Austin, TX

The car's radiator is cracked! As a result of it cracking, many other things went wrong with the car as well. After careful consideration and many deliberations, we are fixing the car and moving on. We had to cancel pretty much the whole southwest (Grand Canyon included) in order to be able to stay here for the fixture of our vehicle and be able to make it to Yosemite on time.









So, we are in Austin, Tx until Thursday 6/14 (at the least) staying with my good friend Matt. He's tremendously wonderful to be keeping us up for so long. Austin, the Heart of Texas, is pretty neat and nothing like what I thought it would be. It's got awesome night life which Matt took us out to experience~~


On Thursday night we went to 6th Street which is essentially a street lined with bars and clubs. They block off the street to cars and you walk from bar to bar (kinda like on Bourbon St., except better)!

Saturday night Matt took us to 4th Street- which is basically like 6th St. except they didn't block off the streets and maybe there's less bars(?)

As you can tell, we had an awesome time!



FaithFetzer is a little crazy and likes to ride her bike EVERYWHERE!!! So while Matt is studying for his Law classes, we go out riding throughout Austin... ugh, so much.

Today we went to a nice place called Zilker Springs and swam in the spring there- there were SO many people (AND dogs!) that we decided we had selected the wrong day to go.


There were rocks ALL over the bottom of the spring. We fell in the water numerous times and I felt like I had re-broken my toe about 3 times from running into rocks!




We finally made it out to the center of the over-powering water and we sat on a rock (shown here with the man standing on them) for about 3 hours before we wanted to make the trek back onto the banks.

We occupied our time by watching people who were attempting to make the same trek we had just accomplished. People would bring bags full of towels and such, coolers, fishing rods- all while holding a child in their arms- and attempt to wade thru the extremely fast current! Needless to say, no one really accomplished what we had!


We left the springs and FF decided she wanted to check out South Austin, which is on the opposite side of the city from where Matt lives.


We rode and rode and rode for a long time-- up steep hills and all... until finally we had this view of the skyline-- (pretty far away)-- then we decided to go check out the bats.


















(Can you tell I've been riding a bike all day?!?) Austin has the largest Urban Bat population in the WORLD!! (what a thing to have as your claim to fame!) They reside under the Congress Ave. Bridge and every night during summer they fly out at sundown in order to go eat insects. It's a pretty popular thing to do here on summer nights-- I related the turn out for the bats, to the 4th of July... Well, to sum it up-- we only saw a couple of bats fly out of the bridge-- it wasn't as exciting as we thought it would be- and locals were chocking it up to "It's just a low number coming out tonight!"...

On the way home, naturally, it was dark. I have gone from not riding a bike at all, as a result of my accident-- to riding across town, downtown, and at night!! Also, I can go up hills now. FF is pretty proud of me. (As am I)

We rode right past the capital building on our way home... Then by the time we got home, at 1030, I was tuckered out!