Well, we’ve done it. After three and a half years of getting by and being tossed around by the whims of the capitol, Jamie and I made the decision to cut our losses and leave Austin. Of course it’s a fine line between cutting one’s losses and being booted out on your ear, which is pretty much what we were facing with our apartment lease coming up for renewal and no job prospects in sight beyond our limited work for Busted. But at some point you just have to accept that a place is not good for you and that your personal growth has been limited to extending the boundaries of how many rude people you can stomach on a daily basis and how many nights you can drag your bed into the living room to get away from the neighbors partying and puking outside the bedroom window. Simply put, we were ready for a new start.
Our last few days in Austin turned out to be some of the nicest. We saw friends for goodbye coffees and beers and dinners. We met friendly strangers. We became tourists, people who were not staying. As we packed and sold furnishings, 
we thought a lot about why we were leaving a city that epitomizes cool, hip, groovy and weird and we realized that aside from a few dear friends and a few favorite spots, most of our enjoyment in Texas took place outside those famous Austin city limits. Austin is great if you are a student and have daddy bankrolling your life. Austin is great if you have a job you love and the income to take advantage of all those hip, cool and groovy things. It’s a city of pleasures and privileges, cliques and clubs. If you fall outside those parameters, it’s a tough to make connections that actually mean something to everyone involved.
we thought a lot about why we were leaving a city that epitomizes cool, hip, groovy and weird and we realized that aside from a few dear friends and a few favorite spots, most of our enjoyment in Texas took place outside those famous Austin city limits. Austin is great if you are a student and have daddy bankrolling your life. Austin is great if you have a job you love and the income to take advantage of all those hip, cool and groovy things. It’s a city of pleasures and privileges, cliques and clubs. If you fall outside those parameters, it’s a tough to make connections that actually mean something to everyone involved.Perhaps it is the same in any city. It certainly didn’t help that we seemed to keep bumping up against neighbors and work situations that demanded far more than they ever gave in return. In the end, we realized we were losing faith in humanity and indeed in our own abilities to remain the caring and good people we know ourselves to be. It was those moments of needing clarity that would send us off on adventures to Enchanted Rock, Abilene and the coast. If being away was better, then why stay?
Bless their hearts, my folks drove to Austin with their truck and cargo trailer to help us with the move. Jamie and Dad packed that trailer with surgical precision while mom and I vacuumed and scrubbed in the hopes of getting the security deposit back. We set off for Florida at 6 am on a Sunday morning and watched the sun rise over Round Top as we drove. Breakfast was at Denny’s in Cypress, a new experience for Jamie. There was a bacon celebration underway, a Baconalia. How could we resist! The first day’s
drive took us through Houston and Baton Rouge.
There was no time for snapping photos but Baton Rouge made us laugh when we spied a sign for a pizza shop called “Schlitz and Giggles.” http://www.schlittz.com/Brilliant. I emailed them a few days ago saying we wished we could have stopped because we loved their sign. The owner wrote back that the pizza was even better than the sign and when we were in Baton Rouge again, stop in—the first beer and pizza was on him!
drive took us through Houston and Baton Rouge.
There was no time for snapping photos but Baton Rouge made us laugh when we spied a sign for a pizza shop called “Schlitz and Giggles.” http://www.schlittz.com/Brilliant. I emailed them a few days ago saying we wished we could have stopped because we loved their sign. The owner wrote back that the pizza was even better than the sign and when we were in Baton Rouge again, stop in—the first beer and pizza was on him!
We saw another great sign along the highway in Ponchatoula. Cretin Homes. We were in tears from laughing. Urban Dictionary defines cretin as “A Person that is: brainless, stupid, child-like, and full of pointless information that makes no sense and appeals only to other cretins. They can be found in abundance in every single populated internet forum, where they race to post as many mind-numbing messages as possible in a single session. In addition, they seemingly interbreed with other cretins, ensuring that their cretinous genes continue long after they end up dead meaning the Internet will never be rid of their kind. More's the pity.” It’s good to know that even cretins get to have custom-made homes. http://www.cretinhomes.com/
Louisiana along Routes 10 and 12 was fun and friendly. We had dinner at the Olive Garden in Slidell, Jamie’s second of the three forays into popular American eateries that you find along highways and in mall parking lots. Miceli, our young waiter, brought Jamie the biggest draught beer he’s had in America (everything is bigger in Texas except the beer glasses) and I shared a tip for getting a ginger ale in places that don’t serve ginger ale, which is most places in the south it seems. This tip comes from a very nice waiter in a bizarrely posh restaurant in Austin called The Cheesecake Factory http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/ when we met with the Jewish bookkeeper from the library who was certified online to perform marriages to discuss our wedding vows: fill a glass with Sprite then add a shot of Coke. Honest to goodness, it’s a suitable ginger ale substitute in a pinch.
