Austin, TX
Hopefully this whole trip will seem funny to someone besides me, but I’ll tell you what, Austin, TX was a fun-ass trip!
Click here for all the pictures from our Austin, TX trip!
I’ll kinda try and go through each day without it being too boring or stupid. So, as part of the prize for coming in Third Place in the Dogfish Head Off-Centered Film Competition was a flight for one to Austin, TX to see the “world premiere” of out short film, World Wide Clout, plus three days two nights in a hotel, plus some spending cash. So, we took the spending cash and bought two more plane tickets so all three of us, Erik, Robert, and myself, could go down. We started pricing out tickets for the flight and realized it was actually cheaper for us to leave a day early and pay for an extra night at the hotel then it was to pay for all three of to go down on the original day. So we turned a Friday to Sunday trip into a Thursday to Sunday trip, sweet!
Thursday: So Thursday started WAY early for me. We had a 6AM flight to Austin, which meant we should be at the airport like 4AMish, which meant I was getting up like 3AMish, which meant I should be going to bed like 9PMish the night before, which meant I really went to bed like 12AM – so I got about 3 hours sleep before the trip began – did you follow me there? Fortunately the beginning of the trip went off without a hitch: made it to the airport on time, the flights were easy and lazy (about 5 hours of flying, 6 hours with layovers), and no one appeared to stress too hard which can happen with lack of sleep and traveling. So essentially we arrived in Austin, TX at out hotel around 1PM, too early to check in, but late enough for some lunch. Our hotel was near a Hooters and we were beat, so that was stop number one. We were all out of it, kind of just staring at each other and being like “I don’t believe we’re in Texas right now”, while everyone in the restaurant was kind of just staring at us and looking like “Those guys aren’t from Texas” – it was surreal. Anyway, we drank a couple beers, had a sandwich, some wings, and some fried pickles. The fried pickles were the thing that sticks out, tasty but way salty.
We finally checked in after lunch and relaxed a little. I think we talked about what we were going to do and then we all fell asleep without discussing it. By the time we woke up it was starting to get dark. We talked a little bit about whether we wanted to stay in and chill or go out and do something – going out won over, though we all really just wanted to chill, but why stay in and eat pizza when you can do that any night, we may never be in Austin, TX again! A couple people had told us about a bridge in the city that over a million bats lived underneath, and supposedly at dusk all the bats came out and it was supposed to be crazy. It sounded a little weird, but that was about our speed. We finally made it down to the bridge; there was a barge in the water with a bunch of people, a deck at a restaurant with a bunch of people, a ledge near the water with a bunch of people – we were definitely in the right spot. We waited, and waited, and waited until it was almost dark – I think I saw like 20 bats, for real. A lot of people said it may have been too early in the year, but it was lame.
After the bats we went to 6th Street which is suppose to be the big party/hang-out spot. We walked up and down 6th Street once, it was very . . . college-ish, dirty, fake . . . I don’t know, I wasn’t picking up on the vibe. Basically it was like: bar, blues bar, souvenir shop, bar, blues bar, tattoo parlor, bar, blues bar, pizza spot, and so on and so forth – very not where I was at. On the way into town we passed the Ginger Man bar which I had heard good things about on BeerAdvocate and Robert had heard good things from Garrett, so we figured we’d give it a shot, it was only a couple blocks away. The Ginger Man was MUCH more our pace and mentally where we were at. It had about 50 taps plus a nice bottle selection, room at the bar, no live band, open air seating in the back, and darts. We tried a few different beers and we all kind of agreed on this rye beer that was on cask as the fan favorite. So we grabbed a couple casks, a set of darts from the bartender, and picked our own music off the jukebox – very cool. Later we went out back and enjoyed another beer in the nice weather of early April in TX, pretty sweet. After the Ginger Man we cruised through a jazz bar briefly and then I think we just went back to the hotel and fell out, Erik and Robert sharing a queen bed and me on a pull out couch.
(Originally I was going to do the whole trip as one post, now I think I am going to break out each day separately.)
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:44 am
Sounds like alot of fun already! Like the day by day format.