Doing Texas

Last weekend started off pretty normally. Alexander had a soccer game at 9:00am and so I took him there early and then dropped off Fiona for her Dance class with Dena who had just finished her Pilates class. Such is the life of the parents of this latest generation- chauffeurs who cook!

As I approached the field I checked my email only to discover that my boss was out with a medical situation. By the end of the game Alexander had scored two goals and I had decided that I needed to go to Texas and do some stuff.

Sunday afternoon I headed to Austin in time for... well, nothing. Everything was closed apart from the bar next to the hotel where I had couple of pints with the salesman I was initially traveling with. And alas, the bar didn't do any kind of food, not even a bag of nuts.

Monday we headed for Houston- a 3 hour drive. I realized that I've been going backwards and forward to Austin and Dallas now for several years and never actually ventured out into the countryside. From inside the air conditioned car it looks great and a lot like Thetford. Why do I say that? I just wanted to get my plug in for naming somewhere after some random place in England like so many have done before me.

Unfortunately when I came out of my meeting my email told me that Houston had run out of rental cars due to the hurricane and this meant I had to drive back to Austin with the salesman. I had a GPS that did a fair but not perfect job of getting us there. Unfortunately fair wasn't good enough for the salesman who decided to counter my GPS's instructions with those of his Blackberry and so we went round and round Houston until I finally pointed out that driving into the sun made the most sense as Austin was West of Houston. "Aha! Try and explain that to a woman!" was his response. I didn't think I would have any problem explaining that fact to the women I knew and concluded he must know some different ones to me and on we drove.

After another 3 hours we came back to Austin airport where I picked up my own rental car and headed East to College Station.

College Station is a town (which no longer has a functioning railroad station) in the middle of agricultural Texas that exists for the sole purpose of servicing the university there. It's studentville big time and made me feel rather old. The hotel was full of young people studying as if there was nowhere else to go and every restaurant, bar and coffee shop was run by students. After the initial shock, I really enjoyed it, as everyone was happy and upbeat. I just sort of wonder what getting a job somewhere other than College Station feels like after being there for N years? The same could be said of Oxford of Cambridge, but I have to say that my impression of College Station was that it was much more a university town that either of those two cities.

After a very pleasant time at Sweet Eugine's Coffee Shop I had to drive back (another 2 hours) to Austin and saw a lot more cows, horses and oil wells as I drove through the farmland, my GPS deciding to take me down some more country routes than I am sure I came on in the dark. I don't think it is cognizant of the time of day beyond inverting the screen but who knows, maybe it felt I needed to chill out more or maybe I just started out from somewhere other than the center of College Station.

Why do I go on about seeing cows and horses in Texas? Well that's is what you are supposed to see, but I must admit to fearing that that I wouldn't see any because they would shut up in factory farms with no hope of seeing any pasture at all. In California it turns out that a lot of cows, even if they are classified as grass fed don't see grass until the last few days of their lives. They are stuck in sheds for most of their lives and then get into pasture for a short while before they get slaughtered, but that amount of time classifies them as "Grass Fed". Perhaps the cows I saw were on pasture timeshare. I hope not.

Still, you can't go to Texas and not have steak (timeshare or no timeshare) and IMHO you can't go to Austin and not have beer, so on Tues evening I managed to do both, firstly taking in an 18oz ribeye on the bone with blue cheese and garlic topping on a red wine reduction demiglaze (if you are paying that much for it you better remember every nuance!)

After dinner we headed to the Ginger Man which did Austin proud. I counted 87 hand pumped beers and managed to try a total of 5 (one I didn't like and was replaced gratis by the barman with another).

So all in all a most excellent trip, except for getting up at 4:00am California time to fly back after being kept awake most of the night by anxiety attacks caused by whatever hormones the cow was injected with. I really hate that and I guess the cow did too!