Archive for February, 2003

Eleven years ago in May, Mel and I came to Austin for a weekend trip. It was love at first sight. One month later, we packed up all our stuff and moved here. We had little beyond our love for each other (corny, I know, but it’s true) and our love of this town. I had a part-time job lined up. Mel was unemployed and looking.

We had plenty of spare evening hours to kill, very little money, and no cable TV or Internet to enthrall us. So we spent a lot of time looking for bargain places to eat and cheap or free entertainment:

Dinner at Sandy’s (burger, fries, and drink for $1.99 on Thursdays and Saturdays). Or Tuesdays at the Texas Chili Parlor, where you could get two-fer hamburgers. (I never had the courage to try their flaming-hot chili.) Sometimes we would splurge and go to Green Mesquite for BBQ or El Mercado on South First Street.

Then on to Chance’s (early for a cheaper cover charge) to sit outside in the summer heat and listen to music echoing off the outdoor stage’s the limestone cliff backdrop. Or we would prowl Liberty Books, a local gay/lesbian bookstore, for reading material and information on what was happening in the community, and then take stroll through Whole Foods at its original location. Sometimes, we would continue with a walk-through of Eclectic, a funky import store that used to reside at 12th and Lamar. We used to get fun, cheap stocking stuffers at Eclectic.

Or we would drop a couple of dollars in the gas tank of our red Chevy S-10 pickup and drive around for a couple of hours, looking at all the neato neighborhoods and discussing where we wanted to live when we were finally able to afford a house.

As the years went by, we found our lives more involved in family, work, home, and pets. (We finally bought a house — a fixer-upper that is not our dream home by any stretch of the imagination — but it’s ours and it’s in South Austin, which we love.) We don’t get out as much now and, of course, most of the old haunts have changed.

Sandy’s Thursday/Saturday special continues, although it’s 50 cents more. A bargain, still. Chances is now Club DeVille. Liberty Books is gone. Whole Foods moved into fancy new digs a couple of blocks away, with a parking garage and everything. Now they are looking to move again, into even fancier digs. Eclectic moved down the street, too. In my opinion, both lost a lot of their charm when they decided to go after upper-scale dollars.

Can you still find Austin charm in four hours? Let’s see…

Take a drive. Austin’s neighborhoods remain a wacky and wonderful mix of rich/poor and urban/rural, despite the gentrification going on in some older neighborhoods. Wander through Hyde Park. Check out Clarksville or Tarrytown. Drive down South First Street.

You can still have dinner at El Mercado or Green Mesquite, although prices have gone up quite a bit. After dinner, check out the Cathedral of Junk in South Austin.

Have some Amy’s Ice Cream. Yes, even on a cold, blustery day like today.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that the Austin we fell in love with is still here, somewhere, buried under the dust of the dotcom bust. You got four hours? Go find it!

(Posted in conjunction with Austin Bloggers’ Austin Blog Day.)