Jananas

From Mexico & El Paso, the drive through Texas was long. As in looooong. I still think that one of my favorite views was driving past a small oil field and seeing a wind farm in the background. Bad news was that a semi kicked up a rock which hit the windshield.

We arrived in Austin sorta late the first evening. We were lucky that Jason’s aunt was letting us crash at her place, so shortly after we arrived we went out for dinner (real food, not road food) to thank her. First though, we got cleaned up She took us to Mother’s Cafe & Garden, where we had good healthy food. We had initially planned on meeting up with our friend Emrys later that evening, but ended up being too tired to feel up to it. Driving will do that to you.

The next morning we got up and puttered around for a bit (including getting to do a load of laundry, which was awesome). Jason had been craving some south Indian food. We found Madras Pavilion online. On our way there, we took a wrong turn. Thankfully, it took us past Hey Cupcake, so I got to indulge my sweet tooth – before lunch even. We also spent some time talking to their awesome staff. They also had vegan cupcakes so Jason was pretty stoked. From there, we went over to Madras and stuffed ourselves on dosa and veggie buffet goodness. Somewhere in there, we also stopped by the Bell of Lost Souls‘ real life store (Battleforge Games) so that Jason could indulge his inner gamer.

We headed downtown to meet up with Emrys at the shop he’s working at. He didn’t get off work until 5pm, so we headed down to 6th street to wander around the downtown area of Austin. We found parking and started wandering the main strip. We stopped into the Museum of the Weird, which was a blast. We both agreed that being a taxidemist must have been awesome in the heyday of sideshows. Hey, I’ll just take these two animals and stitch ‘em together, and presto a Jackalope!

On our walk, we stopped by pretty much every tattoo/piercing shop on the way as we’re both shop nerds. One of the strangest things was that all the tattoo parlours were open air, i.e that everyone can see you while you’re getting tattooed. Not something that I’m comfortable with at all! Interestingly though, was that there were at least three shops with awesome & diverse jewelry selection (high quality to boot!), which is something that we don’t see in Toronto. We ran into our friend Rick at his shop Industrial Primitives, and he changed out my medusa jewelry for me so that the post was a better/shorter length.

When Emyrs was off work that evening, we dropped by his apartment and chilled for a bit. His puppy Nora is super cute! Before dropping his lady friend off at work, we dropped by Toy Joy so that they could all grab vegan soft serve. We had a blast walking around the toy store and laughing at all the ridiculous stuff. The kids all grabbed peanut butter soft serve. I had a lavendar lemonade, as I’m not a fan of soft serve in general.

He hadn’t seen the bats at the Congress Bridge and I wanted to go, so we dragged him along. Sadly, I forgot to check what time sunset was that day, so we made it down to the bridge like an hour earlier than we needed to be but we had fun hanging out and catching up anyway. My camera stopped working (Jason managed to fix it that evening), so I don’t have any pictures of the bats when they finally came out. But man, it was amazing! We all agreed that it looked like smoke floating off into the distance and were amazed that it just kept going. After we watched the bats for a while, we decided to head out.

Unfortunately, it was already 9pm so most vegan dinner places were closed. We ended up at Kerby Lane Cafe for dinner, as they have vegan options. We all ended up getting breakfast for dinner, because that’s really what you do ad diners. Sadly, my dinner wasn’t great but I still enjoyed being there. After dinner, we headed back to Jason’s aunt’s place for the evening.

I think that’s long enough for one entry, so the rest of our Austin visit will be covered in the next entry.

More from jananas

• The Dilemmas of Working
• Introducing Lila, the dog we found at the side of the road
• Homemade Strawberry Jam