Day 38
Austin Texas - Rest Day #2
Today was a total down day. I slept in, tinkered around with my gear and then went downstairs for a breakfast in the hotel cafe. I added Perry’s Pork leftovers to my eggs. The pork was not the same cold as it was Sunday night, but it was still good. I doubt I will ever have another pork dinner quit like the one I had Sunday night at Perry’s. If you go to Austin and you are there on a Sunday night, you have to go to Perry’s.
I moved to a boutique hotel today for the next two nights. The East Austin Hotel. It reminds me of the Pineapple Hotel on Seattle’s Queen Ann Hill, only cooler. The price is reasonable. This is a really sweet place. The Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin is possibly the nicest place I have ever stayed. The room was luxurious. Twelve foot ceilings in the room where I stayed. It was impressive. Before checking out, I spent about an hour looking at the art work in the hotel. All of the hallways on each floor had original paintings hanging about every five feet. It was fun to look at all the styles and techniques. Every style and technique that I am familiar with was represented in the collection. There must have been several hundred paintings hanging in the hotel’s hallways. Someone had a lot of fun curating the hotel’s collection. Some of the paintings date back to the early 19th Century.
Before dinner I got a haircut. I’ve never gotten a cut this short, so it’s probably a good thing no one can see me right now. (I’m trying not to look at myself.) The bicycle helmet is going to be much more comfortable now, at least for two or three weeks. I can see why a lot of men prefer to wear their hair short, it is very comfortable.
A nice dinner at the East Austin Hotel, a hamburger made from ground beef, and of course ground beef brisket, consumed while watching the first few innings of Game One between Houston and Washington. I couldn’t stay awake long enough to watch the enter game. I’ll try and get a bit deeper into the game tomorrow night.
For a week I’ve had a poem about road kill rattling around in my head. The amount of road kill you see on a daily basis in Texas is beyond what you would imagine. It came out in a rush Monday morning and I wrote it down, it’s called “The Road.” Sometimes I sit down and a poem comes out. Most of the time it rattles around for a few days or longer. This is just like the problem solving technique I employed when I used to work as a software developer. I’m still solving problems in the same way, the problems are just different now. Instead of devising an algorithm, I’m devising a poem.
My second day of rest is over.
