Day 16: Halloween in Austin

It's hard to get to know a place in the dark. When we arrived in Kerrville last night, it was just after sunset. The town looked just like lots of others that we have already visited. When we woke up this morning, we were virtually on a riverbank. It almost looked tempting enough to dive right in.

We were on the road before midday, having taken some time just to sit in the sun. As today is halloween, we wanted to get to Austin by mid-afternoon to give us time to figure out where the place to be in Austin for halloween is. We drove through San Antonio on the way, and got lost on turnpikes and overpasses once again. We are too reliant on the GPS in those moments, I think. Maybe the better option would be to just figure out what road we want before hand and just look for those signs. The signage has generally been pretty good on the roads so far, so I thinnk it might be fairly safe to trust it.

We arrived in Austin vis South Congress Street. This area, which we would learn is nicknamed SoCo, is lined with antique shops, vintage clothing stores, bars and cafes. It is a nice wide leafy street, filled with people on what was an absolutley beautiful afternoon. We browsed through the shops for a while, finding out along the way that the place to be in Austin is 6^th Street. With that settled, we were off to Walmart to find a costume (this is our first and probably only halloween ever, so might atleast make some kind of effort).

Leaving finding your costume until the last minute at Walmart must be what everyone does. Over the last couple of days, I had noticed that Walmart had huge halloween costume sections, so I figured that we could easily find something on the day. This Walmart had virtually nothing left. Still, the lack of selection meant there was no way we could possibly blow our money on costumes. Always a positive. My costume ended up consisting of a hockey mask and a plastic knife (total: $3), while Alex managed to find some devil horns, a devil t-shirt and a pitchfork (total: $15). Atleast we made some kind of effort.

We drove back into town to the SoCo area, and pulled off into a nice green street. Since this was relatively close to our destination tonight, we decided to base ourselves here. A quick change, and we were on our way into the heart of Austin. We crossed the Colorado River, and walked the six blocks that took us to 6^th street. It was still quite early when we got there, only about 6 o'clock, but the police had already blocked off the street for the giant party that this area would turn into hours later. Having read that there were many very nice restaurants on 6^th, we decided to look for one and have some dinner. The funny thing was, we couldn't find any of them. There only seemed to be burger joints, a couple of Mexican places, and one BBQ house that was absolutley empty. After walking around for what seemed like an hour (and actually was), we decided to go to one of the Mexican places. The food was very delicious, and came very quickly, which was impressive for such a packed restaurant. I ordered a beer and Alex had a Mexican Martini, which was very strong, and she didn't like it, so I had to drink that too, which got the night off to a quick start for me.

After we finished our dinner, we went back out onto the street. Suddenly there were a lot more people, many of them in costume. Some were very elaborate. We spent the rest of the night checking out just about every single one of the bars along 6^th. Some were very nice, with a nice atmosphere, and cheap drinks. I don't remember the names of those places. Some weren't so nice, with very expensive drinks. I don't remember the names of those places either. By the time we headed back to the van, 6^th St was absolutley packed with people. It took us half an hour just to get to the other side.