01-10MAR10 - Austin, TX (via kinder, la & livingston, tx)

After enduring four more days of rain at the beginning of March in Houma, we got back on the road Friday, 05MAR, enroute Albuquerque, NM. We are heading to Albuquerque to attend a RV Rally scheduled for 22-25MAR. Having a couple weeks before the Rally, we decided to make a few stops in TX. As always before getting to TX we stopped at the Coushatta Casino in Kinder, LA, where Dan won $15 & Corrie won $20.

Saturday we made it to TX and stopped at Escapee World HQ in Livingston, TX, for a couple of days. See our BLOG about the Escapees RV Club and becoming Texans back in 2008. Monday morning it was off to the DMV office to complete the process of becoming Texans by finally getting Texas plates on our Toad.

http://theryanrvexpress.blogspot.com/2008/04/27mar-02apr08-livingston-tx-we-werent.html

http://www.escapees.com/

Tuesday morning we headed to Austin, a town we had driven around many times but never visited. Enroute to Austin we stopped at Sodolaks Country Inn & Steak House in Snook, TX, for lunch. Sodolaks is famous for the invention of chicken fried bacon. That’s right, deep fried bacon topped with white gravy. Also you can get the traditional chicken fried steak, chicken fried chicken, as well as a complete 10oz sirloin dinner for $9. We split a chicken fried steak burger, along with the chicken fried bacon, bacon, bacon. As we continued on to Austin we ran into a roadblock in the form of low bridge! We had just made a left turn onto a county road when we saw a sign warning of a low bridge with a clearance of 11ft 8in. Unfortunately the warning sign was after the turn, not before, when it was already too late. Dan believes our RV is only 11ft 5in, but we didn’t want to risk it and pulled onto the shoulder, disconnected the Toad and made a three point U-turn.

After detouring around the low bridge we finally made it to the outskirts of Austin, set up camp and headed downtown to explore. First stop was the Congress Ave bridge to check out the supposed largest urban bat colony in the country. The bats migrate from Mexico every spring to spend the summer under the bridge in Austin. There are even boat cruises that will bring you under the bridge at sunset when the bats take off for night time feeding (umbrellas are optional). Since it was early spring, there were only a couple of hundred thousand bats on hand instead of the usual millions.
From there we headed south on Congress Ave to check out the “funky” area of Austin known as SoCo. Check out the below BLOG for Dan & brother-in-law Tim’s adventures at the Continental Club last spring. Unfortunately the Club was charging $7 a person cover, so we walked up the street to get a slice a pizza before heading home. On the way home Dan spotted a restaurant called Juan in a Million (or as Corrie says - One in a Million) and remembered that he had seen this establishment on the Travel Channel & on the Food Network.

http://theryanrvexpress.blogspot.com/2009/03/05-24mar09-kerrville-tx.html

http://www.continentalclub.com/Austin.html

http://www.juaninamillion.com/

So the first thing the next morning (or in Dan’s case, anytime after 0900) Dan headed back to Juan’s to get their world famous breakfast taco grande. This breakfast meal is big enough for three and is filled with potatoes, eggs, and bacon, bacon, bacon. After only eating half of the taco we headed back downtown for walk about. First stop was Whole Earth Food. If you know this store, you know they always have free samples (including wine!). Dan figures if we went around the store three times and sampled all the free stuff each round, we would get a free breakfast including apple smoked bacon, bacon, bacon! Then we headed to 6th Street which our tour book said was old town Austin full of boutiques & shops. It was definitely filled with the older buildings of Austin, but we didn’t see many shops; what we saw was many, many bars & nightclubs. Turns out this is THE nightspot area for Austin and is wall-to-wall live music venues & dives! One interesting thing was that every establishment had an ATM machine on the sidewalk right next to the front door. Why? – because they want cash only for the cover charge; but once inside, you can use credit cards to run up your bar tab!
From there it was back to SoCo and the Big Top Candy store, so we could sample chocolate covered bacon (bacon, bacon, bacon!) and an egg cream. One constant theme(?) we noticed throughout Austin, was stores selling items dedicated to the Mexican/Hispanic celebration of “The Day of the Dead”? We are not sure if this a organized effort or just coincidence; but there are numerous shops selling decorated skulls, death masks, skeletons, etc, all used during the festival in hispanic countries. After several hours of walkabout, we headed back to the RV to rest.

Early that evening we headed out again, our first stop was the Cathedral of Junk. This was another of those unique American individuals who collected everyone else’s junk and then started building something out of it. In this case it looks like the spires of a cathedral and therefore the locals call it the “cathedral of junk”. It is located in the backyard in a typical Austin neighborhood, and is not really visible from the street. But once you walk around the house you are almost overwhelmed by structure you see that is literally made of every piece of junk imaginable! There are even ladders and stairs that you can climb to different levels for different viewing perspectives. Dan even convinced Corrie to climb to the highest level for a photo op; the whole time she kept asking if anyone had ever inspected this structure? For some reason Dan just laughed.

From there it was off to “Odd Duck Farm to Trailer” for dinner. This is individual who cooks in a very small trailer; that is fully committed to natural food prepared over a wood fired grill and only has six items prepared every day based on what is locally grown. Corrie went with the grilled quail, and Dan went with the pork belly slider (bacon, bacon, bacon). The trailer right next door is called Gourdoughs donut trailer. And guess what, they have bacon served on a donut, covered in maple syrup (bacon, bacon, bacon)! We’ll have to sample it the next visit.
http://oddduckfarmtotrailer.com/

Our last stop was the University of Texas (UT) campus where we checked out the UT souvenir store where you can get anything you want in UT orange with a longhorn symbol on it. Then we walked on to campus to discover a salsa band playing at the student union. It was a very enjoyable free concert, even with the somber (infamous) clock tower looming over the campus.
It was a world wind two days in Austin, and we definitely need to come back and spend more time exploring. And remember as the local’s say – Keep Austin Weird!

Trivia – What are the moonlight towers of Austin?