Click on images below to enlarge:
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| The shaded part of the roof seating. Sadly, it lacks the trees and
cactuses of the unshaded part. The comparatively few people here make
me think the roof seating is a secret.
| Near Whole Foods, there are aphorisms written on the side of the
Lululemon Athletica store. I like them all.
You'll have to
enlarge the picture to read them.
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| More Downtown Austin
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| A dillo: a cheap, downtown, short-distance street-car. I took one to
get to and return from Whole Foods.
| The Driskill Hotel.
| An typical example of the restored late-19th-century buildings on East
6th Street.
| Another example.
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| When all you have are restored old buildings, even the chains must
occupy them.
| I unexpectedly found this stunning scene when looking south from 6th
Street between Sabine Street and East Avenue. (The river passes under
6th.)
It gets an excellent partially due to the setting
and partially due to the picture, which I took at the highest
resolution.
| O. Henry's house, now a museum devoted to him. I didn't enter.
Also excellent because I like the foliage.
| Yet more typical restored 6th Street architecture.
Every building
and every sign is for a bar, all seven of them (including The Aquarium
and The Library), right in a row. And this isn't unusual for 6th
Street!
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| Are there other cities in the world where you'd see a sign like this?
| A Texan mural, both in size and theme. How many Austin or Texan symbols
can you count?
I see bats (famous in Austin), the Texas
star, wide open spaces bisected by a highway, the necessary car,
buffalo, barbed-wire fences, and cactuses.
| The Millett Opera House. I wouldn't have thought it'd be large enough,
but I guess that's why it stopped operating in 1911.
| The well-proportioned St. Mary's Cathedral. The stone looks
surprisingly clean for being over a century old.
Excellent.
(I'm feeling generous today.)
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| St. Mary's Cathedral, as seen reflected in the building across the
street.
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| Congress Avenue Bridge Bats
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The view east down the Colorado River from the Congress Avenue bridge.
There is a network of trails like the one in the bottom-left that
run along the river.
| From my vantage point, I could see under the bridge and the people
gathering on the bridge itself to await the bats.
| The bats begin to emerge on the far side of the bridge.
| A movie of the bats streaming out from under the bridge. You must watch
this!
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| Later, the bats emerged from this side of the bridge.
| There they go!
| A movie of bats emerging from the near side of the bridge. They darken
the sky, producing what looks like lines in the sky.
| More bats.
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| | Another bat movie. Look how jagged their flight paths are. They're
very maneuverable.
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| Austin After Dark
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| Easily the most noticeable building downtown at night.
| The Texas State Capitol at night. You can see the silhouettes of some of
the monuments surrounding it.
| The Texas Lottery drawings are done at night in a building on East 6th
Street. The public's invited to watch. Though I didn't wait to watch
the drawings, I did stick my head inside.
I'm told the drawings
are done by machine.
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| Fodder for the Panorama of the inside of Maria's Taco Xpress
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