The view from Week Two (Austin is exhaustin')

Important note to non-Facebookers: I actually am sharing lots of words and images from the trip, in this album of photos. You should look there if you really want to know what we've done and where we've gone.)

I suppose we are at the midway point of the Monthlong Road Trip, and I am back with more pitiful excuses for not posting here. In essence, the day-to-day logistics of the trip make it impossible to write much. Any time there is a spare moment or two, and access to an internet connection, I fall asleep. For the last day and a half and the next day and a half, that sleeping can happen here:



Yes. A hotel bed. Generic, plus, stable. Don't get me wrong: the bed in the Leprechaun is just dandy, but it's quite nice to wake up in the same city on a daily basis, which--aside from two blissful nights in Raleigh, NC--has not been the case.

And with that, I see my Blogger time is up. Off to Day Two of the ACL Festival, which in its own way is as much a smorgasbord as the entire trip: there is a lot of standing in line (equivalent to standing in traffic) in order to see about 15 to 30 minutes of a band before moving on to the next one.

As with the trip in general, this approach lends itself to surprises better than scheduled stops. Best surprise of Day One was a frenzied set by Qbeta, an Italian/Latin/ska band I had never heard of. (Go ahead, , download some of their stuff. I kinda doubt it holds up as well in recorded form, but who knows?)

Counts of various kinds

There is just enough time for one of those quick impressionistic posts before we head off on the motorcycle for the first (and hopefully not last) time to explore Raleigh, NC, so here goes:
On previous road trips (i.e., in the 80s) I counted road kill, but we haven't seen a lot of carcasses thus far, and it is hard to see them from our relatively high seats anyway. Once, on a trip to San Francisco during one of those hippie-aesthetic revivals of the late 80s or very early 90s, I counted tie dye apparel. But, based on our last drive from Buffalo to North Carolina 3 or 4 years ago, it seemed best to count Wal-Marts, Adult Superstores, and Starbucks. (Starbuckses?) The idea for the first and third of these did not occur to me until Day Four, so I confess the number will be a little off.

Here's where we are thus far:
ADULT SUPERSTORES: Only one! Day One, at the NY/PA border. (This is not counting any along Niagara Falls Blvd in our home turf.)
WALMART: None! And we actually wanted one in Pittsburgh, when we were looking for a place to stay after the casino parking option turned out to be a bust. (As you may know, WMs, in addition to being the Handiwork of Satan, are especially RV-friendly, letting you park your huge gas-guzzling vehicles in their huge lots in the hopes that you will come inside and buy huge amounts of crap during your stay.) But from what we could tell, all the WMs were almost as far outside the city as the campground where we ended up.
STARBUCKS: I'm guessing we have surely seen at least two in rest stops, pre-count. Surely we will encounter at least one this afternoon in Raleigh.