We wish you a Merry Solstice, Happy Holidays, and an excellent New Year! We’ve been enjoying our own, bike-tour-themed holiday season. It’s had the same arc as the usual holidays: the pre-Christmas shopping rush; the post-Christmas fugue spent eating leftover chocolate; and ringing in the New Year with a bottle of wine. It’s been familiar, but made different by the fact that we’re traveling right now.
Ever since we left Pensacola, we’ve been seeing festive signs of Christmas. We’d seen Christmas parades in Alabama and Baton Rouge, and an elaborate light show in DeRidder, Lousisana, synchronized to pop music over a short range FM station. I found myself reflecting more on holidays past – traditions and experiences that didn’t quite seem to translate to the present. People are absent or gone, and the context is different, but the emotional memory remains, and pushes itself to the surface.
Amy and I decided that a few things were important to us for our own Christmas celebration – feeling festive, cooking and baking, and communicating with our families. We also wanted to explore some new traditions of our own, given that this was our first Christmas together as a married couple, and really our first Christmas just with each other and not with our nuclear families.
We approached Austin from the surrounding ranch country on December 21st. Cities often seem almost like an appartion in the surrounding terrain. Texas’s natural beauty – unpolluted streams and grasslands filled with long horned cattle – extended right up until the Colorado River, where the city proper starts. Often times there are natural corridors that retain the characteristics of the surrounding countryside and approach quite close to the city center. Being cyclists following a route designed to avoid suburban sprawl, we naturally follow these routes, so there is usually that surprising moment when we suddenly realize that we are in a city. Austin was the perfect example of this.
After crossing the bridge from Montopolis over into what we termed ‘Southwanus’ (a portmanteau of ‘Southern’ and ‘Gowanus’), we regrouped at a coffee shop before checking into our hostel, Drifter Jack’s. We spent our first two nights there, near the University of Texas campus. It was kind of fun to stay at a hostel again. The last time either of us had been in a dorm was during our individual travels through Europe. The hostel staff, who were our age, were very friendly and allowed us to store our bikes in their shed for a few days.
The geography of Austin reminded me of Toronto: with the (Texan) Colorado river taking the place of Lake Ontario, and the city extending northwards with a large university dominating the center of town. In this analogy, Southwanus would be part of the brewpub and condo-rich Torontonian waterfront, with the hostel being located somewhere near Spadina and University. Toronto, of course, is a lot larger and denser than Austin.
On Saturday, the morning of the 23rd, we ate wonderful breakfast tacos and moved to an apartment that we had rented downtown, next to Whole Foods. We wanted to spend Christmas somewhere we could cook and have private space with wifi for Skype calls. We spent most of the weekend doing our Christmas errands – picking up and mailing packages, purchasing gifts, and shopping for groceries for Christmas dinner. We picked out gift wrap supplies at the ‘Center for Creative Reuse’, which sorts and resells donated goods to people who might use them for crafts. That evening, we went on a long walk to see the Austin Trail of Lights and drink spiked cider.
On Christmas Eve, after shopping, we decided to continue one of our own holiday traditions. For the past few years we had gone on a Christmas bike ride. This involved riding our bicycles from our apartment in Brooklyn over the Brooklyn bridge and up Broadway to Harold square, Times Square, then over to Fifth Avenue. Usually we would take a few stops to go see the big tree at Rockerfeller center, drink hot chocolate, and buy a few stocking stuffers at Jack’s, a famous dollar store across from Macy’s. We’d usually time the ride to coincide with ‘Santacon’, a New Jersey tradition in which college-age revelers dress up as Santa, elves and sexy reindeer, drink copious quantities of alcohol and be generally belligerent, so we would sometimes have a bit of fun at their expense.
Even though we aren’t living in New York any more, we wanted to have our ride, so we affixed some CVS battery-powered Christmas tree lights to our bikes and rode around Austin. We had a few slices of gingerbread cake to hand out to those who we saw. For the most part we didn’t see many people on the streets, but we did manage to get rid of the cake, 50% to the staffers at a nearby ER, 40% to the community fridge at Drifter Jack’s, and 10% to a homeless person.
The exuberance of our ride was somewhat curtailed when my bike chain snapped completely. This wasn’t entirely a surprise to me, as I had been having a lot of problems shifting recently, and had to remove a link from my chain while in western Louisiana. I bent the broken link back with a pair of pliers and we were able to limp the 4 miles back home, including a stop for Christmas Eve dinner at In ‘N Out Burger.
On Christmas day itself we exchanged presents, cooked, and phoned our families. A sampling of gifts:
- Waterproof socks
- 1oz Moka pot espresso maker
- Chocolate Santas
- Additional chocolate, a panettone, sausage, and dehydrated bananas
- Winter bike gloves
- Hand and foot warmers
- A bike computer
- New sleeping mats (to replace our old, mouldy ones)
We cooked a nice beef pot roast and spent most of the day relaxing and digesting all of the chocolate gifts we received.
On Boxing Day we took a bus out to Katy, Texas to visit my old friend Nick from high school, and his parents Bob and Suzie. We were originally going to only spend the evening, but we ended up staying for a few days, playing board games, conversing, and watching television. I had my first introduction to “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In”, which both Suzie and my parents claimed was a “staple of their childhood” growing up in the late 1960s. Cue rapid zoom-in/zoom-out sequence of dancing Goldie Hahn with flower power body paint. I still had the finale song stuck in my head for a few days afterwards. We also watched more than a few episodes of “Person of Interest”, and went out to see the new Star Wars movie. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that their cat Mishka, who they hand-fed from a tiny kitten adopted on the streets of Cairo, is still alive and doing quite well. She’s sort of a strange feline link to the past.
After leaving Katy, we went back to Austin for a final day of errands. According to our map, Austin was the last large city we would encounter before beginning our trip through the dry expanse of west Texas, so we wanted to make sure that our bikes were fully stocked and repaired. We made a trip to the H.E.B to do a full food repurchase and replaced both chains and cassettes on the bikes.
Apparently the bike chain and sprocket are considered wearable parts, and we’ve been putting a lot of wear on our bicycles. Dutch-style bikes have sealed chain-cases, but ours certainly don’t and spend a lot of time outdoors (like us!). Amy’s chain was visibly damaged, and while mine had been replaced in Pensacola, it had already reworn itself due to the sorry state of my rear cassette. I’m still not exactly sure why it broke, but the new chain has been holding up quite well. For simplicity, I made the transition to friction shifting so I could change to a 9-speed from a 10 speed. I’ve gotten used to it already — I don’t understand why more people don’t use friction shifting.
The mechanic who repaired our bicycles had a thing or two to say about Austin in its current state. His sentiment was that “the economy should crash so all the people that are just here because there’s money will leave”. I can certainly understand that. It seems that in many of the cities we’ve seen in the US, money can be almost an occupying force, that changes the place and the lives of those who live there.
The next day we spent biking out of the gravity well of Austin, both figuratively and literally. We boosted ourself up to Bee Cave through amazing Mediterranean hills, and then on to Johnson City.
We spent New Years drinking some local wine and watching the ball drop in Times Square, as well as the “Lone Star New Year’s Eve” fireworks in Houston. An unseasonably cold two days have trapped us here in Johnson City, but we’re looking forward to continuing west across the hills as soon as the weather clears.
To all our blog readers, I hope you have a Happy New Year and that your 2018 is a fantastic one!
