9/1/2002 – Alana and Thon got up and ran at 8:00am. I didn’t go; I sprained my ankle playing basketball last week. At about noon we went out to get brunch at Las Manitas Avenue Cafe, my sister’s favorite place downtown. It’s a mexican place. I got a Plato de Churrizo, which is basically refreid beans, and churrizo with egg. Put all that stuff in a tortilla, and it is some pretty good eating. Of course, it didn’t feel right having that for breakfast, but still…



Barton Springs In the afternoon, we went to Barton Springs. It’s a part of the Austin city parks, basically a few blocks from downtown Austin. It’s a natural spring that flows up from limestone which Austin built a nice little park around. The water is always a chilly 68 degrees, so it’s pretty cool to go out there on a hot day and relax on the grass, popping in and out of the water. Of course, it was pretty crowded since a lot of Austin seemed to have had the same idea that we did…

For dinner, we went to Mangia, which has the best pizza in Austin, according to my sister. They make a Chicago style deep dish pizza there. The owner is a die-hard runner, and wanted to have a “healthy” pizza, so he created a deep dish spinach double stuffed pizza on whole wheat bread. That is what Alana and Thon ordered, while Dad and I got a double stuffed mushroom, smoked bacon and pineapple pizza on a white crust. It was actually very good. Afterwards, we headed home, and mom and dad took the Allante back to Dallas. Thon, Alana and I headed out to a nearby park with a view of “bat bridge.” This is a bridge that has tens of thousands of bats living under it, and at sunset, the bats come out and fly around. We took a seat on a dock near the UT-owned boat house, and settled down to watch. Unfortunately, bat season is just about coming to an end – the bats are migratory and head to Mexico for the winter, and there were not too many out for us to see. On the way back, we stopped at Amy’s Ice Cream again, and I got another chocolate (dark chocolate this time) with strawberries and hot fudge, “sundae style” (so the strawberries weren’t pounded in to the ice cream.) That improved it, but still it wasn’t up to Halo Pub standards.

At home, we watched a few episodes of the Simpsons from the newly acquired season 2 DVD that Thon picked up, and then played a game of scrabble to the Director’s cut of Aliens (which Alana has amazingly, never seen before.) I got completely trounced by both Thon and Alana, and we finished off the movie. I’ll have to play more scrabble…