In Waco we broke into a house...

Yesterday we rode in the back of a police car. This was a first for both of us. Those things are kind of cramped! But any space feels cramped when my big pack is sitting on my lap. No, we were not arrested. Our couchsurfing host from San Antonio had dropped us off about 18 miles north of San Antonio after a full morning of the Alamo and the Riverwalk...

At the Alamo. I forgot that water bottle today in one of our rides.


Dancers we saw in San Antonio along the river.

We were right outside of a little town called Selma, and standing near a car dealership. It was not a great spot for catching a ride, or so we thought. Turns out it's a great spot to get moved along by the police. The cop that stopped said they've had some trouble recently with hitchhikers breaking into buildings, so they don't like hitchhikers to hitch in Selma. He seemed almost apologetic and said we didn't fit the description of the troublemakers, but he still needed to move us along. He drove us to a nearby rest stop and wished us luck on our journey.

We caught a ride next with a man who was born in Seattle, coincidentally. He said Austin is like what Seattle was about 30 years ago and that's one of the reasons he and his wife chose to live there. We enjoyed talking to him and he drove us right into the city, to 6th and Congress. We walked around a free contemporary arts center called Arthouse and then wandered towards the Capitol until it came time to call Gary, Brendan's uncle, to meet him.

We spent a delightful evening yesterday and afternoon today with Gary. He treated us to dinner at a Mexican restaurant last night (a very real treat indeed since we haven't eaten out in a restaurant in probably two months) and today we toured the Capitol. While Gary was in his conference in the morning, Brendan and I walked around the University of Texas campus. They have a Creative Writing MFA program, so I wanted to see if I liked the city and the campus. I do.

The Capitol building of Texas.

Inside the Capitol.

View of the Capitol and downtown from the campus of the University of Texas.

Oy. On to our hitchhiking ventures of today. We caught a short ride out of downtown with a delightful woman. This is the first time in our southern hitchhiking that we have been picked up by a solo woman, which I think is noteworthy. She was really nice and fun to talk to, and we exchanged contact information by the end of the ride. Our next ride was another short one, from a man and his pre-teenish daughter. Apparently she had been skeptical about picking us up, but he thought we looked okay and seemed impressed when we told him that we do street performance and hail from Seattle. They were also really nice. Can I just insert here that we have met so many super nice people while hitchhiking? It's the best of us that pick up hitchhikers.

A UT student who often picks up hitchhikers took us another twenty miles or so along I-35 north. He dropped us off outside a gas station and we approached a trucker who was parked there to see if he was headed north. He was on his way to Dallas and said he could take us to Waco, but he wasn't going to be leaving for another thirty minutes or so. We checked around with a few other people, and either they weren't going north or just didn't seem interested in giving us a ride, so we went back to the trucker. This was my first ride in a big rig! It was really fun. I got to sit on the bed in the back. He took us to Waco, where my good friend Cassondra picked us up.

I think I was born to be a trucker.

View from my seat.

Cassondra took us out for a delicious dinner at a local hole-in-the-wall type joint where they have "oriental fries." Oriental fries are all sorts of yummy veggies sliced very thinly, breaded, and fried. Yum. Then Cassondra drove us through the old downtown area and to the Baylor campus to see the bears. When we got back to Cass's place, she discovered her house keys were missing from her key ring. We looked around for them in the car, but they were nowhere to be found. We even drove back to the eatery to see if they fell out in the parking luck, but no luck.

We ultimately we went to Walgreen's and Cassondra bought some pliers so we could try and take the heavy-duty screen off of one of her windows and then climb in. Success! Brendan painstakingly unscrewed the hex-screws (I don't know what they're really called), and I climbed in and came around to open the door. And that is the story of how we broke into a house in Waco. Sorry it wasn't as exciting as it may have sounded from the title, but I'm tired.

On the road, currently in San Antonio

We are now several days into very fruitful hitchhiking and couchsurfing ventures. We bid farewell to New Orleans on Monday morning, after a fun Sunday evening of one last game session, and playing with the color settings on the camera.

I don't think he knows I took this picture.

Our friend Aaron dropped us off at an I-10 west entrance and our wait there was our longest wait so far. After about an hour and twenty minutes we got picked up by a man going to Hammond, Louisiana. Hammond is north of New Orleans, but our ride said that lots of people headed towards Houston from the east will take the route that passes through Hammond in order to avoid the New Orleans city traffic. Along the way, he and Brendan got into a rousing politics discussion. Our ride said Brendan is the first left-wing nutjob he's ever met. I think he really enjoyed the conversation because he invited us to come over for barbeque when we are near New Orleans again.

At the gas station where he left us, a family traveling in a motor home was filling up. We approached the dad and asked if they were heading west, and if so, could we have a ride? He said he would check with his wife. We waited outside the station and when he came to pay, he told us sorry, but she didn't feel comfortable with it. We said thanks anyway, and gave him our card. We walked to the highway entrance, and a few minutes later, the motor home family stopped for us! I think we seemed a little more legit after giving them our card. We rode with them the rest of the way to Houston, and had a delightful time playing pictionary and hangman and telling stories to their kids. That is the first time we got to sit on a couch in a fairly comfortable living room while hitchhiking.

We stayed with the sweetest couchsurfing family ever in Houston. They picked us up where the motor home family dropped us, fed us dinner, gave us a private bedroom to sleep in and our own bathroom to use, provided towels and a trip the museum district and drove us around the city to see weird stuff like massive presidential busts, plus the Beatles.


They are everything I aspire to be in a couchsurfing host. They made us feel so welcome, just like we were part of the family. We stayed there two nights, and this morning our friend Mike and his visiting friend Mike picked us up. We drove around the Rice University campus and neighborhood and then went back to his apartment and learned how to play a fun game called Arkham or something like that.

After the game, Mike dropped us off near another I-10 west entrance and we started hitching for a ride outside of Reliant Stadium, where they were having a rodeo that we hypothesized was a disabled rodeo because so many people with cowboy hats on and with disabled tags on their cars kept pulling into the parking lot. But then we also figured that a lot of rodeo riders end up disabled, so that could explain it. We got a ride from a super nice man who went about 30 miles out of his way just to drop us off at a gas station rather than a shopping center. He also gave us his phone number so we could contact him whenever we do plan to go to Mexico, because he is from there.

Our next ride was short, just to the next exit, but it put us in the right place to get picked up by a man going all the way to San Antonio, and to see this:

They spelled it right!

I don't think I've even mentioned yet that we were headed to San Antonio to see the Alamo. Based on the advice from a wide cross-section of people, we decided that now is not the best time to visit northern Mexico, so we figured we should see some historical Texas stuff instead. The man who picked us up has a wife and kids in San Antonio, but works in Lafayette, Louisiana, so he drives back and forth a lot. He was very nice, and dropped us off outside a bank, where our next couchsurfing host picked us up.

Now we are in San Antonio! Our host is very kind and made dinner for us when we arrived, and we shared some Wisconsin cheese with her. Tomorrow she is going to give us a ride into downtown, as she lives about ten minutes or maybe more to the north of downtown. We will visit the Alamo and walk around downtown a bit, and then we're off to Austin! We found out Brendan's uncle is there on business until Friday, so we want to get there quick so we can see him. We're going to Waco after that, and then hopefully Plano (if you're reading this, Michael and Danielle, sorry we haven't called yet and I hope we can stay with you!).

Enjoy the funny looking ducks we saw at Hermann Park in Houston: