And on Saturday, it rained....And rained, and rained, and rained. The rains were fun for some and not as much for others. The rains created all kinds of issues for the races on Sunday and Monday, but I won't go into that here, because you can read about that in a million other blogs and cyclocross forums. I will say, that people keep asking how to grow the sport for women and I will keep responding, "quit making us 2nd class citizens to the men in our races". I know I am a rabid feminist, but you don't have to be, to get upset about what happened in the junior women's races on Monday.
We watched the 11/12 year old juniors race on Saturday in the mud and that was crazy. Some of those kids could barely walk up the muddy hills, let alone ride them. Our Iowa kid in the race got caught in a crash and basically got his head run over by the bicycles behind him. Thank goodness for helmets. He still had a very respectable finish. What a kid!
After standing in the rain and mud, John and I finally got to go to Pinballz, this crazy place with over 100 pinball/video game machines that are all in great condition and don't cost too terribly much to play. We were in hog heaven. We even found a Gorgar machine, like the one they used to have at the Mill when we moved there. We spent a great couple of hours there, but then had to go and clean-up before our next fun thing.
A couple of days before, John's ex texted him to see if we wanted to go to a concert with her and the guy she came to Texas with. Having no other info than that, I imagined a midnight show at a bar with a bunch of drunk people and felt like it might not be my thing. Later, when we were finally at home and not driving somewhere to meet people and had more time to talk, I asked John if his ex mentioned who's concert it was. He said, "Alejandro Escovedo." Wait. What? Where?! He didn't know, so I looked it up and it was at Austin City Limits and started at 8. Well, that obviously changed everything. That was exactly the kind of older person show I could handle.
I was luckily able to get tickets and we met them at Torchy's Tacos for dinner and then headed to the show. Since we got tickets so late, John and I were seated in the back of the top balcony, but that ended up being perfect. We could see everything on stage (okay, once I put my glasses on. Whatever) and the show was lovely. It was a little sax heavy, (albeit, the sax player was great, but after the 80's most of us are pretty saxed-out) with the jazz band. I kept saying the band was over-saxed, which caused John to continually roll his eyes. Anyway, it was the perfect way to spend our last night in town.
On Sunday I tried to run again. It was the first time I ran since I got sick on Wednesday. I wasn't very strong, but I wanted to get on those amazing trails one last time before we headed up to the frozen tundra. I saw egrets and great blue herons and a weird looking duck that had a white head with red blotches. Hmmmm.
When we got back from running, we started hearing murmurs of the weirdness going on with CX Nats. The town of Austin closed down the venue because of muddy ruts possibly hurting the tree roots. At first they canceled the last and biggest day of racing. Not only that, they brought cops with tear gas into the park to arrest any cyclists who were at the venue. Talk about your biker gangs....So bizarre. Then the USAC folks talked them down and got them to hold the race the following day, to give them time to mulch the course and let it dry out a bit. It sucked for us, because we had to leave on Sunday afternoon. Oh, well.
Instead, we went to the graffiti walls and took a bunch of dorky photos. It was pretty cool. It was hard to find any space uncovered.
We headed to Chuy's for our last Texas meal before wen went to Oklahoma City for the night.
I was all migrainey, so when we got to our hotel, I had to lie down for a minute and rest. We figured out that there was a restaurant/bar downstairs in our hotel room and so we just ate down there and chatted up the bartender and another guy who was hanging out at the bar. We were both pretty fried, so this time, instead of checking out all the bars in restaurants in Bricktown, we opted to go back to our room and watch an episode of Freaks and Geeks. We were both more than fine with it. We had a great week, but we were so exhausted, and socially overwhelmed and happy to be going home to harass our asshole cats.
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