Rainy day in Austin, not the best day to experience Ellsworth Kelly’s chapel on the university of Texas campus, next to Blandon Art Museum. It is spectacular when the sun shines through…a docent showed me a photo. Oh well, pretty cool without sun too. This also wasn’t the day to eat at micklethwait craft meats which I didn’t realize is a food truck. But we weren’t going to miss what may have been our best meal of the trip. Superb bbq brisket and pork ribs and delicious sides – beans, slaw, potato salad. Fortunately we found a dry picnic table with a big tarp over it and it wasn’t too cold. We also walked over to a hipster convenience store…name was Pickin’ or some sort and had a killer sandwich list and beer selection and good fancy coffees. The rain let up a little son we Ubered over to South Congress so Dirck could see it. We had fun wandering through Allen boots, even though we aren’t in the market for cowboy boots and we stopped st the Hotel San Jose where I loved staying six years ago and visited its sister hotel nearby, Hotel Cecilia, which looked as cool.
Sad to leave Austin and return to cold snowy Iowa but feel lucky we made it here. P.S. Austin is trying out a new approach to Uber pickups at the airport. The pickup is a line akin to a taxi line, a specially designated ride app pickup area in the garage where the rental cars are, a short walk from the terminal. Worked well. You order an Uber and then stand in a fast moving line and get the next Uber in line, taxi style except an Uber attendant emails your driver enters your pin/reservation number. Beats landing at a chaotic airport arrival area and trying to figure out which car is your Uber.
Tex-Jap sounds bad (unlike Tex-Mex) but Kemuri Tatsu-ya is a restaurant that fuses Texas and Japanese fare. Interesting idea and sort of worked. The restaurant designer must have had fun, mixing good ole boy Texas and Japanese izakaya (informal pub) decor, think cattle skulls and lanterns. Perhaps the most natural mashup we had was well-grilled smoked pork ribs with gochujang hot red chili paste. The corn with crema and chilis tasted almost Cuban. The ramen dipped in a broth with brisket bits was tasty but unwieldy.
East Austin seems to be the place for inventive food by young chefs, maybe because they can afford the rent, although that may be changing with gentrification.
Our friend Art recommended Antone’s, a blues club that turned out to be a block from the Hilton (where we have a great view from the 17th floor). Antones was sold out Sunday but almost empty Monday with no cover and we lucked out with the Brad Stivers band. Brad plays a mean guitar– rockabilly and blues — and sings well too. Realized he’s my son Noah’s age. Only 28. We hoped to see his drummer Lindsay Beaver’s band Tuesday but Brad filled in for her. Bigger crowd. Lindsey is booked at the Des Moines Marriott downtown on feb 15 so maybe we will catch her there. Didn’t know the Marriott has live music. Turns out it’s the annual Des Moines bluesfest!
I rode all day on a bike around Austin’s Lady Bird Lake before noticing the name of the bike I’d rented was the same as my grandson’s (aka Linus). Fitting end to a fantastic day. Coming from subzero Iowa, Austin was glorious — in the 60s, flawless blue skies, breeze. I may have gotten a sunburn. I’ll take it.
The trail system along the narrow Lady Bird Lake and on passageways between huge skyscrapers downtown is impressive and I felt safe sharing the trail/bike lane with pedestrians, scooters and cars. My rental from Austin Bike rental and tours got off to a rocky start when I walked past the place three times before realizing it located in a metal storage container plopped down in a food truck court in a small pocket of undeveloped surrounded by glass high rises. (How very Austin.) And the container was locked. eventually some nice girls arrived and I was on my way with a very comfortable and sturdy 7 speed “Linus” bike, a helmet, lock and pack to carry stuff.NASHVILLE — The novelist Ann Patchett, who lives in this city, has said that she brings out-of-town visitors to two places: the Parthenon, the replica of the ancient Greek structure in Centennial Park, and United Apparel Liquidators, or U.A.L. as devotees know it. Both are temples of a sort.
The small clothing chain has three stores in the Nashville area. The flagship is also in the city, in a strip mall of no distinction, half-hidden between a nail salon and a Chinese takeout place. Ms. Patchett took the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert, shopping there one day last year, and during a literary talk that night, they dished about the Christian Dior flats that Ms. Gilbert purchased.
“They were so beautiful,” Ms. Gilbert told the audience, “I was licking them in the store.”
Better still, Ms. Patchett noted, the designer shoes were “10 percent of what they had once cost.”
Technically, U.A.L. belongs to the booming retail category known as off-price. But where discounters like Nordstrom Rack and T. J. Maxx have a bargain-basement atmosphere and leftover-seeming merchandise, U.A.L. feels like a designer boutique. Imagine walking into Jeffrey in New York or Fred Segal in Los Angeles and discovering it’s having an everything-must-go fire sale.
TakeBetsywithyou 