Texas travels

Texas travels

Well, he put me off in Texas
A state I dearly love
The wide open spaces all around me
The moon and stars up above.
-- Jimmy Rodgers, 1929

There may have been wide open spaces all around me, but I sure didn't see moon or stars. I landed in Austin about midnight Wednesday after a two-hour delay in Cincinnati. The layover was amazing: the plane was full and we were waiting for them to close the door and give us the demonstration on how to insert the metal tab into the metal buckle when the 1st officer came on the PA and said "You may have noticed the Captain just got off the plane. He's been transferred to another flight. The good news is that we have another Captain on his way here. The bad news is that he is still in his driveway and it will be about an hour and a half before he gets here."

Maybe they wanted the new guy because he was a more skilled pilot. It turned out that there was a cold front crashing in on Austin. On landing it felt like our plane was being tossed about like a cork on the ocean. I got in my rental car at about 1am, and the front was giving me a pretty dramatic sound and light show. It started raining about 5 minutes into my drive, and 5 minutes later the street I was on was a river. Texas-sized rain drops above, deep water below! Eventually I drove out of the worst of it. By the time I arrived in Temple (2:30am local time), the temp had dropped probably 30 degrees!

In spite of only about 4 hours of sleep, my meeting went well. I was a little foggy, but I really didn't start to fall asleep spontaneously until I was caught in a traffic jam back in Austin that evening. I made it back to my hotel safely, then crashed and woke up in time to catch a 6am flight out. Alas, no live music in the city that bills itself the live music capital of the world.

Friday morning the sky was starting to clear, and once we got in the air I had a georgeous, full-spectrum sunrise somewhere over Houston. From 30,000' I was surprised by how indistinct the coast line is along East Texas and Louisianna: no sharp edges here. Which is, I guess, part of why the hurricane tidal surge is so dangerous.

I landed back home in Indiana early in the afternoon. While I was gone, Winter had showed up and camped outside my door.

The other big news: I had toast today! (OK, if this is big news, maybe I need to get a life!) Now I'm not as nuts about toast as, say, Heywood Banks, but once in a while it's nice to have. So today I went out and bought my very own toaster oven. Now, if I just had some bagels and cream cheese...