Another state!

Austin: too hot for spelling.

In keeping with my jet-setting, high-flying ways, last week I got on a plane for the second time in 2011 to go to exotic Austin, Texas for a work conference. Texas, as you may or may not know, is very big. In fact, for scale, I refer you to my current favorite t-shirt, available at the very excellent Frog & Toad on Hope Street in Providence:

Most of my stay was (thankfully) spent in an air-conditioned hotel, but a few brief trips outside were most informative. Here's what you need to know about Austin:

1. It is hot. Sweet lord, is it hot. I mean... I mean, my god. Every day I was there had a three-digit high, except for Saturday, when the mercury dipped to a balmy 99. And it doesn't even start to get really hot until about four in the afternoon, which makes no sense. It was 95 when I stepped out of the airport at 11:30 p.m. on my first night there. Walking into hot Texas air for the first time felt like going outside in Las Vegas: like you're not on planet Earth because it simply cannot be this hot and still support human life. Anyway, it's hot, which makes seeing joggers on the street all the more irritating.

2. Sixth Street is Hipsterton. Hipsterville. Hipsterfordshire. I was told it reminds some people of Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and I'll have to take their word for it because I've never been there, combined with the East Village, combined with the streets off of the Vegas strip. Apparently there are barkers trying to get tourists and conference-goers like myself inside to see various shows and take various tours, but I have no first-hand experience with them. And it's a good thing, too, because if someone is going to try to pester me onto a duck boat or into a dueling piano bar when it's a bajillion degrees out, that someone needs to prepare for a shin kick. From me.

3. There are bats! Why was I not informed of the bats? I didn't learn that Austin was home to the world's largest urban bat colony until a fellow conference attendee told me about it over continental breakfast one morning. Sure enough, there's a bridge in downtown Austin under which a million and a half bats live, and at sunset in the summer, they all leave to go feed, and it's awesome. People line the sidewalk on the bridge and the park underneath it, and there's free parking, and an ice cream man!

4. For all the pride it should take in its bats, Austin should feel an equal amount of shame for this thing:

No. Stop it.

If you can't tell from the picture, it is a bicycle bar powered by many people who were just talked out of money. With all riders pedaling furiously (in insane heat, remember), this thing goes about five mph (max), serves its riders beer (from a keg the riders provide) because no sober person would agree to this nonsense, and inspires me to throw rotting produce in its direction like nothing I have ever encountered.

And so, to recap: Hot. Hipsters. Bats. Shame. Austin! I should write a travel guide.