Thursday Travel Tales: Austin Part I

The theme of this travel tale will be our trip to Austin, TX last Christmas. Before I start the story, I need to provide two pieces of background information: 

1) Zach and I go to extreme measures to save money while traveling. I’m not sure exactly why Zach and I get crazy thrifty while traveling, but it probably stems from the fact that we met while traveling at a time when we were both poor students, so acting poor on trips reminds us of the good ‘ol days. Regardless, the weird thing about this habit is that we’re extremely inconsistent about when we decide it’s time to sacrifice to save money and when it’s okay to treat ourselves. Here are two examples:

·         In college Zach and I went on a trip to Disney World. We bought crazy expensive park tickets, had no problem paying $20/day for parking, and ate at the nicest restaurants in the park. But we didn’t want to spend money on a hotel, so we slept in our car in a Wal-Mart parking lot for 2 nights. We definitely had enough money to afford a hotel, but for some reason we thought it would be better to be super sketchy and sleep in our car like homeless people.

Can you tell we’d been “showering” in a Wal-Mart bathroom?

·         During our hooray-college-is-over-let’s-go-to-Australia trip we stayed on this private island on the Great Barrier Reef which cost $400/night (I know, whoa). Once we got there though we decided that the food on the island was a bit expensive, so we resolved not to eat any of it. This means we survived for four days off of snacks we had in our bag (which consisted of a 4 apples, 4 bananas, a jar of nutella, 2 granola bars, and a few slices of bread) rather than spend money on food.

Don’t we look hungry?

      2) Zach and I have had some mini-fights about what traditions from our childhoods to keep alive when the two of us (and eventually our kids) celebrate Christmas. The Christmas we spent in Austin was the first Christmas we’d be spending alone since we got married, so we were excited to execute the previously agreed-upon plan of following only one tradition from each person’s childhood, and then making up new ones for our kids. The tradition I picked is going to the movie theater on Christmas day (which is a pretty big deal since I usually only go to the movie theater 2-3 per year).  The tradition Zach picked is going to eat Chinese food on Christmas day, since that’s usually the only type of restaurant open.

Here's Zach, his sister, and me participating in one of his traditions that didn't make the cut - 

opening one present (always pajamas) on Christmas Eve.

Okay, back to the Austin story. Zach and I made a long term goal a few years ago to visit all 50 states together, so we decided to visit Texas over Christmas break, even though we have no friends or family to visit there, so that we could cross it off of the list. (In case you’re interested, we’ve been to 15 states together so far, so we still have a long way to go – I keep track of this along with a number of other long-term goals in a spreadsheet titled “Bucket List,” which gives you a little insight into how obsessive I am about tracking my progress against random self-imposed standards). Anyway, last Christmas after we opened our presents we packed, headed to the airport, and then got on a plane to Austin.

Here I am being weird at the Austin airport.

Because of our strange thriftiness thing, we decided not to rent a car for the first two days of our trip in order to save a measly $40. My plan was to get a cab to the house we were renting, then use the free bikes included in the rental to get around for the first few days, and then on our last day in Austin we’d walk about 2 miles to get to a rental car place and pick up our car.

So we got our cab to the rental house fine, but once we got there the door was locked and the key wasn’t under the mat like we were told it would be – uh oh. It turns out the lady we were renting this house from forgot to put the key in place because it was Christmas and she was busy, so we waited about 10 minutes for her to drive over and bring the key – no big deal. We got inside and immediately looked up directions to the nearest Chinese restaurant and movie theater. Luckily, there was a restaurant right next to a movie theater, and our movie (Catching Fire) wasn’t scheduled to start for another 2 hours. So we bundled up and started our bike ride.

So I’m not a bike snob like Zach – who’s the kind of guy that loves bikes so much that he prefers to be fastened to them every time he rides – but I do like it when my bike chain stays attached for the entire ride and my gears only change when I press them (crazy, I know). Well unfortunately these free bikes didn’t offer these minor comforts, so getting to our destination was a little more difficult than we had foreseen (driving there in a rental car would have been infinitely faster - and warmer).

We did manage to get to the movie theater safely, at which point I told Zach to go get the tickets while I called my mom, then we would head across the street to eat dinner. Well Zach went to get the movie tickets, but saw that the actual show time was 7pm, not 8pm like we saw online (when is the online time ever wrong?!) and he came back and asked me what to do. Well I was on the phone and kind of shooed him away and told him to figure out something else – which I thought meant he would find another movie for us to watch. At this point Zach was torn – because it seemed to him that we had only two options, see the movie I wanted to watch and fulfill my Christmas tradition (7pm was the last show time of the night), or go to the Chinese restaurant for dinner and fulfill his tradition (we didn’t have time to eat there before 7pm and we couldn’t go after the movie because it closed at 9pm). So being the gallant man he is, he chose to sacrifice his tradition for mine and bought the 7pm movie tickets.

So when he got back I was off of the phone and he told me about the new plan – go see the movie I wanted to see, then figure something out afterwards for dinner. At this point I’m ashamed to say that I flipped out – mainly because I realized very quickly that this meant I was going to have to skip dinner, because there would absolutely be no place open after 9pm on Christmas day where we would be able to get food. Also, if I had to pick between the two traditions, I would have picked Zach’s – because his includes food, and food always wins. But Zach had already bought the tickets, so we had no choice but to go inside and get seats for our movie. I headed to the concession stand to find something to eat which was extremely daunting considering our uber-constrained diet (I ended up settling on two sad-looking pretzels wrapped in plastic with yellow mustard for $15 – very festive!). We watched the movie and it was actually really good, and then we ended the evening with a cold, rainy, uphill bike ride back to the rental house. Needless to say, not the best start to our trip. I try not to think about it, but if we had a car we would have gotten to the theater much quicker and had time to pick up take-out before the movie started. Then we could have kept the food in the car and eaten it at home afterwards. Oh well.

Yay Catching Fire! I heart Katniss ... but not as much as I heart food.

This post is getting super long, so I’ll continue the Austin recap in next week’s installment of Thursday Travel Tales. The next post will have more pictures and fewer words (maybe), so get excited.