Austin, The Alternative Capital

To arrive in Austin by road requires you to drive through the world outside, a ring of fields and farms, suburban strip malls, and small town America. Austin is the capital city of the state that may be opening the road to the repeal of Roe versus Wade, a law change that has the news people all aquiver. On the ground such esoterica matter not that much when planning a visit to a city renowned for its food and music qualities. Austin is where we wanted to eat barbecue, listen to live music and perhaps even sit outdoors and drink local beer. Decadence personified. 

There is that by now well known aphorism to Keep Austin Weird, which to my mind if you have to consciously keep a place weird it's too late. However Austin does try to stay weird. The guy in the park plying the xylophone while wearing a "yachtsman's cap" may qualify. Earlier I saw him trying to comfort a homeless woman curled up in a ball sobbing hopelessly, the sort of homeless drama that caused tourists to breathlessly call 911 in Key West and we dutifully sent officers to calm down the usual suspects. By the time we had parked the van and paid three bucks for 90 minutes all was once again serene. When Layne took Rusty for a walk she saw dozens of elaborate shelters in the far reaches of the park.

One has to be aware of people in glass houses not throwing stones, but even from the perspective of a voluntary houseless van dweller it seems a bit much to turn a park into a camp. Is that part of Austin's charm or not ? I have no idea. Qw ate our lunch and moved on. There are many homeless in Austin, not the level notorious in San Francisco but I was reminded of the bad old days of tents lining South Roosevelt Boulevard one year in Key West.

A middle aged black guy driving an elderly Cadillac with chariot wheels worthy of Queen Boadicea, well that to my mind is weird. I've had enough flat tires lately not to want to put his rotating scythes to the test but there he was, stereo thumping a deep bass, as he spun his way down the highway, him and his sticky-outy hubcaps.. Decidedly weird.

One very normal facet of life in every modern urban agglomeration is heaps of traffic. Austin has tons of that and parking is at a premium and the city has all the usual joys of a modern cultured interesting city with expensive housing and too many would-be residents. It also has that music and food thing going on. I got in line.

I was the only masked person in the building but I was probably the only person in the building who has ever been ventilated so let us let them learn that pleasure on their own. Texas has given up on masks but the freedom to choose to wear one isn't a one way street.

I saw the sign above telling impatient customers not to help themselves and apparently the screen wasn't enough. The sign is old and curling so I expect manners haven't improved over time. The customer in front of me, a tall white man around 35 years of age maybe, turned abruptly and said: "You want me to step closer to them?" pointing to the line ahead of him. "I'm not going to."And with tat moment of defiance he turned his back on me. I pondered for a moment and said: "I was laughing at the sign," and I pointed to it. He looked at the signing looked at me and then said: "I don't meant o eb rude," and turned around again. Don't ask me to explain what was going through his unmasked head. I'm retired I wanted to say and no one's paying me to be your therapist. I simply waited my turn.

The line moved rapidly and efficiently. Mac-and-cheese to go one pint, creamed corn one pint, half a pound of brisket. Anything else? no job done. 

The place was packed and they don't take online reservations before one pm for some reason and they don't do curbside or anything remotely modern. The system has obviously been honed over the years since their opening in 2014 and it works just fine. They will even deliver to you across the country. 

There are two Blacks BBQ restaurants in Austin, one on Guadaupe Street near the University which calls itself proudly "The Original" and this one downtown by the river. Apparently it was family dispute between the Uncle who owns the very first restaurant in the town of Lockhart and forced his nephews who wanted to open a Blacks BBQ in Austin to change the name of theirs so they named it after their father Terry. Then the Lockhart Uncle decided to take them on and opened his place on Guadalupe Street. It reminded me of the period when there were two Sandy's Cuban Cafés on White Street in Key West.  Read the Black saga HERE.

