I got back to Seattle on Saturday night, after four days of working in San Antonio and one night of playing in Austin.

San Antonio
I never actually made it to downtown San Antonio (I spent all my time either working at the hotel or in an office in a generic industrial park), so I won’t venture an opinion about the city itself. Still, here is a list of things that were not, in my experience, bigger in Texas:

Bathtubs in a Marriott
12 oz. bottles of beer
Hair

Where was the big hair? I was told there would be big, big hair. Granted, I saw more blue eye shadow in one week than I have in the previous five years, but I was promised big hair, dammit.

Also, I was expecting hard water in San Antonio, but apparently the hotel overcompensated with excessive amounts of softener in the water system. It was like showering in Downy. Ick.

Austin
One of the last things I did before I left Seattle was send an e-mail to my friend Karen in Austin confessing my ignorance of Texas geography and wondering if I’d be anywhere near her neck of the non-woods. When she told me she was within reasonable driving distance, I switched my flight out from Friday morning to Saturday afternoon, went back to my fourteen hour work days, and waited for Karen to rescue me.

And rescue me she did. She came Friday, and we drove to Austin, spending the first half hour or so in a thoroughly dramatic thunderstorm featuring hail and, later, what we were pretty sure was a funnel cloud.

On the way she explained many things about Texas, including the fact that I was more likely to see big hair in Dallas, where there is both lower humidity and a higher commitment to hair spray.

Later we hooked up with a big group of her friends at a Cuban restaurant, where there was excellent food and nifty conversation. Afterward we went to the Continental Club and saw Elizabeth McQueen (I bought her CD, and I’ve been listening to it since I got back) and then Wayne Hancock.

At the end of the evening, on the way to the car, Karen pointed out a few members of the famous Austin bat colony, although at first I thought some clumps of garbage dangling from a roof were the bats, and bats were moths.

It was just that kind of fabulous, bat-addled night.