Going to see the bats tonight!

Little suckers are hard to catch on camera.

I am also going in a little early to eat dinner at a restaurant called The Well. I tried to look up the Austin City Limits venue but it appears there’s nothing tonight. They’re probably as worn out from that Eclipse as I am.

One mildly interesting new thing this morning is many campground laundry rooms use an App for payment. You click the button, and the machine comes on. I had no idea.

KOA campgrounds are really great. They’re clean, quiet, and in pretty spaces.

Apparently the rancher is growing Zucchini.

Butterflies. I am a card- carrying member of NABA.

I have spent my entire day moving slow. It’s a wonderful way to live! As I doodle around, the shock, awe, and wonder of the Totality keep coming to my mind.

This is a professional NASA photo- and is very close to what we saw with the naked eye.

I am still teary – eyed when I think about those moments, 4 1/2 minutes to be exact. This experience will take awhile to digest, I think.

My Lyft ride to downtown Austin has arrived- I’m having an adventure inside my adventure!

Joshua is my driver. I always pay too much and get Lyft Black.

I feel safer in a big car these days. Joshua is driving a Lincoln Navigator. The car smells like I am INSIDE an air freshener packet. My drop off point will be the Statesman Bat Observatory! Heres what I expect to see:

Joshua is from Cuba, and all the rest of his family is still there. He says Cuba is a very, very bad place to live, entirely corrupt. Joshua earned the money to buy the Lincoln Navigator by starting in a crappy Toyota. I don’t know if I believe him. I once met a Giant Snail farmer from Ghana in a Lyft. No joke! They extract the slime and put it in cosmetics.

Joshua was good at computer work in Cuba: here is the US he’d rather drive. He’s also a big soccer fan. He’s taking a class to drive big trucks. I hope he does well.

Well, I’m getting a PhD in wrangling travel. Joshua drops me off here, but it’s a bit confusing. Heres what I actually see. My drop off point was at the little red and blue signs.

From this side all I can see is setup for a motorcycle show.

Not what I expected to see. I decide I’m hungry and head to The Well. I hike up the stairs to cross the Congress Ave bridge. It’s a 10-minute walk, and feels great after all the driving yesterday. We will figure out the bat thing after my meal. Who’s “we”?!! 😄 I left kitty at the camper. It’s just me😍

I’m on the Congress Ave bridge! You suppose that’s bat poop?

Dinner is wonderful, squishy, and slow.

More Murals on the way back to the bridge.

This is how a full stomach makes me feel.

We wait.

The bats in Austin are Mexican freetails.

They are Mammals- mother bats nurse their young!

They finally come out!

Austin has a statue memorializing Willie Nelson at the foot of the bridge.

Good night, Willie.

Good night, Mexican Freetail Bats.

Certainly not eclipse – level awe, but I have a much deeper sense of the fragility of these animal populations. There’s a lot of conservation effort to prevent extinction on a global level. People exterminate them out of fear, as development happens. This is part of how Covid-19 started – overlap between species habitat.