Texas - Day 84 - to Austin

Leander KOA, Leander
Tuesday, 26 January 2021

I'm not bothering with a route map for this trip because I've driven this same route several times before - most recently just a couple of weeks ago.  I went down I-35W until it joined with I-35E and became just plain I-35, and took that straight down to Austin.  It took me exactly 3 hours and 40 minutes to drive from the campground to Hancock Center at 40th St and Red River in Austin.  And that was with me going only 65 mph the whole way, despite the higher speed limits.  So that's good to know.  (Wonder if I'll remember.)

There wasn't anything particularly memorable about this drive, other than the large number of police out on the highway watching for bad driving.  You'd think this was a weekend or a national holiday, there were so many of them out.

At Bruceville-Eddy, I saw enormous fields of a bright emerald green, which were clearly a crop of some kind.  The contrast was sharp with the brown-green fields everywhere else. 

I remember Bruceville and Eddy as separate towns when I was young, and I hadn't realized they'd merged, so I looked it up.  I learned the merger happened in 1974, after I got out of college but was still being oblivious to the world around me, like so many other 20-somethings tend to do.  Unusually, each of these towns retained their separate post offices until Bruceville's developed unsafe foundation problems in 2009, and then they merged those too.

I saw a bumper sticker that said "Make America Kind Again."

In Austin, I took the puppies by Hyde Park Animal Clinic for their 2nd shots of the canine influenza vaccine, and I hope it actually works.

Then we stopped to walk a bit and have lunch, and then I dropped them off at Taurus Academy.  And I hope they have a wonderful time barking at other dogs for several days.

From there I drove the 15 or 20 miles to the Leander KOA and instantly started cleaning up doggy detritus.  I pulled the covers off their beds and took all the beds outside to air on the picnic table.  Then I swept the mounds of dog hair off the floor, twice, because one go-round doesn't get it all up.

I did some rearranging of supplies and just generally took advantage of the lowered energy level and lack of need to walk the dogs every 3 or 4 hours to get some things done around the RV.