Old Pecan Street Festival

On Sunday we went to the Old Pecan Street Festival in Austin. In retrospect, distancing myself by about a week from the 95+ degree heat and the unrelenting sun, I suppose it was a pretty swell time. In all reality, I plan to indoors, refrigerating myself with air conditioning until the weather can get to a manageable 72 deg or lower. Wait, what were we talking about? The festival! Right.

When we first got there, we came across a crowd of people gathered outside of a bar that had it's windows open to the public. When we peeked inside, we saw this 11-year-old, rocking out to Hendrix covers. The kid was seriously good. We looked him up when we got home, and he is Travis of The Travis Brown Band. Our children thought he was pretty cool, although the music was a little loud for their ears.



To our children, the entire point of a festival is to find rides and the like, so they were very excited when we finally made it over to the children's section.



After all of that jumping, they needed a little refreshment, so we stopped for some icy slushy drinks.



The syrups were in sort of a "buffet line" next to the booth that sold the drinks, so we may have refilled on syrup a few times... (shhh, don't tell...)



Also, no self-respecting US festival is complete without a good supply of cotton candy. This is Greg's preferred method of eating it:

First, he packs it down inside the bag.



Next, remove hardened lump.



And enjoy.



Personally, I think it's a little gross and kind of defeats the point of the airy, voluminous puff of sugar in the first place, but to each his own, I suppose.

Personally though, if there's only one thing that I'm going to eat at a US festival or street fair, it is freshly made kettle corn. Not the microwave stuff out of a bag, not the giant, stale bags sold at the local CostCo, but real, honest-to-goodness, kettle popped, burnished and salty-sweet Kettle Corn. There's nothing like it.



I noticed this one intriguing looking popsicle stand.



We didn't get any that day, but the flavors look like they'd be worth seeking out. They are Austin based, but other than that, I can't find out much more on their website. I'll have to keep my eye out for it in the future.

Just before we left, we noticed this snake handler (well, OK, I was so delirious from the heat and distracted by the children that I nearly ran into him. But who's splitting hairs here?)



Greg wanted a picture with him, and Lavella thought that it was a good idea at first, until she noticed how big the snake was up close.



That was the end of that. The poor guy felt so terrible for scaring her, and kept apologizing. Ah well.

So overall, it was pretty fun, but I was quite glad to get back to our air conditioned car and then eat dinner in an air conditioned restaurant. This kind of heat just makes me want to curl up and sleep for a million years. I can only imagine what the summers will be like...