Is Austin Actually Weird?
Our explorations in a city we never called home
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My husband Jeff was the first member of our family to make the trip to Austin.
Shortly after we moved to Houston, he discovered that the annual Spiceworks conference was held a driving distance from our house. He was still looking to network in the world of IT with the possibility of finding a job that was more local than his remote work. A trip to the state capitol appeared to be a good place to start.
In addition to the piles of t-shirts and vendor swag that he brought home, he also told me I would love Austin. It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy our new home in Houston, but his drive to and from Austin, and his time in the city, convinced him that it was a place his wife would love to visit. And until COVID hit, the conference became a yearly event that took him away from Houston for a couple of days, our kids excitedly waiting for his return with more useless swag.
But he didn’t get to keep the city to himself. I reserved a stay at a resort near Lake Travis for our sixteenth wedding anniversary. While I was desperate for a December hike in the hill country, an unexpected cold snap has us looking for ways to explore downtown Austin instead.
Jeff and I toured the LBJ Presidential Library, learning so much state and US history in a single museum. We walked downtown and looked for warm shops on our way to the state capitol building. As we toured the city, we repeatedly saw the slogan: “Keep Austin Weird.” At the time, it didn’t really seem to fit. It was cold. People weren’t out and about. And as Midwesterners, we didn’t believe that we had the best judgment on what was weird in a Texas city. But we also knew that Austin had a different vibe from Houston. It is a big city, but the downtown felt more like our beloved Indianapolis than Houston. And looking through the gift shops and business windows made it clear that the city embraced far more diversity than much of the Lone Star State.
Even in that short weekend trip, I quickly fell in love with Austin and couldn’t wait to return.
Six months later, we returned to Austin with our kids so we could experience the flight of the Mexican Freetail bats. Our son has been in love with bats, or at least the idea of bats, ever since a park ranger-led talk in an Indiana barn at Potato Creek State Park several years ago. From the moment we saw all of the tourist information about the bats in Austin, we knew that this was something we needed to do with our kids, so we made early June reservations at McKinney Falls State Park.
It’s a beautiful state park and one we wanted to explore further, but we made plans to camp on a hot June weekend specifically so that we could take our bat-loving little boy to downtown Austin on Saturday night to watch 750,000 pregnant Mexican Freetail bats fly out from underneath the Congress Avenue bridge at sunset. The weekend was unseasonably hot, even for Texas, so we spent the day enjoying the water and slides at Typhoon Texas. Then we rushed downtown and settled into one of the many boat tours that take tourists and Austin residents for a direct view of the bats in flight.
The Congress Avenue Bridge is home to the largest urban colony of bats in the world. In early June, visitors can see a colony of hungry pregnant females who returned from Mexico in the late spring, ready to give birth to their offspring in the middle of Texas’s state capital. Bats were not new to us, but watching thousands upon thousands of bats fly right past us into the night was a spectacle unlike any we had ever experienced.
Years later, as I was reading Laura Dave’s novel, The Last Thing He Told Me, I could clearly visualize the scene on the Congress Avenue bridge with the bats. If the bats are one of the things keep Austin weird, they should do everything they can to protect them. It is a truly phenomenal natural experience in the middle of a modern American city. (I made this story part of the prologue for my upcoming book, The Life I Never Knew I Wanted. You can watch the video below.)
Our family’s short visit to see the bats made such an impression on our kids that our daughter decided she wanted to do Austin for her fourth grade city project. The following spring break, we took three full days to camp in Buescher State Park and explore the state capitol, collecting all the information she would need to effectively complete the project.
We were determined to cram everything we could into two days of exploring the city. Our first task was enjoying Austin cuisine. Austin is known for its barbecue and food trucks and we were determined to find the best affordable food the city had to offer.
When we arrived downtown we drove right into traffic. We eventually discovered we had arrived in Austin at the very beginning of South by Southwest (SXSW), one of the largest conferences in the south. I had seen all sorts of people posting about SXSW on Instagram for over a week, but somehow I didn't put two and two together. The city is normally busy, but this was crazy, people of all kinds walking along the streets with different colored badges hanging around their necks.
We ignored the tech world so we could find food, and we discovered Iron Works Barbecue at just the right time. We feasted on chicken, brisket, beef ribs, and a healthy serving of side dishes. It wasn’t Franklin Barbecue, but it may be the best restaurant barbecue we've ever tasted.1
Since we still had time, we wandered around, taking pictures of the SXSW signage at the convention center, stopping by the Hypersciences Inc. booth (staffed by UT engineering students which delighted our seven-year-old future engineer), reading the signage and taking pictures at the O. Henry house, and then sitting outside our meeting spot for the ghost tour.
I'm not the scary movie type at all. I don't do the Halloween haunted houses. I've read three Stephen King books and one was his book On Writing. I am afraid of the dark, especially when I'm unfamiliar with the territory. When I was three, my parents took me to see a re-release of Snow White and I spent most of my childhood and early adolescence scared of dark basements because I was convinced the Evil Queen was going to come after me saying "Mirror, Mirror on the wall..."
But I enjoy ghost tours.
