I mentioned at the end of last week that I was going to do a Texas recap since I will be leaving soon and I wasn’t blogging at the time. I will miss Austin a ton so maybe this will be good for me.

Maybe I should start by explaining why I came to Austin in the first place. My very best friend Katie and I met at community college in Michigan. We then went to universities that were hours apart and had to keep in touch by email and phone cards (before we had cell phones). When she was choosing grad schools I said you know what I’ll just come with you wherever you go and it will be an adventure.

So here we are on moving day. We took what would fit in this car collectively and headed out from my dad’s house. Little to no tears were had because we were too excited. It still baffles me how calm we both were that day.

Heading out of Michigan with the car full!

We drove for 3 days and stopped 2 times. Our second stop was made in Greenville, TX the birthplace of Ben Kweller. He was and maybe still is my favorite musician and it turned out he moved to Austin from Brooklyn just a month or 2 before we did.

Again I’m not sure how we were so calm about things. We were headed to a place we’ve never been, we had no apartment, Katie drove her car over a curb when we arrived in town and wrecked the muffler, and I had no job. We had this hostel booked for 4 nights while we looked at places to live. It was our first Texas home.

We made ourselves pretty comfortable and entertained ourselves singing out loud and dancing on the beds.

We explored the city and sought out air conditioning where we could. We were so not used to the heat and we moved here in August.

There was a pool at the hostel and we swam every night. We carried this tradition once we moved into our apartment with a pool. We swam every night until well into November when the water was just a tiny bit too cold.

Success! We found a place to live and this was our first real Austin home.

This was about as fancy as it got for awhile. We came with very little and no way to get much more. We both slept on the floor for a few months.

We made the most of it and used newspaper as our “table”, “couch”, and “tv”.

Oh yes I knew better than to put dish soap in the dishwasher. It was pretty funny though.

We tried to keep our spirits up since we were in a new place with no friends and missing home. It was difficult at times but at least we had each other and we did our best to keep entertained. I remember those pool nights too. It was something we started and just kept on doing. It turned into an almost therapeutic time where we would talk about how we were feeling and what we were sad or happy about. I even remember one time I was feeling really ill and perhaps had some sort of food poising but we hadn’t swam that day and we had to go even  though I was feeling really ill and it was difficult to walk there. Once I was in the water I started feeling so much better! The pool fixed everything it seemed we would both emerge feeling a lot better about everything.