Congratulations Liz & Tim

March 26, 2007

It's been a long and tiring weekend. My nephew Tim got married to the beautiful Liz--in Austin, TX on Saturday. As you know, I live in Michigan.

So, the round-up:

Friday: My wife drops Frodo at the kennel and we're on the road by 9:00 to get to the airport by 11-ish. Traffic sucks. Our flight leaves Detroit at 12:10 to St. Louis. There's a 50-minute layover in St. Louis and we find ourselves having just the right amount of time, no more, no time to get a drink, food, or much of anything but go to the bathroom and find the gate, which is at the absolute opposite end of the airport.

St. Louis to Austin. Relatively uneventful. Rent a car, then get totally lost on the way to the Austin Motel just off downtown Austin (pretty funky place). This happens so often to me that it's practically my MO. Anyway, we finally check in. My brother and two of his kids are staying at the Embassy Suites just down the road. We get together and after some dithering around we find a restaurant called Aussies. It's high-70s and sunny. In Michigan it was 50s and rainy. We sit outside and eat and chat, watching some college students play beach volleyball. Life is good. After a long crappy winter we're all ready to move to Austin permanently. Doesn't take much.

There's an after-rehearsal dinner get-together for everybody at the "compound," a friend of Tim & Liz's, I guess. The highlight of that seems to be the margarita machine--it's like a slurpy machine and you just walk over with your cup and pour yourself a frozen margarita--life is good. Michigan? What's Michigan?

Back to hotel, read for a while, crash.

Saturday

We meet my brother for breakfast at a bakery down the road from our motel. Back in the '80s Pete got his PhD and was faculty for a year or so at U of T, so he took us on a tour of sorts. We took the Capitol Building tour--the portraits of Ann Richards and George W. Bush are next to each other; I find that sort of ironic. Then we drove over to a roadhouse called Threadgills where Janis Joplin got her start, had lunch. Then back over to U of T to the LBJ Presidential Museum, then over to the Science Museum to see some Llamas and the dinosaur bones and some wildlife on exhibit--a guy had a baby alligator to pet, live snakes, tarantulas, etc.

We wandered around campus for a while, then headed back to our hotels to more or less get ready for the wedding. First my family headed downtown to a store to get T-shirts--mine says KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD on the back. Then the wedding, outdoors, 80 degrees, sunny. The bridesmaids wore whatever black dresses they had. The groomsmen wore black slacks, blue Mexican wedding shirts and cowboy hats. Tim and Liz's two dogs--Biscuit and Bogart--were the ring bearers (not pictured above, but dressed to kill anyway). Then a Texas BBQ reception of BBQ chicken, ribs, sausage and brisket, etc., dancing, etc.

At 1:00 in the morning or so my oldest son wakes up and vomits all over the place in the hotel room. Probably too much BBQ and sinus drainage. This, like getting lost at least once per trip, seems to be something of a Terry Family Travel Tradition, one I hope my kids will get over.

7:30. We're up, more or less, dragging our butts off to the airport, wandering around. Run into my niece, Sara, who is flying back to Boston. We chat more at the airport than we did the two nights previous. Finally we get on our flight to St. Louis, then St. Louis to Detroit and we finally make it home around 10:00.

We like Austin. Great weather.

Best,

Mark Terry