Day 5: Big Spring to Austin

Our room was great.  Really good beds and lots of room and the breakfast was good.  Perhaps not $200 of good but good none the less.  We had a sharp reminder that we were in fact in Texas when we went to drink the water from the tap.  Seattle water it is not!  I now know why all the ladies my age here are blonde rather than grey – you guessed it, all the minerals in the water turn their hair yellow.  So I guess I am joining the crowd for the duration.  No more silver haired fashionista for me for a while.  The other horror was that it was 150 miles to the nearest espresso stand!  How do these people survive.

Texas between Big Spring and Austin certainly didn’t look like I expected west Texas to look.  Flat yes but not brown.  Much greener than I expected and cotton fields everywhere.  They are currently harvesting the cotton so one field looks like it is knee deep in snow and the next is brown with bolls in the dirt around the edge.  I was so tempted to ask Bear to stop so I could run over and grab a couple.  I have never held a cotton boll before.  Then we hit the hill country and the land changed to rolling hills.  Lots of mesquite and big ranches but still not brown.  We were not on the interstate so we got to drive through lots of small towns.  Some were wrecks of former towns and others were beautiful and clean and prosperous looking.
 
We rolled into Austin in the early afternoon.  Our condo is right downtown just off of the biggest party street in Austin.  It is midnight and I am still listening to the horn player on the corner across the street.  And the people walking up and down the sidewalks!  Dressed in everything from jeans and tee shirt to 6” stiletto heels.  The one look I don’t see from our window is cowboy.  How odd, I would have thought that would be the big look.  This doesn’t feel like a cowboy town.  I feels the most like Seattle of any of our stops on this trip.  Perhaps it is the Starbucks on the corner.

We went for a shopping trip to the flagship Whole Foods.  It is HUGE!  We had such a good time picking out stuff for dinner – and local beer.  The cookie bar didn’t hurt either.  Imagine an olive bar with about 20 items to choose from – now turn those olives into cookies.  MMMM, yum.
 
Lefty joined us just before dinner.  Then we got to watch the Seahawks give away the farm, or since this is Texas they gave away the ranch.  So sad.