We now find ourselves in hip, funky Austin, TX, home of Food for Fitness, a place where you can spend $2.50 and get a "Cranberry Orange Dog Superiority Tablet." Like all the food there, it has a specially designed pricepoint that alerts passers-by to how superior you are to them in every way. It also features awful skunk-ass organic recycled cranberries. Food for Fitness has a crack team of fixed-gear riding, mesh-shirt wearing berry recovery teams, who comb the city looking for dog turds to pry the undigested berries out of. It's a lot of payroll time, but organic berries are so damn expensive it's worth it. Anyways, the reason they hunt for dog turds is because even though the Superiority Tablet looks like a human muffin, it's only fit for canine consumption because it's drier than the surface of the moon.
Dee-licious.
We have come by way of Nashville, where we camped out in a campground full of half-naked hillbilly children (seems to be a big part of my life right now). It rained like a motherfucker, and there was water e'rywhere. Now my tent smells like Grandma's house, so we're gonna sleep in it tonight!
After Nashville, we traveled through Mississippi, which is stone-cold the most shit-turd state I have ever been in. Lord deliver us from a life of Mississippi. Not only was it flat, empty, and monotonous, it also had those pavement seams that buck the car every two-thirds of a second. The upshot of this is that we spent three hours with the Fit on "fuck" mode. Everybody in the state drives a 20-foot tall pickup, though, so the Fit didn't get any action.
The 55 delivered us to New Orleans, where we spent two nights. I know you're supposed to run around and party in N.O., but we were tired and it was Sunday night-- and we're not cool enough to party, even in the Big Easy. Turns out renters are renters everywhere. We ate at a guidebook recommended place called the Cajun Cabin, which of course was a shitty tourist trap. The food was actually pretty good, which is a relief given that I paid $54 for a barbecue sandwich. We met a huge fat fucker there who claimed to have spent $325 on beer the night before (probably true) and to have been Brett Favre's waterboy in high school (definitely not true, because he later told us it wasn't). The night after that we had dinner in another shitty tourist dive, because we got lost looking for the place we wanted to go. So much for New Orleans' spectacular cooking. The only really good meal we had was lunch at a little diner away from the center of town, which we picked because three cops came out. That's my only worldly travel tip: eat where cops eat, because they've eaten everywhere and half of them have been in town for decades.
We saw a statue of a naked fat lady, but Caitlin was too tired to take pictures of me humping it.
The next day we drove to Austin, saw the bats, and went to sleep in the lowest-rated La Shinta in town, which was still ninety fucking dollars. Fuck you too, La Shinta.
Tentatively, it looks like the rest of the odyssey will be: San Antonio, El Paso, Tucson, Grand Canyon NP, Santa Barbara, and then... Santa Cruz. If that place is any bit less than perfect, Creedence owes me a refund.
Now we're off to see Lance's bike shop, hopefully I'll be able to pick up some of those cool "Dopers Suck" socks there.
