Our good friend Davide, whom we kick out of her own apartment when we visit New York, finally decided to join the rest of us shmarty pants by finally turning 40. We couldn't pass up this birthday party, so we loaded up the mini van and made the trek to Austin to celebrate (Davide splits her time between the Manhattan high life and the relaxed poolside zen of the Texas Hill Country).
The route we selected took us through the southern Panhandle, through Abilene, through Fredericksburg, and then to the northern fringes of Austin. I hadn't driven through Abilene in a long time, and I was amazed at the number of wind farms that had popped up since my last trip. Giant turbines were scattered seemingly everywhere, capturing the wind pouring out of the southwest. Above us hung a thick web of transmission lines, massive cables shuttling power (mostly) downstate.
Abilene is where you can really see the transition from Panhandle trees and shrubbery to thicker, rockier, hill country vegetation. One minute we're still traveling on the high plains and the next going downhill, from 3500 feet in Amarillo to 500 in Austin.
Davide's birthday was tremendous fun. The kids swam. We ate too much food. We met an actual rocket scientist, who seemed very nice and not rockety at all. I suppose when you reach 40 these are the parties you have, parties full of kids, swimming, food, wine, tea, cake, and rocket scientists.
After the party we drove to Suzanne's brother and sister-in-law's house, which is on a beautiful hill overlooking a beautiful part of Austin, complete with lake, park, and scurrying wildlife. They put us up in their apartment over the garage, a nice quiet guesthouse that was way too comfy for our own good (Alex and I had a great nap there the next afternoon).
That next morning, after a tasty Father's Day brunch at the Magnolia Cafe (this is where I ordered too much food thinking that I should eat as much as possible because we don't have any place like this in Amarillo; that logic, unfortunately, is quickly crushed by a stomach full of leaden gingerbread pancakes) we hopped back in the van and went tubing.
Tubing is what it sounds like. You take a large inner tube to a river. You place the tube on the river. You sit on the tube. You float down the river. It's very easy and very relaxing.
Well, relaxing that is unless you're surrounded by a mass of humanity with the same idea on a river that tends to move only when it feels motivated to do so. On this particular day our river, wide and fresh and chilly, had decided to take it easy, so thirty minutes into our float we were still in view of our launching point. The water was fairly low as well (apparently the week before was high and fast, specifically managed that way to wash out bugs and debris), and a low river while tubing means we shouted the refrain "butts up!" quite a bit. If you didn't heed that warning - I speak from constant experience here - you'd end up getting socked in the bottom by skull-sized rocks lurking below the water's surface.
Still, it was very fun and quite relaxing, although here and there were the odd lonely guys who had one tube for themselves and one for their cooler with built in radio which, consistently, either loudly played Van Halen, Journey, or some country music forced into incomprehension by its loud distortion over the cooler's tiny speaker.
It was a quick weekend to Austin, a mere round trip of another 16 hours in the van, but seeing Davide venture into her best years was worth it. And our nephew Scott also illuminated something for me: after three minutes of watching him play Halo, I realized my own Gorf and Pac-Man video game expertise would't be enough to compete with him. Actually after that three minutes of watching him spin, jump, shoot, and run all I wanted to do was barf.
Everyone gets older I suppose, and with that goes the past glories of 25 cent tries at the video arcade.
