My best friend, B, and I went on her work trip to Houston this weekend. Houston is where I was born and lived until I was 13. It’s still one giant strip mall. It’s incredible that Houston can be so relatively close to Austin and be SO. MUCH. UGLIER. However, we ate at fancy restaurants and drank fancy drinks and met cool people, so as to ameliorate the pain.
On the way into Houston, we noticed that B had a low tire, so we pulled into a gas station to air it up. I seems the last time she had her tires rotated, they put the hubcap over the valve, making it nearly impossible to get the gauge or the hose onto it properly. After that frustration, we checked into our hotel and fell asleep only to be woken up at 3:30 AM by a freakin’ fire alarm! A false fire alarm, of course, but still nerve-wracking. We didn’t get any sleep that night.
We breakfasted at an old-fashioned diner the next morning,where I met B’s friend, an amazingly awesome PR guy in Houston. He was very sweet and funny and cute (and gay, shut up, I’m married), so we had a grand old time at breakfast. We ran errands, checked email and shopped and then had lunch at the kind of place where they not only put your napkin in your lap when you sit down, they pick it up when you go to the bathroom and fold it and scoot your chair back in. FANCY! We talked bidness with B’s Houston rep and made plans to have dinner at yet another chichi eatery.
The next day was a little more low profile. We went to a sports bar (yechhh) and then to Goode’s Armadillo Palace to see a friend play. That felt a little more like Austin, albeit way over accessorized. They had saddles all over the room, and all manner of “Texas” stuff hanging from the walls and ceiling. The tables were even covered in (faux) cowhide! But the show was great, and I had a cosmo and a martini, so.
Oh, I forgot that right before we met up at Armadillo Palace, we stopped by a very cool bar called Marfreless. You have to know it to find it, there’s no sign and the door is very nondescript. B knows the owner. He wasn’t there but made sure we were taken care of by one of the bartenders. She was great and by the time I had sipped the last of my amazing Appletini, we were swapping recipes and she had given us one for okra and tomoatoes. You can’t beat that kind of down to earth coolness, especially at the best martini bar in the city.
We tooled out of Houston Sunday, after inhaling a Beck’s Prime burger (thank God we don’t have that in Austin). On the way home, B and I talked to our respective boys. She’s dating my husband’s best friend which is both weird! and cool! She and I jokingly told my husband that I expected flowers if he really missed me, and then completely forgot about it. When I got home, guess what? He really did get me beautiful flowers!
I think I’ll keep him.
