Exploring Austin

Today I drove up near our apartment to attend St. Albert the Great Catholic Church - it has a very racially diverse population of parishioners. It looks likely to be our parish during our stay here. After that I took the bus from the apartment to UT to learn some of the ins and outs of the route. I poked around part of the UT campus area including the famous clock tower. When I got back to the apartment I got access to look around - it looks fine to me. After this I stopped by Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park (nearby) to look around - and found some shell fossils. There is a lot of bedrock pretty close to the surface around here. I can see the "hill country" in the distance but have not driven that far west. On the way back to the hotel I stopped at a Goodwill store to see what they had for bicycles (not much) and I found that they have set up a computer museum. It's cute (and free). The display shown is of old Mac computers - looks like they have been plaguing the world for a while! During the drives I have had the opportunity to practice driving the frontage roads. All the major highways have frontage roads that run parallel to them very closely and have a number of access points to the highway. That is not surprising, but what is tricky is that the frontage roads are one way (running the same direction as the lanes they parallel). Additionally, the signage is confusing me - a sign that indicates highway access (and I think "on-ramp") also indicates the frontage road. It's like driving in circles somtimes - or rather, really long ovals. I promised myself I would try not to whine about the heat - after all, I brought this move to Austin upon myself. I am surprised to find, however, that this is a not quite a "business as usual" drought down here. There are a lot of these black birds around here - they look like a cross between a crow and a road runner and they look like they have been suffering a bit. I stopped at a nearby mall because my hotel room had not yet been cleaned. I was amused at how the cars crowded under the shade of the trees. There is such a low percentage of stores open in that Highland Mall. I walked to supper tonight. It was still about 100 F out, but it is drier heat than Peoria at this point so it was not so bad, though I set the AC pretty low in my hotel room. Not much left to report, except to break some misconceptions: I have detected very few deep South accents so far (quite a few Hispanic ones, though) and I have seen very few cowboy hats. Tomorrow is my first day at UT and I move into the apartment.