AB1 Tour 2014 - Week 2 - Austin, Texas

O.K. campers, after delays were caused by a hellish wifi experience with the New Orleans campsite's wifi (I think their system operated on two very tired hamsters running on a wheel), our blog is back.  Makes me sound like an old codger, complaining and all.  Well, as we're getting up there in years, I often find myself referring to some wise words handed down to Diedre and me by our Terravita friend, John Mohr.  They're actually three suggestions for weathering the aging process gracefully that I hope will be useful to you in your old age, which for some of us will be here any minute now:
     1-NEVER pass up a bathroom
     2-NEVER trust a fart
     3-and NEVER, EVER pass up an erection
     Moving on ...
   

Sunday, April 6, was a travel day.  We made our way from Kerrville, TX, to Austin ... Texas (not Minnesota as I was originally led to believe).  Jumping right into this year's first big city, we were immediately off hiking Mount Bonnell in beautiful Covert Park.  Unlike Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Mount Bonnell actually is a mountain.  The view from the top was spectacular as we looked down upon Austin and the river-like lake that runs through it.  At the base of the mountain lives a Carleton College classmate-couple who done gradiated with me back in '73.  Candace is an absolutely lovely southern belle by way of Kansas while Mark had been one of the toughest guys on the Carleton football team before joining up with me on my juggernaut of a college softball team in the always fierce Marvin Rotblatt Memorial Softball league.  Drafting all jocks, we finished the season 13-1, thanxx in no small part to Mark's football mentality on the base paths.  And amazingly enough, shattering the image of all Neanderthal jocks everywhere, Mark finished as the top student in our class, majoring in physics, not phys-ed.
   

 As we could see by their lovely home, their pool, and their boat upon which we went for a ride, Candace and Mark have done quite well.  And then less than 24 hours after our dinner with them, they became grandparents for the first time.  The rich just keep getting richer in so many ways.
   

On Tuesday, I dragged my poor wife on one of my town-walking tours of which I so favor.  But seeing as she's now a total fitness freak, complete with aerial yoga, a Fit bracelet which keeps track of her daily regimen of walking, and duplicating her mother's exercise program which includes standing on your head at social security age, my walk didn't phase her in the least.  We took a fun, free tour of the Texas state capitol.  As usual, it was important for Texans to be bigger and better than the rest of us, and sure enough, their capitol is actually a bit taller than the U.S. Capitol.  It even faces south to show solidarity with the confederacy.  Boy, talk about your poor losers.
     Evening up the walking destinations, we satisfied Diedre by checking out the home-office/store of Whole Foods.  She was very happy with that.
     For dinner, we met up with a St. Louis Park High School classmate of mine, Melissa Hield.  Melissa was a Park High cheerleader when I played basketball for Park.  Now these many years later, she's a big-shot with the state government, so much so that they even look the other way when she brings her pom-poms to work.
     After dinner, we then did a very curious thing: we went to see the bats.  No, this wasn't another one of my idiotic baseball games.  It was an actual bat colony, the world's largest urban bat colony at over 1.5 million bats.  They live downtown under the Ann Richards Congress Avenue Bridge.  And let me tell you, every night at sunset, the place gets like Mardi Gras.  People from everywhere come out to see the bats.  Sure enough, just as the sun just went down, swarms of bats came from everywhere under the bridge, and for the next 20 minutes, you watched a continual swirl of bats flying out over the river in search of insect dinners.  It sounds strange, but we really enjoyed seeing the bats.
   

The next day our rural side demanded equal time, so we headed out to the McKinney Falls State Park to see both the upper and lower falls.  Using our previously mentioned state parks pass, we've now saved $60 on a $70 pass.  We still need to get to a state park in Amarillo in September to come out $2 to the good on that investment.  And you say I'm not good with money.
     These weren't gigantic falls, but we figured we'd better work our way up until we get to Niagara Falls in August.  We were nearly 86'ed from the park when my usually perceptive wife decided she wanted to lie on a veritable sea of blue wild flowers, thus emulating the great poppies scene in "The Wizard of Oz."  The only problem with this scheme was, these wild flowers are "blue bonnets," the Texas state flower.  And apparently surly Texas park rangers don't take too kindly to us Yankees (read: "Diedre") crushing their delicate little petals (the flowers, not the rangers).  This plus-sized ranger emphasized more than once to Diedre that she was "crushing" the flowers, apparently taking no notice of her svelte, yoga-inspired wisp of a body.  He kept calling her a "crusher."  So, henceforth on the remainder of this trip, Diedre will lovingly be referred to as "The Crusher," a name which just happens to be the appellation of my all-time favorite professional wrestler, Reginald "The Crusher" Lisowski.

     Classing up the act, we then made it over to the University of Texas student theatre that night to see the Tony-winning musical, "In the Heights."  It had been conceived by and had music and lyrics written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, a close personal friend of mine whom I had nearly met at the national playwright's conference in Chicago last year (you no doubt remember my story about him; if not, check out your personal archives of this blog).
     Seeing as how last year we made it to 10 baseball games and only two plays, numbers that are supposed to be much more equal per the "Diedre-Alexx Roommate Agreement of 1991," we went to the theatre again the next night to see "The Drawer Boy," a marvelously funny, yet poignant play by Michael Healey about two friends farming together after serving in WWII and suffering horrible injuries.  And we lucked out: it was "pay what you can" night, something small theatres do every once in awhile.  For the money, we both felt it was one of the best plays we had seen in several years.
     Friday was my day to wander the University of Texas campus while Diedre did yet another one of her bizarre strains of yoga: I think this one was "gardening yoga."  I first made it to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.  It's funny; although I always knew he was a democrat, I still had the impression that he was an old conservative, states rights southerner.  But the library spoke of nothing but how much he did for the poor and impoverished.  And of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that he signed was absolutely ground-breaking.  That night, I verbalized my thought to The Crusher and she agreed that she had felt the same way about him.  So what really surprised us the next morning was when the local newspaper addressed exactly that point of view of LBJ.  I was a bit taken aback to learn that LBJ's civil rights views had radically shifted over time.  From 1937 to 1957, he had always voted with the south on (against) civil rights, voting "nay" on every civil rights bill for 11 years as a congressman.  He even voted against legislation aimed at ending lynching.
     Wait ... WHAT?!
     Running for the senate in 1948, he then assailed Truman's entire civil rights program.  For 20 years, his voting record was amazingly, conservatively consistent.
     And then it changed.
   

 In 1957 in the senate, LBJ's confidence in who he was grew.  Having always had a great feeling for the poor and disenfranchised, he realized that to achieve his goal of the presidency, his cowtowing to southern beliefs about race were no longer necessary for him to get to where he wanted to be.  That eventually led to his signing of the greatest of all civil rights legislation in 1964 as president.  So there's that.
     The rest of my day on campus saw me checking out the University of Texas's Darrell Royal Football Stadium.  Inside it there's, of course, a Starbucks.
     I then made my way over to the Harry Ransom Research Center.  Two things I wanted to see there were 1) a Gutenberg Bible.  It was printed in 1455 and is one of just 48 surviving copies, and just one of only five in the U.S.  It was all in Latin of course, but my extensive knowledge of the language (5-and-one-half years of high school and college Latin, mainly good for doing crossword puzzles) allowed me easy access through the tome.  I was only able to get through the first four or five books of the Bible in the time allotted to me; and 2) also at the Ransom center was the world's first photograph (heliograph) taken in 1826 in France by Joseph Niepce.  The picture is the view of the back of Niepce's estate taken from an upstairs window.  Titled "View from the Window at Le Gras," it represents the origin of today's photography.  It had to be exposed for eight hours before closing the shutter.  It's the first permanent photo from nature.  And if you look closely at the two gardeners working in the back captured at the bottom left of the picture, it appears that the taller one surreptitiously has the first two fingers on his right hand behind the smaller gardener's head just as the picture was taken.  The tricky part was he had to hold this pose for the entire 8 hours without the smaller guy ever knowing what was happening, thus inventing the first ever "rabbit ears" photo.
     BA-DUM-BUMP!
 

 I met up with the ladies, Melissa and The Crusher, for yet another night of theatre, this time at the rollicking "Spring Fever Follies" at Esther's Follies downtown.  The great part of this satirical, "Saturday-Night Live"-like show was the giant window on stage that looked right out onto the Austin nightlife street, making unwary Austinians (is that even a word?) part of the show.  The playhouse has been open to the public since 1977; co-owner/actress Shannon Sedwick is the Cal Ripken (usual baseball reference) of theatre here, acting in 9,861 consecutive shows on Esther's stage.  She's so reliable, her understudy is a cat.
 

