clouds of tens of thousands of bats – eek!
- Yuppie-Square Dream Home. The house that Dell (or a company like it) built. The ultimate Yuppie accessory.
Found in a back shelf at Allen's Boots, an old cowboy boot shop in hipster Austin: a stuffed Jackalope with bonus deer's head lurking in the background; the ultimate Hipster home accessory.
- Spotted uptown: 3 Yuppies on the move. If this image doesn’t make you want to own a paintball gun, nothing will.
- Spotted downtown: 3 hipsters on the move. A ‘62 Lincoln is already possibly one of the coolest, most achingly bad-ass objects, period. Owning a lowered one with a mint green paint job basically anoints you the hipster Jesus. Let’s not even talk about the hipster beards and tatts these Austinites are sporting – buddy even has a tattoo of a machine gun on his “gun”! I sheepishly asked to take their picture while they were idling at the stop sign and, in so doing, acknowledged my own non-hipster status, but you’ve gotta be true to what you are, I suppose. Drive slow, homeys.
By pure coincidence, the dealership sign floating above the White Heat look-alike, shown in this photo, is exactly what you felt when you slipped into one of White Heat's baby-soft bucket seats.
Down the hatch, Señor! The author, at "Freebirds World Burrito," about to embark on a gastrointestinal journey into the unknown.
Shiny, Yuppie Austin
The Austin Motel. A famous landmark in old, hip Austin. Yeah, I know what it looks like.
