The Raish Brothers Brotherly Roadtrip - Austin Texas

We drove from Sweetwater, TX to Austin, TX.  Austin has become a center for music and the arts believe it or not, Texas is becoming cool.
those Texas windfarms in daylight.

its hard to see but they go into infinity.

first time seeing cotton fields.


going 80+ mph for hours makes your windshield look like this.

we stayed at an extended stay outside of Austin because there was nothing else left.  Unbeknownst to us this weekend happened to be ACL, Austin City Limits famous music festival so everyone was in town.  Extended stay was probably the worst place we stayed at.  Here is just one example of their awesomeness.

we took the bus to downtown Austin because we wanted to drink and party because it was friday night.  Here is bob kneeling down in the shade of a tree in 90 degree Texas weather by the bus stop like a true migrant worker/poor student/poor adult.

Lambert's BBQ in Austin was the best thing we ate on the whole trip.  It's a bit fancier and pricier than what you would think of as a BBQ place but in this case you really get what you pay for.  The pulled pork was IT!  Cheesy grits, and brisket were also consumed with pleasure.
We did a Cow and Pig cuts test while we were waiting.  We each had 10 seconds to to flip the menu over and memorize the chart.  Bob got a C- on the cow and I got a D- on the pig.  Fail.

The emergence of the bats at dusk from under the Congress Bridge is supposed to be a big thing and it looks crazy because thousands of bats fly out like its a scene in batman or something.  There is a hotline to call and they end up telling you the 2 hour window that they might emerge at.  We debated over this for a few minutes on the bridge and then decided to go have a quick drink because there were supposed to be lots of bars on south congress street.  we crossed the bridge and didn't see any immediate bars or anything that looked like it would be a bar area anytime soon and had a brief tiff over what to do and then went back to the bridge to at least figure things out and maybe the bats would come out while we were planning.  These people are waiting in this park on the south side of the river.

boat waiting around for the bats and kayakers and weird floatilla boat things too.

it started to get dark and everyone was dropping out of the game like flies.  Every minute longer we stayed there the closer to the time the bats would appear was, but also that meant we would have less time to have drinks because we had a michael jackson singalong dance party at the Alamo Drafthouse cinema to go to.  We got into another tiff about aggregate means and the two hour window was just about up and finally the bats came out.  kind of.

it was so dark at this point that you could barely make the bats out and it looked like they were just flying out under the bridge like 10 feet and then flying back under, not flying out into the night in a long swath for a well composed photo.  It seemed like you could only see like 10 at a time, not 10,000.  Major disappointment.  Major.  we gambled and lost but not in the way I thought we would lose.  We thought an amazing 10,000 bat experience was a guaranteed thing and it was a mere fizzle of bats.  We said F it we will go get drinks on Rainey street and Uber it over to the Alamo later.

These girls got in the way of my shot but on a side note there are lots of hot girls in Austin.  We didn't see the stereotype of the hot blonde texan cowgirl but we were quite surpised at the number of attractive ladies around Austin.

Rainey street

food truck area


Austin City Limits festival ending made us late.  Thank goodness for Uber and technology

The Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar has this "The Shining" scene in their lobby.  So there are like 6 Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas in Austin all with different programing and I messed it up and the Michael Jackson singalong dance party was at 2 other branches but not at this one.  We were faced with watching "Gone Girl" or drinking around Austin.  We went with drinking in Austin

we ended up at the cool bar the Highball right next door where there was a 90s dance party going on.  We stayed there for the rest of the night and for many beers.
Austin seems pretty cool.  Things seem spread out but if you know where you're going there is lots of cool stuff going on.




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