After my show at Super Happy Funland in Houston, I shot over to Austin, TX for the rest of the eclipse weekend.
Austin is a beautiful city with a vibrant downtown, and when I got there it was mobbed with eclipse tourists. It looked to me like a great place to busk, so I hauled my gear across the Ann W Richards Congress Ave bridge…
…to a spot that looked promising.
I found this tree stump in a row of sidewalk trees on a wide stretch of sidewalk a couple blocks North of the bridge, with plenty of foot-traffic. I set up right on top of that stump and played for about 3 hours on Sunday afternoon and made almost a hundred bucks playing bass and didgeridoo. It was a great day! I wish I could play for eclipse tourists all the time!
As it started getting dark I packed up my gear and headed back across the bridge, but there were so many people standing on the bridge it was difficult for me to maneuver my gear around them. I asked someone: “What are we all here to see?”
“Bats” She replied. Apparently the world’s largest urban bat colony lives beneath the Ann W Richard’s bridge, and at sunset they fly out by the millions.
However, the bats seemed shy on this particular evening, and there was no dramatic mass exodus. I saw bats flying around under the bridge but they seemed content to stick around home that night, and eventually the crowd subsided.
I would have loved to see the bats big fly-off, but I’m out to see and meet people, and I met people from Denmark, Germany, Thailand, Boston, Denver and Portland on the bridge.
Monday before the eclipse, I took a walk around Austin and enjoyed the scenery.
We had clouds for the eclipse, but they thinned out enough that I got to see enough of it, including a glimpse of corona at totality. I even got a few pictures:
I had a great time in Austin,
but those clouds cramped my style a bit, they followed me all the way to Baton Rouge and kept the sunlight from reaching my PV solar panels enough that by the time I got to Baton Rouge I had dead batteries all round. Hence the delay in posting, but I’m catching up.
Electric Earth Music 