We were busy unloading the loot I brought back to Butler Metro Park when a woman appeared on the doorway asking if we knew whether the Dougherty Arts center next door was open. We admitted our outsider status, houseless van dwellers in a permanent population of the park's unhoused. She was fascinated by us living happily in or tiny space and admitted she wanted to get her husband interested. He's an engineer so my suggestion was to get him worked up about designing the systems he wanted. Engineers over think things by their nature and giving them a problem to solve hooks them usually. At least it did among the sailing community its we used to navigate amongst. Candace, a native of San Diego, was shyly enthusiastic about her home of five years and you can see why. She is an oil painter by inclination and you can see her work on Instagram @livelyvibesdesigns.

We talked for a good long while about her life, her husband the immigrant, her career choices (I advised working for county or local government of course being pensioned myself) as well as life in Austin, an increasingly expensive town. For young people she said, and for us too I said thinking about the gentrification of the Keys. Her enthusiasm and appreciation for life put Austin in the plus column for us. And then there are local pastries.

We had read about kolaches after a reader turned us on to them and Layne discovered a bakery producing only kolaches next to a five star rated laundry. Life on the road requires work of the more mundane sort and we hadn't done laundry since Pensacola at Therèse's place. So we live like students once again...at the laundromat!

It does help to have your van parked outside so you can set your alarm and go take a nap in your own bed. I enjoy not taking responsibility for the machinery, like taking showers at truck stops and not having to worry about clean up and making sure the plumbing is working. Use it and leave it. Lovely.

We rounded out our day in Austin by shopping at Trader Joe's and having a German Lager at the Austin Beer Garden Brewery -ABGB. The beer was actually quite good and at 4.5% not at all harsh for my delicate palate. The music was pleasant but a bit distant for those of us sitting outside in an 80 degree evening. For the night we chose a scenic overlook 15 minutes outside the city on Highway 360. It was not the best possible choice. At three in the morning a group of lost souls showed up paling loud music followed rapidly by some desperate character playing a thumping loud bass for an hour. Layne put in her ear buds, Rusty snored and I read. The wind of the arriving cold front picked up and the frustrated youth packed up and left.

To spenda. day in Austin leaves you wanting more and after the plague finally abates we will return as there is much more to see and do. There is a reportedly rather splendid park called Emma Long with RV parking at reasonable cost but with a website that defies being able to make a reservation. In my head we will spend a few nights there and spend our days giving Austin the attention it deserves.

Next up: Kerrville and the Museum of Western Art and some thoughts on the Hill Country. Oh and a harvest host selling cider among the vineyards.

Texas Oil Man

This log entry finds me near Pflugerville, east of Austin, on an overcast warm humid morning. We are told the weekend will see strong winds, rain and cold temperatures ushering in a strong cold front. It won't be that cold we tell ourselves looking at forecasts down to 35 degrees at night. We are used to it. We shall see.  

Our journey to the capital of Texas took  us across the state by Highway 79 and Highway 54 mostly, a rolling flatland of farms, hedges, trees still dropping leaves and trucks, lots of big fast trucks. There were scenes of stark poverty, moldy trailers going green, some under tarps, inhabited because the family car was parked next door.

As always Gannet 2 stuck to the program and we kept rolling at 65mph and some gas mileage between 16 and 18 mpg. Layne uses gas buddy, a discount card to find cheap gas and we filled up in Shreveport at $2:64 a gallon and later in Lufkin we found gas at $2:79 and filled half a tank. Most gas stations advertise at $3:30 or more which I think will seem inexpensive compared to what awaits us in Mexico and California. 

Layne also got the Libby app which allows us to borrow library books at a nominal charge and we have been listening to a detective novel set in New Orleans in 1984 in the noir style of Dashiell Hammet and delightfully set in its period with much discussion of the civil wars in Central America and not a cellphone in sight.

It is a serene and untroubled existence and makes me think we might be good candidates for a journey to Mars, suspended in time and space away from the daily annoyances of workplace and news space and people "vexatious to the spirit" as the Desiderata poem much circulated in my youth used to have it.

