Hellweek, Austin, SXSW, and more

On Wednesday, Marjie, Lieselot, Angie and I had decided to take a "recovery day" and go to Austin. However, our "recovery" ride still consisted of riding for an hour and 20 minutes in cool temperatures and wind, so Lieselot recovered, but Angie and I still felt like we got a normal day of riding in. Marjie went for a run instead of riding. We headed to Austin without a plan, except that Angie and I needed to pick up a rental car. And we wanted a good cup of coffee. We ended up walking around downtown on Congress street, and couldn't find a coffee shop besides Starbucks...which was very annoying. Apparently I'm a bigger coffee snob than I thought...Texans don't know how to make espresso drinks, even at Starbucks. The best latte I've had on this trip was at Dunkin Donuts in Oklahoma City. And I couldn't believe the lack of coffee shops in Austin, but I digress.

We stopped at a visitor's center for some information. The man there didn't have many suggestions, besides the capitol building, the museum, and the Whole Foods (which is apparently the corporate headquarters or something like that, so it's huge...but we have a Whole Paycheck at home, and we didn't go to Austin to go to the grocery store). Lieselot asked the man "Is there any Lance Armstrong stuff here?" At the very least, she was hoping to see a statue or a sign that said "Home Of Lance Armstrong". The man told us that the Lance Armstrong Foundation was based there, but he didn't even know where it was.

We ended up only having time to walk through the state capitol building and go to a shop at a the museum so Lieselot could buy a Texas t-shirt. Lieselot won't have a chance to make it to New York while she's in the U.S., so we seized the opportunity to take a picture of her with the mini-statue of liberty.

And we couldn't resist taking a photo of the former governor, and we tried not to snicker while doing so, because you don't want to piss off a proud Texan.

Marjie and Lieselot then dropped Angie and me off at the rental car place, then they proceeded to Chipotle for dinner. I gave my old friend Worm a call, and he suggested Angie and I go to the "Soco" part of town to check out a bunch of eclectic shops and restaurants that "chicks dig". Due to the South by Southwest (SXSW) film/music festival, there were a lot of people in Austin. We walked through a few shops, then stopped for a snack at a wine bar, and Worm ended up getting off work early and meeting us there. He then took us to a quaint little restaurant off the beaten path. We had dinner, then went downtown to meet up with a few other friends of his - Jamie (who lives in St. Paul now and flew in for SXSW, but also grew up in Roch and went to Iowa State), Tim (a friend of Jamie's from the Twin Cities too), and Chad, a friend of Worm's that I know who also went to Iowa State.

Angie and I had agreed that we needed to leave Austin by 8:30 if we wanted to get back to Fredericksburg by 10 pm so that we could get enough sleep to ride the next day. But we were having a good time in Austin, and it was difficult to leave early. Then we went to this bar where Beth Orten was going to be playing at 11 pm. Angie and I are both fans of Beth Orten and have some of her music, so we decided to try to get in to hear her play. The problem was that we didn't have the SXSW wristband - people pay about $150 for a wristband to get into all of the concerts all week. If you don't have a wristband, you can wait in line and pay a cover to get in IF the venue doesn't fill up - people with wristbands get priority. So while we were waiting in a line that wasn't moving, Worm realized that the staff member working the door to the bar was a co-worker of his...so he went to chat with her, and she basically pulled us out of line and let us in, FREE (I'm sure there were some pissed off people in line). She also informed us that they were not going to be letting any non-wristbanders in that night. So needless to say, we were lucky. Beth Orten was good, and by the time she was done playing, it was 12:30. My friends were trying to get us to stay, but we really needed to get back. So we headed off for Fredericksburg, and it was a strange trip home. Once we got about 20 minutes out of Austin, we noticed that the roads were desolate (i.e. no traffic), except for the million deer wandering around. Long story short, I ended up driving about 45-50 mph and we spent the entire drive scanning the ditches for deer because we knew our little Toyota Corolla wouldn't fare well in a tangle with a deer. It was a stressful drive, and we figure we saw about 50 deer, and we didn't roll into Fredericksburg until about 2:30 am.

When the alarm went off at 7:15 the next morning, Lieselot was the only one that got up. Angie and I slept in, and eventually just decided to take the day from riding which ended up being a really good thing - she's been fighting a chest cold all week, and I needed a day off for my body to recover. The unfortunate part was that it turned out to be one of the nicest days for riding all week. We went and got coffee and had a nice lunch, then walked around downtown with the rest of the tourists (Fredericksburg is a full-blown tourist town, although I can't quite figure out why). That night, we all went out for dinner (and pitchers of Sangria).

The Hellweekers (and some random guy)














If you want to see some actual pictures taken during riding, you'll have to check out Nate's pictures since I haven't been taking my camera with me on the rides.