We stopped for the night in Diamond Head, Mississippi, at the Diamond Head Resort http://diamondheadresort.ms/which was decidedly un-resort like. Creepy was more like it but we were tired and dad doesn’t like to drive with the trailer much past dark. The folks’ room was ok but it took the desk clerk three tries to find us a room that was made up. We ended up with a suite because he got tired of trying to decipher on the computer which rooms had been cleaned. The suite had a complimentary cockroach in the refrigerator. I didn’t sleep well, which made two nights in a row because our UT neighbors back in Austin the night before had decided to have 60 of their closest and drunkest friends over for another all-night party. It was a blurry-eyed Wren that stumbled into the Cracker Barrel in Spanish Fort, Alabama, for breakfast at 7:30am but a happy one that left an hour later after a rousing breakfast delivered by Debbie Lee and a nice chat with Jackie in the gift shop. Jamie had his first taste of grits which he pronounced “quite gritty.”
Breakfast saw us through until Gainesville, Florida, in late afternoon. It’s safe to say that the panhandle of Florida goes on forever. It’s like Pennsylvania without the mountains. What kept us occupied for surely 100 miles were signs for Café Risque. 
We had been marveling at and lamenting billboards from the minute we crossed into Louisiana. They are everywhere, most of them trying to lure you to Gulf Coast casinos. My folks stopped at Gulfport, Mississippi, on two of their trips out to Austin to have a flutter in the casinos. By the second trip, the casinos had gone completely high tech, not a one-armed bandit in sight. Gone was the sound of quarters dropping, levers being let loose and jackpots spilling into buckets. Now you get a voucher if you win, a piece of paper you take to a person or another machine. What fun is that? However, Café Risque was sizing itself up to be a winner. There was one commercially produced billboard with some coquettishly positioned seemingly
We had been marveling at and lamenting billboards from the minute we crossed into Louisiana. They are everywhere, most of them trying to lure you to Gulf Coast casinos. My folks stopped at Gulfport, Mississippi, on two of their trips out to Austin to have a flutter in the casinos. By the second trip, the casinos had gone completely high tech, not a one-armed bandit in sight. Gone was the sound of quarters dropping, levers being let loose and jackpots spilling into buckets. Now you get a voucher if you win, a piece of paper you take to a person or another machine. What fun is that? However, Café Risque was sizing itself up to be a winner. There was one commercially produced billboard with some coquettishly positioned seemingly naked ladies but the majority of the billboards were made with a lot of big stencils and paints. The first one was a bit surprising but by the time we saw the thirtieth one, we were laughing and praying we could see the café from the highway.
We stopped at Sonny’s Real Pit BBQ http://www.sonnysbbq.com/to get fueled up for the final push to Sebring. It’s never a good idea to stop somewhere that has ‘Real Pit’ listed in the name but Sonny’s is a Florida chain and the folks knew it would be ok food, which it was. After dining at The Salt Lick, a legendary central Texas barbecue joint that has earned every single kudo it’s received over the years (it’s where we had our après wedding party), nothing else quite measures up, but we managed to clean our plates and leave with a stack of wet-wipes for future adventures.
It was with great joy that we soon discovered we were closing in fast on the exit for Café Risque. I slowed down to 60 mph and Jamie craned his neck to both sides of the bridge but to no avail. We couldn’t see the café. But we saw something equally hilarious. The billboard beside the on-ramp after the bridge read:
Again, tears of joy. What clever marketing for that lawyer.
Florida delivered us to our journey’s end with a spectacular sunset followed by a starry sky and here we may settle. For now we are in the spare room at my folks’ place, enjoying the quiet at night and re-acquainting ourselves with the importance of sun screen during the day. We’re quickly finding that our new state is very different from our old one but that’s why they call it Florida and not Texas. Stay tuned for adventures in bike shopping, catching escaped parakeets and buying fruit at roadside stands. Florida promises to be every bit as nutty as the Lone Star State. 
