Austin keeps showing up on “Most Vegan Cities in America” lists, so I thought I’d visit for a DIY vegan food crawl. I was excited for this trip because although it was not going to be as scenic as the Azores, I spoke the language and knew where to buy basic essentials, so I could take a break from intense trip planning and not worry about running out of contact solution or having to learn the culture of roundabouts. And there would be so much vegan food.
Texas is green!
Austin has an excellent bus system. You can use your phone as a ticket! The buses run frequently! They show up on time! They actually show up! So I spent $5 for a couple of day passes rather than renting a car. (There are also a ton, A TON, of Bird scooters (and the like) in Austin, and plenty of “No scooters past this point” signs, because the scooters were what most tourists seemed to be using.) This is the airport’s bus stop (a guitar for the live music capital of the world–Austin has more live music venues per person than the rest of the nation).
I stayed on the east side of town (the other side of the 35 freeway from downtown Austin) where most of the vegan food was. It sort of feels like San Bernardino meets Portland on the prairie.
First stop, Arlo’s, the place that usually tops the list of vegan must-eats in Austin. It’s a food truck! In fact, most of the places I visited were food trucks. The vegans haven’t taken root yet, apparently.
This is Arlo’s BBQ burger (minus the onion and chipotle sauce, plus tots). It is tasty. I ended up having it twice over the weekend (because some of the vegan food trucks are well-hidden, but more on that in the next post).
Austin’s 6th Street, where all the live music is. Sixth Street also had this market going for the duration of my visit, although I never figured out what it was.
Wandering down 6th Street on a Saturday afternoon, you get to see lots of musicians hauling equipment through wooden gates embedded with staples holding corners of previous live music event fliers.
And now for the Voodoo Doughnut section.
While I stood in the massive line it occurred to me that the Austin Voodoo Doughnut might not have vegan donuts.
But they did! They were running low, but they had one School Daze left, which the cashier recommended because it was his favorite. (It’s peanut butter and jelly, and the jelly wasn’t too sweet, so it was perfect.) The table tops were also covered with obituaries of famous people.
The cash registers at Voodoo Doughnut.
Austin is also known for its bats. Apparently bats find something appealing about living underneath Congress Avenue Bridge, and every evening the colony (1.5 million bats) flies out from the bridge in a big stream to feast on an average of 15,000 insects. People started lining the bridge an hour before sunset, and by the time the bats came out for dinner people were shoulder-to-shoulder and three-deep on the bridge.
It’s hard to see, but there is a stream of bats flowing just above the horizon in this photo. In the photos online, it looks like the bats fly out perpendicular from the bridge (but it also says to visit in the summer–in fact a couple kids drove by yelling, “There are no bats right now!”). On this particular evening, the bats flew under the throngs of tourists, around a hill on the right, and then crossed the river further down. So we didn’t really get to see the bats (they also waited until it was fairly dark to start flying), but we got to know our fellow bridge buddies. I talked with a guy from Philly about what its like working in IT for the government (his contribution) and the fact that the Atlantic Ocean is warmer than the Pacific (my contribution, which he found incredible). It was another example of solo travel being social, and it definitely made waiting for the bats more fun.