Austin, Texas

A 5 hour flight to Denver, Colorado. Then a 2 flight to Austin, Texas. Should be easy enough.

As we are approaching Denver we notice the snow everywhere. We touch down and the walk up the jet bridge, it's pretty... fresh.

Our flight to Austin is delayed. We have to hang around for about 4 hours.

We touch down in Austin at about 2am. It's foggy and about -2 degrees. We later find out that they are well below the average temperature for this time of year and that there has been bad weather across the US. A major airport in Dallas has had flights delayed by 4 days and is full of stranded people.

So we were pretty lucky to avoid too many issues in the end.

Straight to bed. No exploring tonight.

Day 2

Our hosts have left us a cheat sheet, including how to get to town. Too far to walk, so it's on the bus.

It is raining slightly and it's freaking cold. A good 'warm up' for NY, we suppose. We don't have to wait too long for the bus and we ride all the way to Austin's famous 6th Street.

We grab some local, standard Tex-Mex lunch. Burritos and enchiladas etc. The waitress is super friendly and managed to say "y'all" about 15 times in the first sentence. Stereotype: check! The beers are nice and cheap. $3 for any domestic beer. Really understand how bad we have it in Australia now.

Next task is to get some gloves. Our poor little hands. We wander across the bridge towards a St. Vinnies. We grab a couple of awesome/ugly sweaters (including an Xmas one) and get some gloves next door at America Apparel. Much better. We head back into town. It's a bit too far to head back to our air bnb joint, so we stay in town for the night.

We stop in for some pool, but end up playing shuffle board instead. A game played on a long wooden lane which is covered in sand. It's similar to the version on a cruise ship. A bit like lawn bowls. We play for a while and kill some time waiting for 6th street to start up.

I overhear that the Chicago Bears (my number one team who I follow religiously...) are playing tonight in the NFL. Awesome. Any chance to yell at a TV and learn how this stupid game works is ok by me. We head to a little bar and watch. There is a guy playing guitar and doing a bit of music trivia. Courtney nails a question about the Eagles and scores a free shot.

The name of the place is the Dizzy Rooster. It's very American. The ball game is on, a rock band starts up with long, long blues solos. There is a beer pong table which we dominate... for the first game. Then we get our butts kicked. I think the guys were sharking us!

A few beers and horrible tequilas later and it's time for some pizza. They know how to do this right in Austin as well.

We wander to the bus stop past some guys with a sign saying they are selling weed. Not very subtle! But apparently it doesn't matter. It's almost legal in Austin, we later hear.

We get the equivalent of the old wandering star bus back towards home. The only problem is that it doesn't drop us near where our home is. We get off somewhere. The GPS isn't working on our phones and it's below freezing and we are lost. Oh, and this main road we are on has hardly any cars going past.

We get very lucky and a cab comes past after 10 or so minutes. He is confused by what we are doing all the way out here. He takes us home. We are supremely grateful.

Day 3

Got up late and went and got some brunch down the road at another tex-mex place. Some enchiladas and tacos. Can't get sick of this food. It's amazing.

On the way back we stumble upon a coffee van. The guy doesn't give us a chance to walk past without ordering. He is exceedingly friendly. He asks us how we heard about his world famous coffee van and how far we've come from... "uh, we're just down the road and randomly walked past". Sorry to disappoint you bud. Your coffee is pretty good though.

Anyway, back into town. This time via a place that does Tuesday night trivia called The Flying Saucer. It also has another draw card (that we didn't know about) of having over 100 beers on tap. None of which being Budweiser or Bud Light (gross).

The trivia was ordinary. How about a question about the rest of the world, ya jerk? Also there was 1 round out of 3 completely about the new Hunger Games movie. Huh? At least the beers were good...

Onwards to 6th street. Not one cab in sight. We walk about 7/10ths of the way.

We head to the Alamo Draft House for a movie. This place serves food and drinks during the movie and has theme nights with audience participation. Tonight is Terror Tuesday so we watch Tales from the Crypt, a classic from the 70s (which neither of us have heard of). It turned out to be really cool, as per the hosts promise in his introduction. A nice concept with the food and drink service as well. Australia should get on board this. Gold class is the only thing close, except the tickets for this show were $3 each, not $50.

We get out around 1am. 6th street is buzzing again. I notice one of the bands we saw last night playing at another pub. Must be a full time 'gig' for people in this town.

Back on the wandering star with more clue tonight. We walk about 30 mins through empty suburbia home.

Day 4

It's our last day in Austin so it's time to have some more tacos. Just joking. We check out of our airbnb accommodation and decide to do something healthy-ish for our bodies and hunt down some salad sandwiches.

We walk about 15 minutes to a nearby bakery/cafe. Jeff comes back from ordering our 'healthy' lunch with an astounded look on his face. Apparently the waitress asked if we wanted vegetable sticks or chips with our sandwiches. Not the hot chip kind but like crisps. And it's a pretty regular thing to see people eating their sandwiches with a pile of potato chips on the side. Between that and every other restaurant being a burger joint and the rest being Tex-Mex joints, it's no wonder these people are on the larger side. That's not to say we didn't make the most of the Tex-mex. When in Austin and all that.

After lunch we head towards Downtown on the bus where we are informed by another passenger that God loves us. Good to know. We look for a place at the bus depot to store our bags so we can go for a wonder but our cheap-as fair to New Orleans means there is no depot. We cruise around till we find a coffee shop with some wifi. Whilst there we meet a fellow backpacker who is travelling around America. A little different from our travels in that he's sleeping under bridges in order to save cash and has a couple kids in a couple of different states. Nice bloke though.

After that we head to the bus stop to catch our ride to New Orleans. It's no where near as luxurious as the buses we've grown accustomed to travelling in around South America but it was cheap. First bus is a 3 hour ride to Houston, a 2 hour stop over there and then a 6 hour bus at around 11pm which will take us New Orleans.

Pretty hard to sleep, but we shouldn't complain. We saved about $450 over a plane ride. So it's all good.