Last week I got to leave Buffalo-on-the-Charles to visit Austin, Texas and Amy’s Ice Creams.  The first two days were fabulous. Chocoberry ice cream at Amy’s!   Temperatures were in the fifties!  I got to wear my shorts but more importantly I got to inhale Austin’s very specific laid back atmosphere.  The first night I got the cheapest room at America’s hippest hotel, the San Jose.  It was as someone predicted a noisy room but in the morning when I went downstairs I was already at Jo’s coffee cafe with a few loud black birds and a bunch of enthusiastic early morning bicyclists.  Jo’s is just what you’d expect at America’s hippest hotel.  It is open to the elements.  We can’t do that in Central Square.  Jo’s has developed a NY Yankees strategy of buying up barista talent so two familiar faces from Davis Square’s Diesel Cafe were making the drinks.  They were excellent. I had a breakfast sausage from Elgin, Texas and was ready to work.  At the end of our labors we had a few hours before a business dinner so three of us drove around Austin looking for food trailers.  We found the South Austin Trailer Park  & Eatery on South First Street.  Torchy’s Tacos, Holy Cacao and Man Bites Dog.  All in one convenient location.  Travel & Leisure named Holy Cacao’s Hot Chocolate the best in the country.  They can’t lie about stuff like that.  We ordered enough food food for six people but we don’t get to South First Street as frequently as we should.  Man Bites Dog had an outstanding lamb sausage served with Greek yogurt.  We will happily steal this item and serve it this weekend as part of Breakfast@TheBigTable.  The tacos were wonderful.  But we couldn’t dawdle nor could we search for pork belly sliders or Gordough’s aistream donut shop.  Instead we went to my favorite restaurant Uchiko and ate crazy amounts of high end food that concluded with a challenging tobacco whiskey pastry.  Its hard to stay ahead in an information age.  TW Foods also offers the same idea but  Uchiko still had a corn medley consisting of corn sorbet, corn jelly and dehydrated corn something or other.  Good grief.

The next morning was unusually cold. No more shorts.    I walked over the Congress Ave. bridge, home to hundreds of thousands of bats that emerge at sunset.  While I was looking at a historic marker in the shape of Texas,  a runner stopped.  “Yesterday’s sunrise was amazing.”  He and I were happy with that day’s sunrise.  “There’s a sufi saying that the man who rises early owns the day.”  Then he resumed running, heading towards the Texas Capitol,  perhaps stopping to share his cosmic cowboy wisdom with other visitors.