Although Texas has been suffering from the worst drought in
its history, our first few days in the Lone Star State could not have been
wetter.
After leaving Cajun country, we entered the state of Texas,
with Houston as our first stop. Our plan was to take another stab at
couchsurfing. This time, the suspect was Josue, a thirty-something Mexican-American
with two kids, who one couchsurfer dubbed “the couchsurfing king of Houston.”
Grateful to be staying with the couchsurfing king of Houston, we were willing
to bide our time until 9 pm, when he would be returning with the kids from
soccer practice.
The only problem was that it was pouring rain. We took a
brief walking tour of historic Houston, but after deciding that we were too wet
and Houston wasn’t interesting enough, we moved on to a cafĂ©, where we waited
out the rest of the day. There were unfortunately no awake kids to play with by
the time we finally got to Josue’s, but he turned out to be extremely nice and
welcoming as he gave us not simply a couch, but an entire room.
Me in Allen's Landing Park in Houston. As you can see, it wasn't very exciting. |
The next day was a bit of a doozy. Although we planned to
spend at least three days in Austin, we discovered that our timing was not so
fortuitous as the upcoming weekend was South by Southwest (SXSW), one of the
largest music/film festivals in North America. Desperate to find a place to
stay, we tried our hand at a new informal sleeping arrangement for travelers
called airbnb. It’s kind of like couchsurfing, except that you pay the person
to stay at their house instead of staying there for free.
After arriving at Mo’s, our airbnb host in Austin (we took a
short interlude at the Lyndon Baines Johnson library and museum right outside
the city), we determined that a much-needed catnap was preferable to venturing
into the pouring rain once again.
But as we were forced to whittle our stay in Austin down to
one night—it was utterly impossible to find a place to stay over the weekend
(even America’s Best Value Inn was charging 200$ a night!!) —we determined that
we wouldn’t let the rain bog us down. We were going to go out and that was the
end of it.
At first, we ventured onto 6th street, the more
commercial downtown thoroughfare, known for its many live music venues. But
after facing too many college students in proper nightlife attire, we
determined that we needed a greater incentive to fight off the rain and our
increasing exhaustion.
And find it we did at the Broken Spoke, a good ol’ Texas
Honky-tonk, recommended to us by our hostess. Suddenly, we entered a room with cheap beer,
an awesome country-western band, and several couples two-stepping along the
dance floor. Far from the world of college kids who looked like they could have
been from anywhere, we found ourselves amid veritable cowboys—hats, belts,
and all. (I took an awesome video of this event, but unfortunately, the internet is not allowing me to upload it, so I'll have to resort to a youtube clip of a different band playing at the Broken Spoke.)
Riding the high of the Broken Spoke, the next morning we decided that we would continue to do Austin as best as we could, despite the
continual downpour. We began at the Alamo Drafthouse, an ingenious movie house that
offers wait service in the theatre. In lieu of having no other choices, we
ended up seeing The Artist, which may
have recently won an Oscar, but I found to be so-so. The novelty really lay in the eating of a large salad served to me in the theater.
That night, we booked it, in the rain of course, to any
motel we could find in San Antonio—our next destination. We fell upon the Sands
Motel, which seemed to fit our general criteria of cheap and dingy just fine.
But we didn’t know just how cheap and dingy it was until the
next morning. About forty minutes after arriving in downtown San Antonio, Ricky
realized that he didn’t have his wallet. Full disclosure to the reader: Ricky
is a chronic forgetter and loser-of-things, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to
make of his assertion.
He said that he was sure he left in his jacket, which was
still hanging in the motel room closet.
When we got back to the motel, we went promptly to the hotel
manager, a soft-spoken Indian man (the actual kind), and asked him if we could go back into the
hotel room to look for the jacket. He told us that the room had been cleaned
already, so we would have to ask Angie, the hotel maid. As Ricky approached
Angie, a heavy-set Native American woman, I went back to the car to furiously
check for the wallet in the hopes that we would not have to face what seemed
liked the inevitable.
“Angie said that she found the jacket, but there was no
wallet in it,” Ricky quickly told me. We looked at each other knowingly: it was
the maid. But how do we get her to confess? Ricky found the only route to do
so; by telling her that we were going to have to call the police if she didn’t “find”
it. She promptly said that she would keep “looking.” Meanwhile, the hotel
manager was begging us not to take any action, since it would reflect poorly on
his hotel. And all the while, my cultural studies background was giving me a
difficult time of making sense of this situation. A white guy asking for his
wallet. A recent immigrant begging him not to compromise his business. And a
native woman who, likely not of an enviable monetary situation, took it.
But regardless of whose fault it was—Ricky’s for leaving the
wallet, the maid’s for stealing it, or the manager’s for looking the other
way—the future of our trip was hanging on the retrieval of that wallet, which
contained a lot of cash, credit cards, and his driver’s license. A few heart-thumping minutes later, Angie
emerged from the storeroom suddenly victorious in her search.
A bit frazzled, we finally returned to the downtown area in
the hardest rain yet, where we walked the San Antonio River Walk, visited The Alamo, and saw some of the surviving missions,
where Spanish settlers attempted to convert the native population.
Me on the River Walk. |
Ricky in front of The Alamo. |
While I knew about Texas and its complicated legacy of
the Wild West, East Texas, particularly in the pouring rain, failed to bring the state’s unique story to life. But on that drive from San Antonio to the
Amistad Recreation Area—where we would be camping that night en route to Big
Bend National Park—I suddenly noticed a horizontal line in the sky where the
dark clouds ended and the clear sky began. .
The line in the sky dividing the rain from the sun. |
Our drive into the Amistad National Recreation Area. |
Last week’s adventures
in Amistad and Big Bend did not provide us with any internet access, so next up,
Ricky will debrief our adventures in the South Texan desert.
Clearly Brahna needs to be the CFO for this adventure!
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