I always think it funny when I meet Europeans who exclaim “oh, I love San Francisco! It feels almost like a European city” I’ve heard this or equivalent many times and I like San Francisco too, for many of the same reasons. But the irony cannot be ignored.

As a Northern Californian, a Berkeleyite, even, I feel a little guilty of the very same sort of offense in coming to Austin and, not surprisingly, liking it. Why even come to Texas, if I’m pretty much just going to its liberal, college town capital? Well. While the Texas countryside offers plenty of good countryside type things, I’ve never once in my life heard anyone recommend another Texan city as a place worth visiting. No one’s ever spoken to me of a lovely weekend in Houston, or a nice time in Dallas (Debbie, perhaps, excepted). My impression of Texan cities is one of suburban sprawl, and man have I seen that before.

A day and a half here and I’m happy to say that Austin is anyway no Berkeley whatsoever. It is certainly liberal, but it is a state capital of 700,000 unto itself. Berkeley is a 100,000 strong fairly homogeneous section of a much larger metropolis. In Austin the conspicuous liberalness is more tempered and the weirdness, as I’ve so briefly seen it, much less conceited.

Austin also has its own suburban sprawl; I’ve stayed my two nights here actually about 15 miles North of the city center. I’ve been staying with an awesome Couchsurfing host named Ben. I first met up with him and a decent gaggle of the local Couchsurfing community at a little swimming hole west of Austin called Krause Springs. I spent the previous night in the town of Kerrville with my brother-in-law Erick’s parents, so the springs were more or less on the way to Austin. We all spent the entire afternoon swimming there and it was lovely. The springs are privately owned, but they charge only five dollars and just make everyone sign a waiver before letting them jump off of just about anything into the water. I’d learned my lesson about jumping, back on the Kern River, but had to give the rope swing a go. This was not too physically damaging, but my ego suffered slightly when my performance came nowhere near the grace of the various six and seven year olds swinging away. There’s a lot of force on that upswing and my left arm just couldn’t quite manage.

We witnessed a bit of Austin’s deservedly famous nightlife then turned in. The following day Ben took me around to see some sites. The highlight was without question the Catherdral of Junk. Down a quiet residential street South of downtown in a large backyard stands this monumental structure of concrete tiled with such unlikely things as action figures and long-distance calling rate placards reinforced with the most impressive latticework of welded together junk. The structure is composed of no less then 800 bicycles, the pieces of several cars and trucks, a number of refrigerators and bed-frames, and ever so much more. It is decorated with a polychromatic explosion of post-consumer treasure in every shape and size.

This unlikely feat of artsy, pack-rat engineering contains passage ways between several towers, the highest of which climbs nearly three stories – well above the artist’s modest (but brightly painted) home. The artist/sculptor/architect of the Cathedral, Vince Hannemann, told us he had no training in engineering when we engaged him in conversation (after catching him chasing an unruly dog out the side-door). Nevertheless, the structure is surprisingly stable. But, then again, not quite stable enough that, at the moment Ben and his friend Mike decided to start jumping in unison at the Cathedral’s pinnacle, all I could really think about was how it was probably a very good thing that the Texas Hill Counry isn’t prone to earthquakes.

After the Cathedral of Junk we proceeded to the State Capitol building which, refreshingly, is just open. I don’t quite know if it’s a Lone Star pride thing, or just a peculiar kind of easy-goingness, but the doors are just unlocked. There is a small sign about being subject to search, but the are no metal detectors or x-ray machines. The only guards I could see were two state troopers in fitted cowboy hats chatting idly next to the elevators. Of course the offices were generally closed – it was a Sunday – and the actual desks of the legislature roped off, but aside from that I, and the other late-afternoon tourists, could roam free through the halls. Notable, the cupola of the capitol is shaped like the White House, but very purposefully 14 feet taller. In a similar vein, the state flag flies at the same height as the Stars and Stripes – the only state in the Union where this is the case, to my knowledge.

While we were in the capitol a sizable thunder shower unleashed itself on the city, and when we left the building the humidity had notched up just about all the way. This was striking because, just two hours west in Kerrville, it was very arid and, reportedly, hadn’t rained in months. On top of this, they had reached triple digit temperatures everyday for nearly sixty days, or so I was told. On a New Mexico station, somewhere near the state line, a jewelry company was promising that your wedding ring would be free if it rains two inches or more on your wedding day.

I hadn’t even finished my Nalgene of lukewarm cowboy coffee and Whisper was already shooting ground squirrels. He got the first one, on the first try, and managed to scare off the rest. Whisper is some kind of groundskeeper on the little piece of private property right beneath Lake Isabella Dam, sandwiched between the Kern River and a ranger station where we were camping. He wears a filthy, over-sized T-shirt from a from a bait and tackle store in Gardena and undersized black shorts that are normally hidden by the way that shirt overhangs his impressive belly. He uses a big neck brace but doesn’t let it get in the way of hoeing the garden or even, well, shooting squirrels. He has the same accent as my grandmother and talks too much about Vietnam.

