HiJenx

When we got into Austin, we headed toward lunch. This was a good move as the traffic was so horrific, it took us ages to get there. We stopped at a place called Kerbey Lane Cafe, which had been recommend to us. It wasn’t bad:

Austin is a big, proper city. It is the 11th biggest in the US, which had surprised me. I knew it was popular, but I think it’s gotten a lot more popular in the last few years:

Next we went into the city proper where we had a fascinating chat with a Basque woman who used to live in Austin. She remarked on how much it had grown since she had lived there and that though it was alright, she felt it had very little around it, and she recommended the Bay Area in California, where she had also lived. Somehow we ended up speaking Portuguese, which she also spoke, but hers was thoroughly European Portuguese, while mine is very Brazilian, which she noticed immediately. We happened to run into her here oddly, the biggest of all the US state capitol buildings:

It was in quite a nice neighborhood. Austin does have some great neighborhoods, and it’s no surprise, as they are a fast growing tech hub with companies like Apple and Google:

Next we carried on north, to some modern art. There is so much big, weird public art in Texas (as can also been seen in our Houston post).Given how big and trafficky Austin is, we were quite tired by the time we got to the far north of the city and decided to stay in a suburb that 3 of our friends had lived in called Round Rock:

Given all the people we knew in the area, we had been given a million recommendations. We are sorry we probably didn’t take nearly as many of them as might have been nice. There are two reasons, both of which I think are good. I was actually really horrifically ill this whole day. I managed to get some nasty cold allergy mix the very last night in Fredericksburg at 5 AM. We had been there so long, we hardly wanted to be grounded for another few days in the same place that we were frankly sick of. The other is that going out in the evening after driving around all day can be tiring, so we almost always tend to go out near our hotel or motel. This means that instead of having one of the many amazing things people recommended, we had this:

I really can’t recommend it. The main attraction was being walking distance from the hotel. The meat was a bit dry and less impressive, especially compared to the amazing BBQ we tried in Memphis. We are still hoping to find some good Texas BBQ before we go.

Check out the video: