A Needle in a Haystack

I have never been on a road trip as long as the trip to Austin. Although not as horrible as I had imagined, it was still tiring for us all. Strange how sitting down all day can be tiring....but it was. Summer did alot better than what I thought she would. I guess after being tortured for a few hours you get used to the pain, right?

Here we are at a rest stop at the Texas line (Thanks Jennifer, this was a cool place with alot of info).



We left around 7:00 a.m Sunday morning and didn't roll into Austin until 8:00p.m or so. It was dark when we got there. Toby was tired from driving and it was too dark to try and manuever our way around a new city so we grabbed the first hotel we saw......which ended up being, by Austinite standards, the worst part of the city. It's really strange to me what some people's idea of a "bad area" is. Austin's worst part of town is comparable to the area we live in now, in Mobile. Where as, Mobile's worst part of town would be considered Prichard, a much, much bad part of town. I guess it's all a matter of perspective.

Anyway, we ended up staying in the same hotel the whole time we were there because we didn't see anything "scary" in the area and plus we had our grounding point where we could find our way around. "A needle in a haystack" is what I felt like while we were there. The city is 5x Mobile's size and it was a bit overwhelming at first.

Most of our days were spent visiting tattoo shops and checking out the very large downtown area. Toby found a few shops that he liked, and that liked him, so we now know for a fact that there is a job waiting for him when we finally arrive there.

With the city being so big, we only saw a small portion of it, but what we saw we really liked. There were no dissappointments.

We did manage to visit the Capitol, which was really cool because it wasn't like a real secured area like I thought it would be. You could come and go as you please and even hang out on the grounds if you wished. Here is a few pics of the grounds and the capitol.



We also managed to visit Zilker Park and accidentally found the Nature and Science Center while we were there.

There are concrete biking/walking trails EVERYWHERE in the city, even special places marked out on the sides of all the streets for pedestrians.....and there were alot of people taking advantage of this comodity. Here is a pic of the view from one of the trails.

Here is a pic of Summer on a archeological dig in the Nature Center. We like to never have got her out of the Nature Center there was so much to do.

This one is of a tunnel/path downtown. Summer and I walked a little bit of it and from what I could tell it ran all through the downtown area.