We did manage to find a rural traffic jam after we stopped at the Target in Pflugerville. There we picked up some shopping brought to us in the parking lot, Covid style by an eager youth. Then we drove to the country to find our camp for the night, and the tiny road through the fields was blocked. I was ready to sit in traffic and drink a cup of tea but the locals were making u-turns and fleeing the scene. I found a pull out, turned the van and we made our own detour. Thank you Google. It was a path of much rumbling and shaking and some truly weird death defying cambers on the back roads but we ambled through the afternoon sunlight, detective Dave Robichaux in New Orleans silenced in his pursuit of ex-contras killing people. We had to concentrate to find our way through these back roads.

Dell's Favorite Texas Olive Oil was our destination, a Harvest Host. These are small businesses across North America (I mean to include Canada) that invite RVs to spend one night, no hook ups expected, no facilities and all for free. In return one learns about the business and you buy a product to support them. A brilliant program offered obviously though an app and never a misfire. We call ahead maybe a day or so and see if they have an opening and then show up and get a tour. We have a cider and a desert tour planned for next week.

Frank told us his story of transformation from Executive Chef to Oil Man. He spent 43 years working at Hyatt convention hotel kitchens and his wife insisted they figure out a new path for him in retirement as he, unlike me, would go mad with no obligations and nothing to do.

They had friends living east of Pflugerville in Elgin more precisely, and the friends knew of 30 acres for sale nearby. Their home in Houston sold unexpectedly fast so they, their horses cats and dogs all decamped to their new field and lived in an RV while they sorted out the retirement plan. Balls of steel in my opinion.

It turns out there are 260,000 olive trees in Texas and Frank's is one of the smaller ones at 1250 plants. They had a massive unexpected frost this February which killed off a lot of their trees and they had to order a whole lot more from California. There trees come as little twigs and two years later are producing oil which I find amazing. The oil is light and buttery and quite deliciously smooth. Frank has found his calling.

It was a carefully planned transformation to turn a chef into a farmer but as Frank sees it being a chef was hard work yet a lot easier than farming. You can't argue with nature and stuff happens that a chef can manage but a farmer can't. A chef switches suppliers if a product isn't available, a farmer watches drought or frost destroy a crop. He seems to thrive on the challenge and after living in 14 different cities during his career and cooking all over the world an olive oil orchard near Austin seems to suit him fine. His wife says they have built the home she will die in.

Traveling like this doesn't inspire me to want to go back to a farming life, but it does allow me to enjoy the ways others have found a bizarre and perhaps unexpected calling to fulfill. For some of these Harvest Hosts they have finally allowed themselves to do what they always wanted, while others like Frank stumbled on an unexpected new life.

He isn't alone as there are others around him growing olives and one of his neighbors wanted to control her own oil press so she bought one in Italy and got an Italian expert a visa to come to Pflugerville and press her olives for her and her neighbors. This is a whole sub culture developing here and I doubt any of the oilmen, tourists, students and native born people flooding the state capital nearby have a clue.

Frank deals with drought by pumping a couple of wells and storing water, and in dry years he has to order water by the truck load. It's not an easy life but the pair of them made the effort to tour Europe and tasted oils in Greece Spain Italy France and so forth and settled on two Spanish olives they wanted to grow in this new hard life. They found an advisor at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical university to guide them and they hire volunteers to come and pick olives each September. And they have their own harvest festival.

My family grows olives among other crops in Umbria in central Italy and my nephews have installed their own very modern olive press to make and sell their own oil. I fled that life 40 years ago and have no regrets though obviously it suit s a lot of people beside myself. I enjoy seeing people enjoy it.

In the 1960s and 70s I recall olives being picked much later, in December and January when frost was on the ground and olives were picked by hand. The pickers we hired carried A shaped ladders, pointed at the top so they would fit snugly among the branches of the olive trees which were much taller than these Texas bushes. The women would pick the olives and throw them in a basket they carried on their arm. One olive by one olive. Frank also picks his olives by hand but puts them through a sifter to remove leaves and debris.

The olive press of my childhood memories was a giant machine with two stone wheels powered by a motor that turned the big wheels of stone around and around forcing the oil out of the fruit. The olive press worked day and night for weeks, a huge series of rooms warmed by a wood stove and when I, he boss's son, visited they would cut me a slice of bread and toasted it on the stove. Then they would take the lightly charred bread and  drip freshly pressed oil on it, rub it with a ripe tomato so the flesh and seeds stuck on the oiled bread and finally they sprinkled big chunks of salt and handed it to me. In my later years this peasant snack has become a prized appetizer called bruschetta ("broo-sket-ta" with a hard K sound) in Italian restaurants.

Dell's Favorite is famous among Harvest Host reviewers for the quality of the bread you can buy to dip the oil in but Frank's supplier is  sick with Covid so supplies are cut off and one is left wondering why a small business would risk it's money flow for want of a free vaccine. We shall have to buy bread elsewhere and there are numerous German bakeries around Austin fortunately.

Harvest Host is a quiet and unusual place to spend a night, plus Layne has her Christmas gifts, so instead of paying to sleep among a crowd of RVs we slept among the olives and I have to say I was exhausted by 8:30 and passed out. Just discussing the job of making oil in Texas wore me out.

Rusty was free to roam but he hopped into the van as the sun went down and watched the world outside while we had dinner. 

Next up Austin where we believe we have found a suitable outdoor venue for music and perhaps a glass of beer. The German settler influence is felt strongly here.

Into Texas

It felt odd to find ourselves suddenly sliding into the world of strip malls, national box stores and familiar brands brightly illuminated by the afternoon sun in primary colors. Shreveport Louisiana was illuminated by neon. It felt as though we had spent half a lifetime in the back roads and small towns of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana so to suddenly come upon Panera and Best Buy and bright red fast food signs was a jolt. I know I'm not supposed to, because we all prefer regional variety etc... but I was quite happy to feel like I was back in a familiar corporate world. We did our shopping, vegetables at Whole Foods and other stuff at Target and me wandering Lowe's looking for my cheater bar to change my own wheels in the future... Soon enough we were on our way with a tank full of gas at $2.64 a gallon and expectations of an easy park for the night 45 minutes away.

Highway 79 departs Shreveport in a southwest direction aiming at Austin, the capital of Texas, about eight hours away, coincidentally our approximate target. It's a mixture of two lanes with some four lanes and all of it covered by racing eighteen wheeler trucks that would just as soon run you down as pass you. The speed limit is 70 miles per hour so my choice was go 60 and save gas or go 75 and save my life. As you can see above we arrived safely at the picnic area. 

Rusty liked it as empty as it was. We shared the night with two 18 wheelers whose drivers we never saw, nor did I go looking for them. In the morning with 45 degrees outside none of the three of us snug aboard Gannet 2 wanted to get up, not even Rusty who was curled up alongside my legs snoring happily. I had a plan so I got Rusty outside and we went for a stroll in the picnic area. A few pick ups came and went, one guy walked into the bushes presumably either to go bird watching or to relieve himself discreetly, I wasn't sure as I didn't watch too closely. There was a van across the way and as we walked inexorably closer the driver got out and lumbered toward me. "Can you give me a jump?" he mumbled shyly. What could I say? Bugger gave me a hand when I needed it and as a general rule I'm happy to help anyone out. This guy was huge, and taller than me, dressed comfortably, as it were, and my wife was still snugly in bed back at Gannet 2. I was sure she was ready to greet the day by saying Hi to a shambling stranger first thing. "Sure," I said and went to get my machine. Layne was surprisingly calm and stayed right where she was as her idiot husband shuffled around saving strangers.

I turned Gannet 2 round in a tight three point turn and we set to the business of getting him going. His name was Randy and he lived "about five miles away down by the Sabine." I looked puzzled because he said that as though everyone knew that the Sabine River flowed here. I had heard of the river: actually I'd anchored in Sabine Lake near Port Arthur thirty years ago so I wasn't doubting him. The day before I had simply been following Google's blue line so I had no idea the river was nearby. He told me he was 18 and was a licensed driver  for just the past six weeks. His mom wouldn't let him drive her van and he had to use the old beater as she insisted it was "character forming," as he put it ruefully. At least you aren't in a VW van I said, thinking back to those many long hours I had spent. stuck by the road. I'm not sure he'd ever heard of hippie Volkswagen vans of notorious unreliability so my allusion to my lost youth went right over his head. VWs are cult objects now but I much prefer my Promaster thanks. 

We waited for his battery, which looked brand new, to take a charge off Gannet 2 and he petted Rusty and told me about his rescue pup of uncertain breed that is scared of everything. His step father came into the picture as Randy now wished out loud stepdad had chosen to go to the post office to pick up the mail instead of sending Randy into this uncertain fate. He called his Mom on my phone (his own was discharged naturally) and told her he wanted to come home as the tow truck had said if he left the keys they would deal with the van. It had become obvious to both of us his old Chevy wasn't going to start. He cranked it and the engine turned over but refused to show any sign of firing at all. I told Layne, still in bed, we had a passenger and off we went.

We drove down Highway 79 dodging trucks -"They don't give a shit" my passenger agreed with my assessment of the danger level driving the highway but said his mother took him on a road trip to Houston the day after he passed his driving test and made him drive. How was that I asked, appalled..."A bit rough" he admitted with stoic understatement. Dude I said, I've been driving forty years and these people scare the pants off me. I nearly dropped the van into the ditch as I made another u-turn on the narrow lane in front of his home. Randy pointed to a white structure surrounded by weeds and not much else, "A nice fixer upper," he said wryly. I said nothing about the rainbow flag in a window figuring it wasn't his stepfather or his dog that were flying it. He shambled off and disappeared. In my head I wished him well but wondered about his prospects.

We pressed on with a choice ahead of us. The weather wasn't promising great heat but the rain had apparently passed on south of us. I suggested we stop in just half an hour at Lake Murvaul in a park flagged on the iOverlander app.

The approach road was a bit torn up as advertised and  of facilities there were none except picnic tables and trash cans. We had previously emptied our portapotty in a pit toilet at a nearby boat ramp so we were set for a couple of days of no driving. And we had this place to ourselves! Free, gratis and for nothing. There weren't even any rules posted so we applied the universal rule of common sense. There wasn't even much trash outside the cans. 

As you can imagine Rusty loved it. We walked together for a while and he sat around and watched the birds in the air, the boats on the lake and the sound of the breezes rattling the leaves. 

He gave me a big kiss before we set off for a circuit in the afternoon so I know he really liked this place, as that is how he shows joy. 

Yesterday started out overcast and breezy and cool but we decided it was time Gannet 2 got a proper clean so we declared it a make-and-mend day in the tradition of the Royal Navy and we spent the middle of the day scrubbing and brushing removing dog hairs from every conceivable orifice. We planted the portapotty in the light of day and scrubbed the shower compartment and the mats and so forth. It felt really good.

Layne checked her supplies and discovered Rusty is living high on the hog so we need more food for him. He is adapting to van life even though travel motion itself doesn't seem to agree with him. He loved the freedom of Rosie Jones Park.

Mind you it doesn't take more than two hours to do the deepest clean on 70 square feet. A brush, a vacuum cleaner and some spritzing and rubbing and it's done.

Rusty kept watch for us.

Layne has lined up a couple of harvest hosts, olive oil and cider related  around Austin with the possibility of checking out some barbecue to go. I like Austin from previous visits  but we are still being cautious about indoor dining and being around music crowds so our route is mostly rural for this part of the journey. Personally I'm looking forward to seeing Rusty's reaction to the deserts of the southwest. I'm betting he'll like the open spaces. For now there is no hurry, we're retired.

Induction cooking underway at 60 amps with burritos for dinner I'm told. Happily our batteries hold ten times that and after all the driving we are fully charged. 

I really like van life.