30 March 2005
Weary Travel’s End
Lately every time I go on a vacation I end up imagining what it would be like to live there. I think this is a pretty standard traveler’s diversion, wandering around some new place as a tourist and imagining how it would feel to walk those streets every day. It’s never really accurate, cities are never the same when you live there as you remember when you visited. All the half-formed first impressions that inevitably fade or get corrected if you stick around, along with the whole sense of unfamiliarity that’s such a big part of what makes new places exciting. But it’s fun, and it passes the time in traffic.
Most people are satisfied to leave it up to their imagination, but when Laura and I visited Dallas and Austin last week we started a rating scale. Just to keep things straight (and because we’re huge geeks). Dallas, with its snakepit of highways and its insulated culture of conspicuous suburban consumption, rated a two out of five (it got courtesy points for good museums, and a modicum of actual culture). Austin, with its active music scene, warm weather and support for creative professions, earned a four (losing points for the standard cons of any larger city—traffic, crime and crowds—and also for being in Texas).
Surprisingly, the actual experience in each city were almost exactly reversed. In the end, it had nothing to do with surroundings, and everything to do with circumstances.
By all accounts Dallas should have been stressful. I was scheduled to meet Laura’s dad, mom, stepdad, grandparents and brother, all in the space of a few days. But everything went smoothly, the weather was pleasant, and the whole experience was warm and relaxing. We had great dinners, brunches and conversations with Laura’s family, spent time with her friends and saw the best Dallas had to offer (with lots of 20-minute highway drives in between). It’s still kind of a horrific place and somewhere I would never want to live, but for four days with the right people, it turned out nice.
In the original plan, Dallas was the family-visit half of the vacation and Austin was the vacation part, so when we “escaped” Dallas for Austin we breathed a sigh of relief. For the first 24 to 48 hours in Austin, everything seemed to be going according to plan – sort of. I should have known better when we drove into town and I spent the first two hours standing in line at the convention center to pick up my badge.
We were there for the annual musical smorgasboard that is the SXSW music festival. The company I work for was a cosponsor this year, so I took the opportunity to snag one of our free press badges and make a vacation out of it.
In theory, the badge sounded too good to pass up: free entry and line-skipping at any of the dozens of venues showcasing hundreds of artists for the five-day festival. In practice, it turned out to be a nightmare perfectly designed to drive me nuts. Our first snag, after the 2 hour wait at the convention center, was that Laura didn’t have a badge. If we wanted to go anywhere together, her only option short of paying cover at six clubs in one night was to pay $130 for a wristband, which would guarantee her free entry to any of the SXSW venues, as long as it wasn’t sold out or there weren’t people with badges waiting to get it. It sounded reasonable—out of all the shows in a night, surely not everything we wanted to see could be sold out—and we didn’t have any other options, so Laura paid up and we got started.
The first night wasn’t too bad. We met some interesting people and saw some interesting shows. I got in to see Elvis Costello, but Laura didn’t. Which worked out fine, since she found another cool show to see a few blocks away. We figured that would be the worst of it. We were wrong.
We spent the rest of the weekend wandering around during the day, shopping and generally enjoying Austin. Every night around eight we started looking for a parking space downtown. Thirty minutes later, we gave up and paid eight dollars to park within walking distance of the venue where somebody we wanted to see was playing three hours later because by the time they actually played the line would be so long we’d never get in. So we stuck it out for a couple sets from a couple bands that might be decent or might be horrible, nursing five dollar domestic beers. By the time the band we wanted to see came on, we were already beat. Every night the lines got longer, and we got burned out sooner. By Saturday night the lines were around the block all over the place, all the pay-to-park garages were full, and my brain was fried. I parked at a gas station by the highway and commenced to lose it just a little.
Thankfully, Laura was there to wipe the foam from my mouth and talk me out of starting the drive back to Lawrence right then and there. Instead, we met her friend at a slightly less crowded bar off the beaten path and settled in for an “International Showcase.” The Iranian band that was supposed to be there couldn’t make it because they were detained for visa inspections (which made me feel a little better about our night), but we saw nice Scandanavian and Italian bands instead, and relaxed on comfy couches. By far the highlight of the evening was hearing Keren Ann, a charming French indie-pop chanteuse, whose mellow lullabyes were just what I needed.
All in all, everything turned out OK. SXSW was a bust, but it was free. Austin’s a fun town and I’d gladly go back sometime when it’s not under siege by thousands of music snobs. And who knows, if the right situation came up, I could see myself living there someday. And Dallas has decent museums and outlet malls. And Laura’s family is under the impression that I’m an alright guy. Overall a pretty good record for nine days in Texas.
We almost got out scot-free. Leave it to Oklahomans to ruin the party. On the way home, Laura got caught in the giant speed trap disguised as a city that is Oklahoma City. She got a $160 ticket and a patronizing lecture from an overweight cop about how he “didn’t want to have to call her momma and tell her she was dead”, all because she was driving 75 miles an hour on an interstate highway. This being the seventh time Laura’s been pulled over in seven months (she’s taken to asking Lawrence cops if there’s any way they can just take the money out of her paycheck every month), she was visibly upset. She bawled so hard that Officer Condescending was moved to pencil in a zero in the second digit to keep the ticket off her record.
So before the trip was over we both had our baby breakdowns. There are a few things I get cranky about really easily (OK, there are a lot of things I get cranky about really easily, but there are few things I get really cranky about). These include crowds, driving and not enough sleep. Put those all together and stretch it out for a few days at a time with no time alone to refresh, shake vigorously, and you’ve got a recipe for Wilson Washout.
Now that I’ve been home for a while and had some time to recover, I’m realizing that my weaknesses aren’t just waiting for me on vacation – I’m stuck with them every day. I always have the ingredients at hand for freaking out in my own special passive-agressive way if I’m not careful. The conditions are never going to be perfect, so the less I try to make them that way and the better I learn to deal gracefully with the less-than-perfect moments, the more moments I’ll be able to enjoy.
This past weekend at least three of the bands we missed at SXSW played to less-than-packed venues within walking distance of my apartment. But I stayed home. There’s plenty more where that came from.
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