“Where are you from, Whisper?” I asked him.

“From the cold reaches of Pennsylvania.”

“Oh? Where are the cold reaches of Pennsylvania?”(So I know what to avoid, of course.)

“Well there are two.” Pause. “If you cut the state into six equal squares the long way, the first is a big anthracite deposit in the top middle square. That’s where I’m from. The second is down in the…”

Oh. Coal regions. He kept going and I stopped listening.

After six months of very little excitement, a weekend of rafting can be a bit much. With my bruised back, scraped belly, squished foot, and sun burnt knees, I decided Monday morning was clearly for reading by the river while Aaron and the other truly hardy river rats went back for more. After lunch I set off for Los Angeles.

I’d determined to head over the mountains and through the desert as best as I could. I had no plans until dinner time, all my friends were at work, and I’ve driven through the Central Valley once or twice before. I thought I’d seen a road shooting due south over the mountains from Lake Isabella, and set off to find it. After the town of Bodfish I ended up on a one-and-a-half lane road, without even a yellow stripe, that quickly hair-pinned out of the canyon. I didn’t see any signs and, oddly, my schmancy new GPS didn’t seem to know there was a road here. The route, which I now know to be Bodfish Caliente Road, came down into another valley and I couldn’t imagine a more perfect Old West picture. Hemmed in by steep scrubby dark brown canyon walls leading into lighter-shaded rocky mountain sides a few ranches hugged the shady arboreal margin between the road and a small creek.

I got further and further away from any roads known to the GPS. Disappointment in technology mixed with a certain feeling of adventurousness. What if the road just ends at the locked gate of some dusty cattle ranch, deer skulls lashed to the posts and a leathery old man pointing a shotgun at me? What if! Yeah, I don’t care! I’m hard core!

The road did not dead-end. It connected to other roads, as most roads do. The landscape got drier, the roads steeper, and the GPS still didn’t know about them. Finally it showed HWY 58 where the road I’d been following ended soon ended. I took 58 to Tehachape and, to avoid HWY 14, which I’ve driven plenty of times as well, I went over a ridge of about a million giant windmills and took a hypotenuse across the flat Mojave plain. This led me to what always seemed to me the world’s most unlikely exurbs of Palmdale and Lancaster. The GPS knew some of the roads here, but yet perplexingly few. I got a couple miles from 14 and finally saw another road taking me South-East back into the mountains and through the Angeles National Forest. This was another beautiful windy road through steep desert canyons but it ended, startlingly with a sign saying “Welcome to Santa Clarita”. This was followed, with no transition whatsoever, by the immediate explosion of the unremarkable hustle and bustle of the northernmost reaches of the Los Angeles megalopolis.

Even most of the streets in Santa Clarita weren’t known to the GPS and that’s when it hit me: I’d been messing around with some third-party maps my dad had downloaded and in the process failed to re-enable the original Garmin North America map file! I hadn’t noticed immediately because the thing apparently always minimally knows the major highways, which is all I’d been driving on. So much for the adventurous explorer. So much for hardcore.

I made it to L.A. a little early and went and got some coffee and checked my email… and… I’m famous in Ireland!

The rest of my time in L.A. has been fairly uneventful. I shared an Ethiopian birthday dinner, went to a cute little bar, slept on a couch, sat in traffic, went running on what used to be my favorite trail in the Santa Monica mountains, got really dangerously dehydrated, sat in traffic some more, got some dinner, went to a Shark Week party with Noah and David Blue wearing a life guard shirt and ketchup on my face while Dave chased me with a card board fin duct taped to his back.

Maybe today I’ll get to Eastern Arizona or Western New Mexico. I’m going to try to track down some hot springs to camp at tonight. I won’t pretend to get myself lost; I’ve turned the detailed map back on.

The economic collapse is only obvious in a few ways, such as the few large construction projects on the Reykjavik periphery obviously halted indefinitely. Very noticeable are the number of “Útsala” signs in every downtown boutique. Previously the most expensive country in the world, many fancy shops are selling luxury goods, considering the new exchange rate, at well less than they must of paid for them. But a stroll in the evening, or a night out in the bars, and Icelanders certainly do not seem depressed. Nearly every beautiful young person was out bumping, griding, and buying expensive drinks when I was quite ready to quit and stumble back for the night. I’d assumed it was around 2:00 in the morning and accepted that I was just a pansy to be heading to bed. Much to my shock, I got in and saw the clock: 5:00 a.m. On the walk home I’d even seen bars that still had lines to get in.

Dear Iceland, you have lived up to your reputation for being fokking hardcore. Rest easy, your friend, Adam Skory.