The first day of my drive home from Seguin, Texas found me in Van Horn, Texas at a Ramada Express. I had hoped to find a Whataburger in Van Horn but there wasn’t one. Instead, I got directed by the motel clerk to something even better — Chuy’s.

Chuy’s has an interesting history. It was visited one night by John Madden, the football coach and TV commentator, who had parked his mobile home in the little town for the night and wandered into Chuy’s hoping to watch a televised football game there, which he did, also sampling the food.

He liked the place and the food and wrote it up in Time magazine, making it instantly appealing to people traveling though Van Horn on I-10.  The incident is recounted in a little blurb on the restaurant’s menu and referred to as a miracle.

I had some good fish tacos there and a couple of bottles of ice-cold Corona beer, which tasted remarkably refreshing after the day on the road.

Two more  days of driving brought me back to Las Vegas, with souvenirs of my Texas adventure in hand, courtesy of my friend Hilmar — a bottle of rustic but tasty Texas Hill Country wine, a print of a drawing of Gruene Hall by a friend of Hilmar’s, and various mementos of SXSW.  It had been a remarkable journey.

Click on the images to enlarge.

On my last day in Austin, Hilmar took me to Olivia’s for brunch. There I had the dish above — Oysters Benedict, Eggs Benedict on homemade bread with fried oysters. Why have I never seen this dish on any other menu before? It is the apotheosis of brunch fare.

We drove back to Seguin that afternoon and that evening went to nearby Gruene, Texas — a town that had died but been revived as a tourist destination. At its heart was Gruene Hall, built in 1878, the oldest continuously operating dance hall in The Lone Star State. It was deep Texas:

Hilmar’s family is of German descent, as are many families in the areas around Austin and San Antonio and points south. They immigrated for the most part in the middle of the 19th Century, bringing with them their music, the polka specifically.  It mixed with the Mexican music of the Latino population in the region to create what we now know as Tex-Mex music, which migrated in turn to Louisiana to become part of the basis of Cajun music.

A Texas dance hall is very similar to a classic German beer garden — because of the beer, of course, which flows in abundance, but also because of the long communal tables where people, including many whole families, sit enjoying the music, and the dance floor, where people of all ages two-step around.

I wore a cowboy hat my whole time in Texas.  I didn’t see many other people wearing them in Austin or San Antonio — I got plenty of compliments on mine, as though the headgear was both exotic and reassuring — but there were lots of cowboy hats at Gruene Hall.

After a few beers at the Hall, we went and had dinner at The Grist Mill, an old mill overlooking the Guadalupe River which had been converted into a fancy restaurant.

The view of the river far below us was mesmerizing:

The next day I headed off west, driving home.

At the Red Rock Casino here in Las Vegas we used to have a branch of The Salt Lick, a famous Texas rib joint, but it closed a couple of years ago, to my intense chagrin. To my intense delight, Hilmar took me to the original Salt Lick which, as it happens, is located out in the countryside not too far from Austin.

It’s a vast place, with indoor and outdoor seating on picnic tables, and was jammed with Texans, including many families, the Saturday afternoon we visited. There was a bit of a wait but we improved the time by sampling a couple of local beers which they had on tap. One was a dark beer flavored with jalapeños, the other was a lighter brew flavored with pecans. I could have sat out there all day alternating between the two, but there was meat to be eaten — we got combo plates of brisket, sausages and ribs. Mighty tasty. Hilmar gave me The Salt Lick Cookbook as a souvenir:

That night we wandered around Austin again, looking for fun — ran across a concert by Prince at the Zona Rosa which required some sort of pass more exclusive than our SXSW badges, so we moved on to Lambert’s to see what was happening at its upstairs bar, a music venue.

We lucked into a great line-up of country bands, the pearl of which was Rosie Flores, the legendary rockabilly spitfire, now 63 but still smoking:

Rosie is sort of like a Latina Wanda Jackson — she has in fact toured with Jackson — and she is something else in concert. We left soon after her set, feeling that nothing could top it. Walking over to The Halcyon, a cool café-bar, we ran into Rosie and a friend of hers at a street corner. We hurried over to her and shook her hand and told her she’d kicked ass at Lambert’s, which seemed to please her a great deal. Up close she was tiny and birdlike.

At The Halcyon we hired a pedicab to take us back to Lustre Pearl. Austin swarms with pedicabs, especially during SXSW, when entrepreneurs from other places in Texas arrive in town to pilot the things alongside the native drivers. Austin also swarms with cute girls during SXSW, and sometimes the cute girls are pedicab drivers, like the one we hired — Deanna Rae:

Deanna Rae is a local, who also makes and sells candy. Like most pedicab drivers she had an mp3 player hooked up to a small boombox strapped to her pedicab. She looked us over carefully and then selected a playlist she thought we might like — mostly alt-country numbers, in honor, I guess, of my cowboy hat.

At one point she slammed on her brakes, shouted, “Money!” and jumped off the pedicab to retrieve a five-dollar bill in the street. Two other pedicab drivers had also spotted it and jumped off their vehicles to race towards it, but Deanna Rae got there first.

“We’re always finding money in the street,” she said happily.

Above is a picture of Deanna Rae from her Facebook page, on which she describes herself as “awesome”. Word.

Click on the images to enlarge.

Above is the elegant and comfortable garage apartment I was lucky enough to inhabit for SXSW, thanks to the kind hospitality of Hilmar and his wife Kaaren.

I didn’t get pictures or video of several nights at SXSW, so you’ll just have to imagine the wild adventures we got up to, the funky clubs we visited and the great music we heard. At any rate, on Thursday Hilmar and I had lunch at The Oasis on Lake Travis (above), another lake just outside Austin created by a dam on the Colorado River.  The grievous drought in Texas is responsible for the sand islands in the middle of the lake, which are normally covered by water:

That night Kaaren cooked us a lovely meal of spicy shrimp and roasted potatoes, then Hilmar and I headed off downtown with no fixed destination in mind.

We stopped in at Cedar Street Courtyard but the band playing there was lackluster, so we walked to Red 7, where good bands were supposed be booked that night. There was a line of badge-holders around the block so we skipped Red 7, then drifted over to Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, because Hilmar said it was a cool place.

We heard some good music coming from its outdoor music venue and went in. About ten minutes after we arrived, the leader of the band on stage, who turned out to be Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, said, “Now I’d like to bring on someone we consider to be a rock and roll legend.”

Hilmar and I rolled our eyes, sure it would be someone lame, but then a guy walked out who was anything but lame — John Fogerty. The Foo Fighters turned up their game about twelve notches backing Fogerty on six or seven of his greatest songs, including this one:

Fogerty is the one in the blue shirt.

Quite by chance (or some sort of mysterious providence) we had stumbled upon what was undoubtedly the greatest set played at SXSW that night — one of the greatest sets I’ve ever heard. Fogerty can still kick ass, and the Foo Fighters did him justice in spades. This is just the sort of thing that happens at SXSW.

We wandered over to the terrace at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel on Congress Street, where we had some coffee, trying to come down from the high.  It took a while.