So, our last day in Austin opened on a sad note for me.  In the paper I read about the death at age 69 of basketball great Lou Hudson.  As a young teen, I had been fascinated by Louie's efforts on the University of Minnesota's Golden Gophers basketball team.  After graduation, he had his number 14 retired there, then went on to average 20 points a game for the St. Louis/Atlanta Hawks for 13 NBA seasons.
     Hearing about Lou's death hit me hard. He was my all-time Gopher hero.  I had started going to games with my dad in the late 50's.  Of everyone I would see in those 45 years, Louie was the best.  My grandfather always remembered going to a game with me and smiling as I constantly yelled, "GIVE IT TO LOUIE!!"
     I was at sophomore Hudson's first Big-10 game when he jumped so high he hit his head on the backboard.  Bleeding, he was taken out of the game for quite a bit, yet still came back.  I remember him playing the rest of the game with blood on his white uniform and still scoring 36 points.  And on the first play during his first game back after he broke his wrist as a senior, he caught a pass, put up a left-handed jumper (he was a natural righty), and, of course, he made it.
     Lou, Archie Clark, and Don Yates were all recruited together to be the first black players to really play for the U (All American football player Bobby Bell played a little after football season, but never started). The fans absolutely loved all three of them.  Lou was my guy.  Rest in peace, old friend.
   

OK, back to Austin.  Trying to make the most out of the last day of our wonderful week in the Texas state capitol, we went to the outskirts of town to meet up with an old work buddy of Diedre's, John Costilla.  What a nice man.  He put us on to "Jacob's Well," a submerged water cave in a most unusual area.  Trying to get revenge for the whole "blue bonnet flower crushing episode," the forest struck back, severely disfiguring Diedre with a tree branch scratch on her face during that morning's hike.  I'm sure with plastic surgery, The Crusher will be back to being as lovely as ever.
   

 From there, we decided to go intellectual and made our was to the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum.  Note the photo of  Diedre with the sculpture "Eve," a 1972 bronze.  Don't they both appear like they're looking for a Starbucks.
     From there we made it over to the O'Henry House, the restored home of the gifted writer most famous for his short story, "The Gift of the Magi."  In the last eight years of his life, he wrote 381 short stories.  WHEW!  I get tired just writing this furshlugginer blog.
     O'Henry died at the age of 47 of, among other things, diabetes.  In one of the house's rooms was a short story of his that had never been published.  I was able to read it while visiting the home; it was O.K., kind of like a "Twilight Zone" episode.
   

We finished our week with a return to Whole Foods and a last dinner with Melissa.  It was so much fun to see her after all these years.  Our mothers had been friends while we were growing up, but we really didn't know each other that well.  This had been a great time to get to know the adult Melissa.  Now as you can see, we're a pair of "Deviled Advocates."
     Houston's up next.  Party on, Garth!

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Hi All - The Crusher here.  My deepest apologies to the Texans as I understand their love of their beautiful wildflowers.  We have now seen bluebonnets all over the state and they really are quite lovely and deserve not to be mutilated by someone trying to recreate a scene from a movie they loved as a child.  Ah well.  That act is going to haunt me the rest of the trip if not my life as an adventurer!  Perhaps I can find some forgiveness in the next big Texan town.  I truly loved Austin and am thrilled we had a full week there to explore it. 

Our campground was very nice - we'd definitely recommend it to anyone else heading that way.  Oak Forest RV Park is conveniently located on the east side of the city and is an easy 10-15 minute drive into the downtown area.  I found a great deal at Eastside Yoga of unlimited classes for the week for only $20 so that was a nice way to start my day and is good for keeping my strength and flexibility up for the Grand Canyon hike next April.  I wish every town had an offer like this. We are looking forward to Houston now, but it will be tough to match the lovely town of Austin.  It's such a walkable town that I hit my new personal best for distance this week, over 75,000 steps averaging about 5 miles a day. 
Thanks for keeping us in your thoughts and for your interest in our blog!  CU soon!