Car place - 2/28/2011





Pictures from day 26!



On Monday we said goodbye to Micky and headed out into the Austin traffic.  First up was the car place since the V was due for an oil change, a tire rotation and had an indicator light that needed figuring out.  They said about an hour and so we enjoyed the complementary fancy coffees and pastries while typing up a few blog posts.  A while later we found out that the light was due to a clogged oxygen sensor and it was going to take a few hours to get the part.  Uhg.  However, they did give us passes to the bowling ally next door.  Decent game and we had fun dancing to to the music in the next to empty building.  The game only lasted a bit and we were soon back in the waiting room.  A few more pastries, some plums and cookies and some more coffee.  By this time Kat was pretty antsy and started wandering around, taking pictures and meeting random people.  

An older woman came into the waiting room with an iPad she had been given for her 80th birthday.  She was having some trouble with the wireless and so Kat and I helped her out.  We then started talking and she had some fascinating stories.  Her husband had been a professor of genetic engineering, though they were retired on an island near green bay now and so thought it was neat that we were also from WI.  He had been teaching temporarily at the University of Austin every spring semester for the past few years though.  Smart move.  He had gotten his PhD at Harvard and they had gone on a bug collecting trip around the states where she got to experience camping for the first time, having very rarely left her hometown of Paterson, NJ up until that point.  This was followed by placements around the world (Oxford where their daughters backpacker around Europe for a summer, Brazil, Australia, etc.).  Since they were officially retired they had continued traveling. Spending time most recently in Italy and Barcelona, Spain and so I picked her brain a bit.  Like a number of other people, she recommended Cinque la Terra (spelling?).  The final funny story was that she had just been to a concert last night where Bucky Pitzereli had song the song, I'm from New Jersey.  Fun connections.

After six hours of waiting the car was finally done.  We said goodbye to the waiting room and hit the road for Houston.  The skyline at dusk was beautiful.  As we wandering downtown we passed the public library and of course had to go in.  There was a very interesting display in the lobby about the history of the ACLU.  After browsing that for a while we hit the books where Kat learned more about palm reading and I checked out the information section and talked to a librarian.  By this point it was getting a bit late and so we moved on to our final destination at the home of a friend of mine from college.  They had a beautiful home, an adorable cat and a large slightly too friendly dog.  Their backyard had pillars and a hot tub!  We took the chance to relax our muscles and minds in the warm water before going to sleep in our separate rooms.  Day 26, and the month of Feberuary, to a close.