TEXAS!

10th of September

I awoke in a truck stop somewhere along the i30, Paolo had driven till about 3am and parked up and slept. The car was really hot and we were both dripping with sweat. I got up and took my turn driving, it was about 7am so I had a good 5 hours sleep, which is more than some nights we’ve had. Paolo fell back asleep once we started driving and the airconditioning was blasting. I drove for about 3 hours until we hit Dallas and drove around it, we didn’t go in, we were heading to Austin. We drove through Dallas for about an hour and then headed south on the i35, Austin would be 3 hours drive from here. Paolo woke up around midday and we stopped at an iHop for breakfast, we had seen these iHops all along the highways and decided that we should probably try it. It was essentially a full English on top of pancakes.

At this point we had driven almost constantly from Memphis, we had driven through 3 states in 24 hours, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas. Our total mileage on the trip was just over 2200miles, not too bad.

It was a long drive down to Austin, in total I had driven around 7 hours. We arrived in Austin and went to the tourist information on 6th street, the lady in there was either being very rude or was extremely stupid, we think that she was probably just extremely thick.

We stayed at a hotel quite central, about 6 blocks away from 6th street. We were tired so we washed and then slept till about 8pm. 6th street was apparently the place to be so we headed out to find some food in that area, we walked around for about an hour trying to find a place for steak, after all this was Texas, there was nowhere! We settled for fish, and the meal was brilliant, a bit classier than any place we had been so far, I had a cuscous dish which was the best cuscous I had ever had, Paolo had a local fish wrapped around a crabcake he loved that too.

6th Street was manic, they close off the street for the revellers of the night so it was almost a carnival spirit, this was really refreshing! It was like being back in Europe on an island somewhere in the medditeranean. We worked our way through numerous bars, they had open rooftops so you could look down into the street and across to other bars that had rooftop parties going on. Check out these pictures.

We were however disappointed because we eventually worked our way into a club around 1:30 thinking that we would be going till the early hours. So we were dancing away then suddenly they turned the lights on and everybody left, it was only 2am! The whole of 6th street closes at 2am and there is nothing else going on after that, you just have to go home! Couldn’t believe it so we had to head back to our hotel room, it totally caught us off guard.