25th of October - Austin

In some scary way facebook knew that I was in Texas and I got an invitation from the Austin cycling association to join their new to Austin ride at 10 in the morning. I thought it was a very nice idea to have a city tour on the bike. The way from the hotel to the city center led me past the football stadium where they prepared for some kind of big game or they have always as much going on if they have a game in town, I don't really want to know. Austin might be progressive for Texas but it is still Texas. Everybody was dressed in orange and so was I - accidently fitting in, later I found out orange was the color of the enemy.
At the convention center was a pretty big group of cyclists which was the city tour group and a road ride group. I wanted to have a longer ride than the short city tour, but still decided to have it afterwards. It was a really nice way to see the city and thanks to other well informed Texans I learned a lot, which I would probably not have learned alone. After the ride four of us had a nice Mexican lunch and than went to Lance Armstrongs shop, where somebody took the broken aerobars of my bike. I talked to several people working there, one guy just moved there from SF where he lived in the Haight. I left the aerobars there to pick them up by car on the next day. Sunday had a big fundraiser where people went with Lance A. on a live strong ride for which you had to have raised or begged for at least 500$ for the lowest level. We had one woman on the ride who was in Austin to ride there.
the rest of the afternoon I followed the route Norman who guided the city tour recommendet and found out that Austin has a lot of really steep hills and nice riding, if only for that texan pavement.
Austin is nice for a vacation, but it is still much to spread out for my taste and than it lacks ocean and mountains. I would not like to live there, but I haven't expected anything else.