DAY 74
Week 11
AUSTIN (Texas, USA)
Saturday September 2nd, 2006
TODAYS MILEAGE – 102 miles or 164 kilometres
TRIP MILEAGE – 9201 miles or 14808 kilometres
Austin City Limits!!! 
Today was just spent bumming around Austin checking out Fry's Electronics and ordering some parts for my Harley. It just happens that it was also the start of the College football season.
The University of Texas (UT) has it's campus here in Austin (Texas) that services over 50,000 students. Their football team the "Texas Longhorns" are the reigning College football champions. With everything being bigger here in Texas, the locals aren't real shy in advertising the fact as well.
My first experience of rabid college sports fans was back in May 2002 while moving Dash over to Kenosha (Wisconsin). It was right around the Final Four of the College basketball finals and the University of Kansas (KU) Jayhawk's were in the finals. I noticed that the entire 430 mile (680 kilometre) trip across the state of Kansas was covered with Jayhawk paraphernalia like you wouldn't believe. Small towns, cities, houses, cars, people, roads - you name it, it had something pertaining to KU on it.
The same thing could be said for the Longhorn fans. Everywhere you look in Austin has something colored in the burnt orange and white of the National Champs. With that championship comes some changes, they've just installed the worlds largest jumbotron video monitor in a stadium that held 85,123 people on Saturday. Winning must be great in a sport that the athletes are not allowed to receive any compensation, but they sure know about free enterprise. We were inline to cop a couple of nosebleed tickets for face value at $50.00 a pop.
Around 7PM I went for a ride on the Harley to check out the nightlife along the famous 6th Street of downtown Austin. Travelling the street reveals an eclectic mix of bars, tattoo parlors, nickel & dime shit souvenir shops and chew & spew cholera carts. Nearly every bar had a live band playing and most of them didn't have a cover charge and in my humble opinion, San Antonio can't hold a candle to Austin for live music if, 6th Street is anything to go by.
Party on dudes and dudettes.