South by Southwest

Ok no, this post is not about the music festival, it's just such a convenient title! What I really want to talk about is my first days in Austin and my plan for the coming weeks.

I arrived here in the Live Music Capital yesterday and had an absolutely wonderful evening my first night in town! First I went out to a Black Star meetup at the Drungo Ice House and had a great time hanging out with them. I even made plans for next Saturday, we're gonna go out into "real" texas to get some "real" texas barbeque, then we're gonna head over to College Station for a day of binge drinking and partying! Woohoo! After that I met up with my aunt and we headed out for dinner downtown. I got this massive 1 pound burger complete with fried pickles, cheese, the works. It was really tasty, I was only able to eat half of it.

Unfortunately, that's when things started to take a turn for the worse... I was supposed to catch a plane to Chicago for a nasco board meeting that left at 8:30am the next morning, but we didn't get home until 1:30. So I set my alarm for 5:30 and hoped for the best. To my great misfortune, I woke up with a horrible feeling in my stomach. Gasses, nausea, dizziness, it was really bad. There was no way I was going to get on a plane feeling that way, so I made the tough decision to call it off. Looks like I won't be going to that board meeting after all... which especially sucks because I'm going into the peace corps, this was pretty much my last chance to see all my nasco board friends before leaving for the next 2 years! Oh well, c'est la vie I suppose. At least the weather is nice down here.

So now I'm in Austin for the next while, and I've already started thinking about where I'm going next. My cousin Tara grew up in Phoenix, and she gave me a great itenerary to check out the southwest, and since this is really one of my most anticipated parts of the trip I think I'm going to take her up on it. SO, as it stands now, I'm thinking I'll go from here to El Paso, maybe stop in Las Cruces, head up to Santa Fe, west to Flagstaff, back south again to Phoenix and Tuscon, and finally over to San Diego to begin leg 3 of the trip (the western seaboard). Sure, it's a roundabout trip through the desert, but I want to see it all! There's so many national parks and national monuments out there, I can't wait to take it all in. This part of the trip will probably take at least 2 weeks, maybe more. Also, I really don't know very many people in that area so it's probably going to be mostly couchsurfing, but that's great, I can't wait to couchsurf more! It's definitely been one of the most rewarding parts of this trip so far, so the more sleeping on random couches the better!

But for now I'm in Austin for the next week or so. I've got lots of people to visit and lots of stuff to do, so it's going to be great. Hooray for warm, hooray for the south, and hooray for more traveling!