This week marked the end of my Spring Break career. At 25 I guess it's about time that all this fun finally comes to an end. Anyhow, I was all set to fly to Texas early Friday morning to see the lady friend. Thursday night rolled around and about 11pm I decided it was time to get my stuff together. About this same time I realized that my wallet was nowhere to be found. Freakout ensued. After turning our house upside down and finding nothing but a couple of corn chips, an mp3 player, and an assortment of pens, dust bunnies, and a sock, at 2am I gave up. Lucky for me, I can say that it is possible to get through airport security without a government issued photo id. You'll get hasseled, searched, patted down, and your carry on will get swabbed down and put in some weird looking ion detector thing, but you'll get on that plane (spoken by a non-threatening clean cut white male).
I arrived in Dallas and somehow convinced her (flowers, candy, and empty promises are magic) to drive me three and a half hours south to visit CMB in Austin for my first ride of the year. We were supposed to leave at 10 but circumstances delayed us. My morning poo clogged her toilet. Then after trying to force the titan down the drain I managed to break the plunger. I'm not sure how that is even possible but there are witnesses, including the guy at the grocery store who made the obvious statement, "Bad morning?" when we went to check out with a new, more durable plunger. Then on the way down, stopping for gas, someone decided to play a pretty damn funny prank. After they finished pumping their gas they left the "automatic pump latch" engaged. As soon as lady friend swiped the credit card and removed the nozzel the gas started pumping. Instead of just popping the latch like a normal person would do she began waving the nozzle frantically, like she was watering the parking lot, except with flammible liquid. Nothing and no one was safe. In less than four seconds she doused a large part of the parking lot and my feet - all for a cost of $1.18, right around 1/3 a gallon.
We finally pulled into CMB's driveway at 2pm and at 2:05 we were heading to the lake. His priorities are in order. This was my first trip to Austin and I must say that it has some rad scenery. Rolling hills, awesome houses, and you can see for miles from the right place. We picked up his Nauti 220, a beast of a boat, and drove about half a mile to Lake Austin only to realize that we probably left the garage open. A quick turn around solved this problem and we were on the water by 3.
I'd known for a few weeks that we were going to ride on Saturday so Austin's weather became a frequent check up. The day before we rode down Austin topped the Fahrenheit at 93. Hell and yes. With that type of sunshine I couldn't help but think that Saturday's trip might be my first first set where I didn't freeze. What I didn't realize was that Lake Austin, which is basically a river, pulls out of Lake Travis. Not a big deal you would think, but Lake Austin gets its water from the bottom of Travis, and it's cold. 62 degrees in fact. Umm, yeah, that's not really cold, and I could have skinned it. What I'm trying to say is that my first set of the year was only a tad chilly and damn near pleasant once we got on some of the flat water.
Lake Austin is about the same size as the Flint but has more wake boats per capita than any other body of water in the U.S. No, I don't have any factual basis for that statement but we must have seen 30 tower boats. These folks love some waterathletics. The first boat that passed by, a new Supra, was loaded down with at least a dozen people and a kid shredding a skate. As they passed us he dropped a picture perfect 3shuv and let us know that this was his river. A little further down we passed a Nautique, slammed with people partying and surfing. This boat had a left side lean going off and the wake they were surfing looked to be chest high. Sick. There were people riding on just about every straight away and the one thing I noticed, that seemed differenet from Georgia riding, was the number of people in each boat. It seemed that everyone had their entire crew plus SO's plus friends. Austin knows how to party.
There is a pretty diverse group of houses lining the water - a caboose, yes the tail end of a choo-choo train had been set on blocks and turned into a lake house. Next door was an 8500 sq ft mansion. True story. This guy even has a clock on his "boat house." Micheal Dell keeps a house on the lake too. You'll be happy to know that all of those PCs you bought put a full sized outdoor basketball court and football field on his property - that look over the water. Re-donk. We ended up on a friend of CMB's dock where they had cooked 100lbs of crawfish in the biggest low country boil I've ever seen. Just off the dock they had set up a nice half rainbow rail and took sets sessioning it with the greatest jetski I've ever seen. Those guys killed it and were having a blast going back and forth between the rail, boat sets, the cooler, and the massive amount of food scattered across tables that lined the edge of the water. We sat back and enjoyed the afternoon taking a couple of sets when a text came through from a buddy of mine in Tennessee. "Did you know that you left your wallet in my car?" Nope, I didn't. And at that moment I wasn't worried about it at all.
