I spent a few nights on a "big cat farm" in North Texas and got a kick out of teenage boys calling me "ma'am" and then headed to Austin - which I found very friendly and very non-Texan. Friendly as in a woman I almost plowed over at a cross walk threw me a peace sign instead of the other well known and expected hand gesture, and non-Texan as in almost everyone has relocated here from another state.On my last night, I met a team of roller derby girls! They were from a hill billy out skirts town but were in Austin practicing with the local team who had trained Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page for "Whip It". Those were some gritty broads...before I knew who they were I was listening to them share stories about bruises from "falling down" and I thought they were part of a battered woman's conference.
There's some good raw food going on here - I found an amazing local juice bar, two raw restaurants, and the ORIGINAL Whole Foods. Of course, I made a pilgrimage to see this holy flagship and it was beautiful. The non-raw food that I sampled wasn't really exciting enough to mention. Lots of meat (barbeque) and mexican - which is usually cheap and satisfying but nothing to rave about.
Next stop Fredericksburg - a Texas/German settlement! In the 1840's the Republic of Texas was having problems populating West Texas because it was so well... unpopulated! and vast and wild. So they made a deal with Germany - for a cheap price you get a ticket over to the US, 10 acres of wild Texas pasture, and 1 acre in town for your "Sunday house" so you could go to church and trade over the weekend. In the middle of Texas you can tour the Vereins Kirche, eat schnitzel and drink hefe-weissen.
This area of Texas is known as "hill-country" and while the name suggest what type of terrain to expect, you'd have no inkling of how green TX can be. It was just beautiful hills with winding roads and wildflowers, butterflies and cows. Definitely not the desert and tumbleweed landscape that I had pictured. Heading further west it got more ancient flat seabed and mountainous instead of hills and I swear I've never sweat so much in my life. Every rest stop I get out of my car and my shorts are drenched through the butt and thighs. How do these highway maintenance guys do it? Wearing jeans, long sleeved tees, vests, hats and gloves, standing on the blacktop all day in the sun. Those are some hardy Texans. Yee haw.