I was both a history and English major in undergrad, so any chance to learn more history about an area is a good opportunity. When I visited Edinburg during my junior year semester abroad, I enjoyed the ghost tour that took my friends and me through the old streets and revealed the less well-known history of the city. When Jeff and I went to Key West before we had kids, we discovered the same thing when we took a ghost tour there. When we were in New Orleans for Campsgiving the previous November, our kids tried to convince us to let them join their aunts on a ghost tour of the city, but we said no. We told them we would do it when we didn't have to worry about a late night and we were sure they wouldn't be scared. After all, taking a ghost tour has never been about the supernatural for us (since we really take the stories with a grain of salt) but instead about hands-on learning about the city we are visiting.
So when our daughter asked if we could do a ghost tour of Austin as part of her research for her project, we agreed. I tried to find what I thought would be the least spooky of the tours, we double-checked with both kids multiple times, and I booked the tour.
Our tour guide was an informed and entertaining storyteller. She stopped us behind the Susanna Dickenson house, in front of the O. Henry house, in front of the fire station next door to the O. Henry house, and then on the front steps of the Driskill Hotel, where she told us the most (and probably the spookiest) ghost stories. Truth be told, it was probably much scarier than we had anticipated and by the time we got our sleepy kids back to the truck, they needed to talk out the entire experience. Our son fell asleep before we were out of the city, but we spent the whole ride back to Bastrop talking about all the different aspects of the tour, what was the scariest, and what concerned our daughter the most. Jeff, proving his mad fathering skills, had her laughing by the time we got "home."
And true to form, the stories helped show a lot of what keeps Austin weird.
When we returned to Austin the following day, Jeff drove past the capitol and then through the UT campus so that we could show the kids a college campus and drive them past the stadium. We walked toward the state capitol, making stops to take daylight pictures in front of both the Susanna Dickenson and O. Henry houses and inside the Driskill Hotel, although getting both kids into the hotel was a challenge because our son didn't even want to walk on the same side of the street as the hotel. We wanted to prove to him that there was nothing for him to be scared about.
One of the many things I find fascinating about Austin is that it is a majority Blue city in the middle of a Red-ish state. And yet, it is also the city where lawmakers from the most conservative portions of the state come to make laws that have a significant impact on the much more liberal citizens.
On that particular spring day, as we approached the state capitol, we discovered that a large group of Texas public school teachers were protesting the legislature, which was in session. Suddenly we weren't just getting a tour of the place where laws were made; we were showing our kids what it means to exercise our First Amendment rights. It also opened up discussion about issues facing public education. At the time, I was still teaching in a Lutheran school and our kids were attending a Lutheran school.2 But this was a chance for me to share with my own kids my support for my public school colleagues and to help them start to see the issues that faced my public school teaching peers and their students. As we tried to listen to the tour guide over the chants of the teachers circling around every level of the rotunda, I didn't complain but proudly took a picture of them working for the betterment of their students and Texas schools.
We eventually broke from the tour guide because 1) we could barely hear her and 2) the kids just wanted to explore on their own. We walked into the Senate chamber and watched the Texas senate at work (although to be frank it appeared that the senators were about as attentive as teachers are during the end-of-year meetings). We took pictures all over the capitol building and made sure that our daughter had everything she thought she wanted and needed for her project.
Before we headed home we needed to make one more stop along 6th Street. We promised the kids we would get Voodoo Donuts to take back with us for breakfast the next morning. Along the way, we made a stop at the Driskill Hotel for a free SXSW event, convincing our son to put his fears aside so that he could not only go into the hotel, but go up the dreaded grand staircase. We returned to the truck exhausted but satisfied. Our daughter had everything she needed to complete her project and we all got a good taste of the state’s capitol.
Even though we have returned to the Midwest and we are living in our favorite city to call home, Austin will always hold a special place in our hearts. I got jealous every time my husband would pack up for another Spiceworks conference. I have dreams of someday attending the education SXSW event the week before the yearly tech conference. When I see friends and family planning trips to the city, I want to share our limited experiences with them, giving them a list of things I believe they should do when they visit.
For outsiders, Austin may seem like it’s “weird” because it is a blue dot in a red state, but that is an unfair characterization of the entire state. The legislature that meets in the center of the city represents years of gerrymandering and voter suppression, not the will of a state that is far more purple than red. Yes, there are Texans who look upon the city with disdain, but there are many who see the imperfect city as symbolic of what Texas could be with a shift in the winds of change. After all, it hosts the presidential library of a president who transformed the lives of the oppressed during a period of significant political and social upheaval. LBJ was far from perfect, but his presidency made lives better for millions of Americans. And he was a Texan, through and through.
Austin is just another reminder that using colors on a map to describe our states puts us into boxes that serve to divide us. It is just one piece of the complicated puzzle that is the Lone Star State.
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And I’ve still never had Franklin Barbecue and that is okay. What we had was delicious and I’m sure it was representative of the expected barbecue quality in Austin.
As of this fall, all of us will now be in public schools.
I've lived in Austin for 13 years, work downtown, ride its trails, and would say it has its own character for sure. Some may call it outlandish or over the top; there are a lot of people who live here who are searching, and that search plays out in lots of ways. Great photos, Sarah!!
I definitely want to back for the bats. It was too cold for them In January. I loved the city and it non Texas typical vibe.