The University of Texas: Austin

After we had finished doing a little bit of shopping at some of the stores alongside the university in Austin, we decided it might be kind of fun to walk around the campus. Since it was Friday, there was still a lot of people to navigate through. Students rushing this way and that to classes or whatever other engagements they had. The campus is quite beautiful at the University of Texas, and they do a really good job of keeping it all in a compact area. Except for the tennis courts, baseball and softball fields, but I will get to that in a bit.

If you have never heard it before, the motto of Austin is "stay weird", and it is definitely a quirky town full of art and all other kinds of interesting stuff. There are murals just about everywhere you look, and I tried to get a shot of a few of them as you can see above.

One of the things I really liked about the campus was the Spanish inspired architecture. The buildings all had this flare to them that kind of reminded you of a city like San Antonio or something like that. To be fair, San Antonio is only an hour and a half south of Austin. We will definitely be driving down there for a day if we ever visit Austin again.

We decided to duck into the Student Union to check it out.

It's a pretty lavish building on the inside, rich with dark woods and what feels like a lot of history though the building itself doesn't look that old. Unfortunately, there was an event going on in the union and they had a lot of the other areas locked or they were requiring a student ID to access them, so we didn't make it much further than the foyer. It was still pretty cool to check it out.

We also found a random statue of George Washington on the campus. There are actually quite a few statues on campus that we didn't get photos of, but the one of Washington just felt really out of place down in Texas. My brother in law commented that over at UVA (Virginia) they have a larger statue similar to this one. Now that makes sense to me being over on the east coast like that. I would question whether Washington ever actually stepped foot in Texas. I am guessing no.

The focal point of the campus is the large clock tower, but unfortunately, it was being rennovated, so as you can see there is just a bunch of scaffolding all around it. Back in 1966 on August 1st, there was a mass shooting that took place on this campus. A 25 year old marine veteran killed 15 people while firing at random from both inside the main tower building and from the observation deck of the tower. He also injured 31 others before two Austin police officers killed him 96 minutes later.

There are a ton of documentaries about the shooting if you want to dig a little more into it.

Like I said, a lot of the buildings had a really "new" feel to them even though they might actually be quite old. Either that or the just renovated the exterior of the buildings to make them look fresh. I don't really know.

As you might imagine, there are cacti everywhere in Texas, and I tried to get some shots of them. There were certain spots where you really have to pay attention to where you are walking, otherwise you could easily brush up against one of them and really ruin your day!

Along with cacti, we also saw a ton of the Tesla CyberCabs/RoboTaxi's or CyberTaxis/RoboCabs's, I always get them mixed up. The automated vehicles were zipping along everywhere taking people from one place to another. It was pretty impressive to watch them manuevor.

After leaving campus, we made a quick drive by the capitol building before crossing the expressway to checkout the baseball and softball fields. As nice as the softball field was, you could tell that baseball is a much bigger deal down in these parts. The baseball stadium was pretty impressive.

We got lucky at the softball diamond as the maintenance crews were doing some work, so although the front gates were locked, we simply strolled into the back entrance we saw open and found ourselves walking right onto the field. There was a guy off in the distance doing some work, but he didn't seem to care that we were there.

The field is interesting in that the outfield is grass, and the infield is dirt, but all the area everywhere else is turf. It was still pretty cool to get in and see it.

Finally, here's a closer view of a CyberCab. We also saw a ton of Waymo cars rolling around. Austin is pretty lousy with self driving vehicles. It's interesting how obtrusive all the sensors are on the Waymo cars versus the Tesla ones.