On the road again: Austin, day 4

Today the weather in Dallas messed up my return. I woke early to find a voicemail message from American Airlines informing me that tomorrow, Friday, I would indeed be flying to DFW as planned, but I would not get to continue to Raleigh until Sunday. This fine plan would strand me for two days in a city wracked by tornados, a city with no hotel rooms.

I think not.

Much work by Gina later and thanks to Rana for noticing a flight option, I am now headed home tomorrow on Southwest via Nashville. I have to get up at oh-dark-thirty, and I will probably have a crappy seat, but at least I should get home.

After many meetings, dinner was at the reliably tasty Lambert's Downtown Barbecue. Lambert's doesn't cook only over wood, but the meat is still very good, and everything else on the menu is quite good. Dessert was, of course, at Amy's.

In not many hours, I must get up and start a long day of travel, so to packing and writing I return.

On the road again: Austin, day 4

I'm kinda bored with myself on these Austin reports, because I can't discuss any of my business meetings, and they consume most of the day.

What I can discuss are the restaurants I visited.

Rudy's was our lunch destination, and a very fun meal it was indeed. They serve the food in a plastic basket on sheets of paper, and your plates are just more sheets of paper. Three of us shared turkey, jalapeno sausage, and brisket, as well as a few sides, and it was all yummy.

Dinner was at a very different sort of barbecue place, Lambert's. Lambert's blends traditional BBQ and gourmet recipes into a delightful set of offerings. We had a lovely dinner that included some excellent three-cheese macaroni and cheese, brisket, lamb chops, and very, very slowly smoked trout (they smoked it for about 28 hours).

We left there and headed over to a nearby Amy's for dessert. I've written about Amy's before and very much like the place. The ice cream there is, of course, wonderful, but I also love it for the atmosphere. To give you an idea of why I like it so much, I took this photo of the sign over the tip jar:


I left a three-buck tip on a thirteen-dollar order because, hey, I'd like those robots, too.

On the road again: Austin, day 3

Today's far from over, but I thought I'd take a break and write this entry early. I definitely ate too much today, in large part because a client friend suggested we eat lunch at Chuy's. Now, as you can tell from the site, Chuy's is a local chain that's spread to a few Texas cities, but despite that status (or maybe as the reason for that success) it combined a fun and funky atmosphere I instantly liked with some fine TexMex food I quite enjoyed. The chips were light and hot and fresh, and the queso was thick and spicy and wonderful. I should have eaten a quarter of what I did, but when the conversation turns good and the chips keep coming, a lot of food just vanishes.

Despite that over-indulgence, we had reservations tonight at Lambert's, so we headed there for an upscale/gourmet barbecue dinner. It's true that "barbecue" and "gourmet" don't often hang out in the same sentence, but in this case they truly belong together. (And this despite the fact that the meat is not cooked all day over wood; they simply add wood for the smokey flavor.)

Today was an absolutely beautiful treat, with a high in the low 80s and breezes blowing all the time. Back home, it's about 30 degrees colder, which will no doubt hit me as quite a shock on the weekend. This trip has made me wish spring would pick up its skirts and hustle on to North Carolina.

As a final note, I'm sad to report that SF writer Philip Jose Farmer has died. Joe Lansdale notes his influence in this CNN piece, and I think the tribute is at least in part deserved, because at times Farmer really did push the boundaries of the field. I never met him, but I wish I had.

On the road again: Austin, day 2

I hate this hotel. The bandwidth sucks, though I must give credit where credit is due: Tonight, it is only the worst I've had in a hotel in years, as opposed to last night, when it was effectively unusable. Still, my phone downloads email over the cellular (non-3G) network faster than my notebook over this hotel's supposedly broadband Internet service--which costs the usual $9.99 a day. I hate this place.

What made email possible was a mid-day two-hour lunch at Schlotzsky's, which offers free WiFi. Thank goodness for that place, or I'd never have caught up on email.

I ran into a Barnes & Noble right after lunch to see if they had my books and perhaps to sign stock, but they had only one paperback of One Jump Ahead, so I didn't bother the staff. They had filed it under "N", however, so I moved it to "V". Frustrating.

Back to the hotel. I don't drink coffee, and I don't drink tea; I use no beverages to jump-start the day. I depend on a long (if time permits) hot shower. Unfortunately, this hotel's shower sucks worse than its bandwidth. You have two settings: ice cold, and random. Given my need to wake up but my lack of desire for early morning pain, plus my goal of soaking a bit after exercising, I opted for random. Consequently, in the course of ten tension-filled minutes I experienced water so cold my genitals fled to my throat, thus strangling my screams of pain, and scalding liquid so hot I once pulled the shower curtain in front of me for protection and squealed like a little girl.

Perhaps I'll go for ice cold tomorrow.

The non-work high point of today was dinner at the truly exceptional Lambert's Downtown Barbecue. Though I could tell from the taste--and the server later confirmed--that they cooked their meat over gas with wood added for smoke infusion, a sin that would cause me to take an immediate dislike to most barbecue places (but one I commit at home from sheer laziness), here it simply made me all the more awestruck at the quality of their food. We sampled an enormous amount:

* deviled eggs with caviar
* housemade charcuterie platter
* side of macaroni and three cheeses
* pulled pork
* brisket
* beef ribs
* jalapeno sausage (not too hot at all)
* bread pudding
* fried chocolate pie with homemade ice cream (which Jennie deemed "too wee")

The worst was darn good; most was excellent by any measure. This place is now on my Austin must-eat list.

After dinner, like all good fat Americans, we waddled out to our giant SUV, squealed our way out of the parking garage, watching as our fuel gauge dropped faster than the altitude in the building, and ran over three pedestrians on the way back to our hotel. Getting out of the SUV so disturbed our distended guts that we each hacked up a small animal we'd inadvertently eaten in the course of our meal; where Jennie found a chicken I will never know, and my poodle skittered away before I could step on it and put it out of its misery.

I had to send my ass and stomach on separate elevators up to my room, where I'm now using the king-sized bed as a chair to support my enormous mass as I type this entry.

I'm so happy to be an American!