October 27th -- Back to Houston

So, I checked out of the hotel. Last night when I checked in I picked up one of those "what to do in and around Austin" brochures in the hotel lobby. I've been to Austin a whole bunch of times and I doubted that it would tell me anything I didn't already know, but I thumbed through it. It suggested a visit to Mt. Bonnell, which is the highest point within the city limits, at 785 feet. The brochure calls it "one of Austin's oldest tourist attractions." Well, since I've never heard of it, I went to check it out. It's beautiful, great view of the expensive houses on the edge of the Colorado River. A nice new "thinking spot" should I ever need one again in Austin.

I really like Austin, at least, as long as it isn't summer. But some things that Sandy said last night might explain it ... the place really is like a Silicon Valley lite. Just like home, apparently, it's mostly men and relatively few women. Since so many people work in high tech, and they're all young and male, it's just like home, so it's comfortable.

Oh, speaking of Sandy, I need to correct something I said yesterday. I'll let her explain:

Now, before I get kicked out of Texas, I have to explain to you why it is a 2-step.

One, 1-2-3, One, 1-2-3, One, 1-2-3... can be translated into:

LONG-short-short-LONG-
LONG-short-short-LONG-
LONG-short-short-LONG...

So basically, you do 2 long steps and 2 short steps. It just seems easier to teach the first way than the second. If anyone knew I was teaching you to count to 3 to do the 2-step, they might revoke my Texas citizenship. And that's gonna come in handy when we secede. :)

It really is easier her way.

It was now after 11:00, so I called back to the Cummins place. Still no promises, but it looked good. So, I decided to head on back down to Houston.

No stops along the way, but I checked in again when I got into town, at about 4:00. Still looks good, maybe 5:30 or 6:00. So, I had two hours to waste. I went downtown, and walked around Tranquility Park, which is a little monument to the moon landing, with a memorial to the Challenger crew that died. Nice place right in the middle of the city. Then I went to another Kinko's to get on the web and check the stock price. Yup, it went over $32 today, which meant that maybe some of my sell order happened. I found out later that I told 360 shares, which isn't as many as I wanted to sell, but at least now I've seen some profit from the IPO :-)

Went to pick up the motorhome at 6:00. It was working (it both started *and* stopped!), but still needed to be buttoned up and cleaned up, and the paperwork needed to be done. All of that happened by about 6:45, and I loaded everything up and headed out. I decided not to go too far, since I was pretty tired, so I'm still here on the outskirts of Houston. The campground I'm at is experimenting with a new service -- active phone lines at the campsites. A lot of campgrounds have phone lines at each site, but they are inactive and if you are camped there for a long term, you can set up service yourself. But this place has set up permanently-active lines at two sites. They are really expensive, so they are charging $2/night more for those campsites. As it turns out, one of them was the only long pull-thru they had left, so I got it. I didn't even know, because I don't bother to ask for such a thing, but they apologized for the high price ($26) but explained that this was the reason. Once I knew, I was happy to pay the $26. Internet access right from the motorhome is worth it. What a geek.

In order to get home via the Grand Canyon, the routing software is keeping me on the interstates, going north through Dallas to Oklahoma City, then west on I-40 all the way to Barstow, CA. Seems as good a route as any, since this gets me through Oklahoma (another sticker for the back of the motorhome), and lets me do a stop in Santa Fe, a place I'd like to see.

So it's probably Oklahoma tomorrow night, New Mexico Friday night, Arizona Saturday night, California Sunday night, and possibly home Monday. That might be optimistic but we'll see how it works out.