Warning - this 24 hour trip report may end up as long as our Thailand trip report. :-)
So Amanda and I went to Austin on Saturday and had a great time. It started off slightly rough with some nausea but we were quickly on our way. We made good time, listened to a Mitch Hedberg CD that we hadn't heard before, and got there well ahead of schedule so we went and got checked into our hotel and grabbed some breakfast. Then, with 15 or 20 minutes to spare, we headed off for our Segway tour of Austin. The place was only about a mile away but the bridge we needed to cross was closed off! Turns out, President Clinton was in town for the UT commencement speech and some of the roads were closed for his motorcade. We were driving all over the place trying to figure out how to get there without that bridge. Took us about 25 minutes but we did finally get there! Good thing I had programmed the number in my cell so we could call and let them know we might be late!
So we get there and we're slightly anxious because we aren't sure we will do well on the Segways. Training took probably 45 minutes and we got comfortable quickly. Turns out, one of the girls that was also on the tour was a member of the Cherry Bomb rollergirl team in Austin. I had no idea roller derbies still existed and were so popular - learned something new!
So we're off on our tour and it was a lot of fun and we got a lot of pics.
Kind of toward the end, we were on a gravel trail near the river and Amanda was trying to scoot away from a cyclist and stepped off of her Segway and it ran into the little rock wall. No big deal as the Segways stay up pretty easily and she did the right thing by getting off. Pretty soon, I come off of mine as one of the tires slides into a rut. Of course, we were the only 2 in the group to come off of their Segways but it was fine and not a big deal.
At the end, we did an obstacle course and got good times on our second tries but of course rollergirl and her family beat us. :-)
So after the Segway tour, we were hot and sunburnt and headed off to our hotel to change into swimsuits and head to the rooftop pool at the Omni. Amanda asks the towel lady how we go about ordering drinks and she says we have to go down to the lobby. We have to go down 19 floors in our swimsuits to order drinks?! Turns out she was wrong and we ordered drinks which arrived 30 minutes later. View from the pool was great and it was very relaxing.....until a daycare showed up (ok, not really but it seemed like it) and there was splashing everywhere, including into our drinks.
Leave the pool and then we go to get showered and dresses for dinner. I get calls from work that something has to be fixed and luckily that was done in time for us to go to dinner. Dinner at the Iron Cactus on 6th Street. We sat on the rooftop patio and the food was really, really good.
Then we're off to see the bats on the Congress bridge. We park and walk quite awhile to get near the bridge to see the bats come out from the bridge at dusk. The bats are a big deal and draw quite a few people every night to watch them come out. We had visions of a Hitchcock movie with the sky being covered in big bats and making lots of noise. What we got was a small stream of little bird-looking bats that kind of made tweet noises. It could have been something from a Disney film! A little disappointing, I must say.
So then we're off to the Driskill Hotel with Amanda's vision of sipping lemon drop martinis and eating fancy desserts. We head to the Driskill which is located maybe 100 feet from our own hotel and Amanda wants us to valet park so she can avoid having to walk in her new shoes which are proving to be very painful to walk in. The hotel is very nice and we find a place to sit and place an order. They did in fact have lemon martinis and they did have fancy desserts - success! Amanda asks if the banana cake dessert is big enough for us to share and the waitress tells us that it's one of the bigger desserts so we just ordered the 1 dessert. We wait probably 20 or 25 minutes and out comes this behometh dessert......
Ok, so it wasn't so big. We looked at the waitress like she was a crazy person and opted to order another dessert right away since this one was so....um....diminutive. We got two forks to go with our mini dessert and just had 1 cloth napkin which, of course, we shared because we're just silly like that. We had much fun with the tiny banana cake and Amanda said she should have told the waitress "oh, you're not kiddin....that thing is huge!" which still makes me laugh. Second dessert comes and we contemplate telling the waitress that we are just too stuffed from the first dessert but we don't and we just pay and leave.
It's about 10:30 by now and I ask Amanda if we are going out tonight and she says "ummm....I thought we were out." So we go pick up the car at valet and drive it the whole way back to the hotel (very slowly I might add, to make the valet feel more worth it) and change into pajamas. Turn on SNL but mute it just in case they have Appalachian Emergency Room which is so hilarious. Amanda does a fantabulous Netti Bo Dance impression. Sadly, no Appalachian Emergency Room this episode but....we did watch a DVD that had us in hysterics. Good times.
Go to bed and apparently the guys next to us decide to have a party in their room. They had 10 guys in their room (despite signing a "no party" policy at check in stating that nobody was allowed in the hotel unless they were a paying hotel guest). Amanda called for security to come, then she called back to say things seemed to have calmed down, then called again to say they hadn't. Turns out that the police had come and removed 7 of the guys and 1 guy was left because he was passed out and unmovable. Sigh.
The hotel alarm goes off at 6 am and I can't figure out how to get it off. Amanda gets it unplugged and back to sleep until about 10. Guys next door are awake and LOUD again. We're not sure how much they actually slept.
Get checked out via video checkout and head for the elevators. Guys at the elevator waiting turned out to be our friendly party boys. We knew their voices but they didn't know who we were. They proceeded to tell us all about their night and how somebody called the police and broke up the party. One of the guys was still drunk and asking random people if he smelled like bourbon and he was a total jerk. What a coincidence we'd get stuck with them in the elevator.
We head for Las Manitas for breakfast/brunch and then to Zilker Park to possibly swim in the springs there. We enter Zilker Park through the wrong entrance and end up bypassing the ticket-taker. Feeling like fugitives, we scope the place out and finally end up in the area of the springs. The area looked neat but we decide to take the kiddie train instead and get the full tour. This area is like kid paradise with playgrounds, the train, the swimming area and soon, there will be a waterpark as well. Nice area.
We head out for the highway to make our way home but not before getting stopped by the police. I had crossed a solid white line on the highway in a moment of confusion about which lane I was supposed to be in. He reminded me about how dangerous it was and I ended up not getting a ticket for that but he did notice that I didn't have my inspection sticker on the car so he cited me for that instead.
On our way again, we passed time listening to random music from her ipod, much of which was 80s metal music and brought back lots of good memories from our teenage years. We stop at the outlets in Hillsboro but I only wanted to go to the Gap outlet. We thought it would be really funny to have the metal music playing at full blast and ask people for directions to the Gap or Ann Taylor or Liz Claiborne. Good times.
Picked up a few good buys at the Gap outlet and finally made our way home. Lots of fun and my stomach muscles still hurt from laughing so much the whole time! If we end up staying in Texas, need to make another trip down to Austin w/the family. They'd love it.
