I’m sipping coffee and sitting in a mod chair in our beautiful AirBnB on the second morning of our stay, thinking that I should have brought warmer clothes. It’s already 81 degrees (feels like 87) outside and the high yesterday was 102, but the most uncomfortable I’ve been is inside where the Texans chill everything off around the Meat Locker setting. Jen warned me, and I took her seriously, but I didn’t pack warm enough PJ’s to cope.

We landed on Wednesday afternoon, got our little Buick Enclave (review: perfectly fine for our needs but terrible visibility out the back, which is crucial for merging on and off Austin’s many feeder roads. At least we could pipe Jen’s phone into the dashboard display) and then checked into our rental. What a beautiful little house. It’s designed perfectly for a family of three, laid out in an L shape with Finley on one side and us on the other. It’s mid century modern all the way through, filled with thoughtful touches, and situated in East Central Austin, walking distance to a bunch of awesome restaurants.

Austin is beautiful, definitely weird, eclectic, and interesting. The architecture is amazing everywhere we look. They spend so much time on signage and textures and buildings made of unusual shapes it makes Catonsville look like an old gray dish towel. There’s functional neon everywhere we look. There’s garish graffiti all over the place. There are hand painted signs and metal signs and old weathered signs on every corner. Welded steel is everywhere. It’s a festival of the senses for design.

For a place on earth where being outside is so oppressive, the residents here pay a lot of attention to the outside environment. I think Home Depot must sell sheets of cattle fencing by the pallet, because it’s a central architectural element. I’d love to ship enough of it up to Maryland to enclose our yard. I’ve seen twenty different approaches to gates and fencing that have me itching to rent an auger and immediately start digging holes on our return.