Being in Austin for two weeks — The week before the First Day of Spring and the week after was an experience I will not soon forget. Why you ask? Because in Austin Spring came on EXACTLY The First Day of Spring!!

I grew up in the damp and frigid no man’s land known as the Midwest. In Chicago, Spring was sometime at the end of April, and worse yet when I spent two years in Northern Minnesota, the First Day of Spring was a meaningless day under about three feet of snow. Up there you don’t even think of putting a tomato plant in the ground until June 1st.

Lucky for me, I have the chore of walking our dog Cheyenne every day on this trip, and by doing so I get to see much more of each place we are in than the average vacationer. You see subtlties walking around the surrounding mile of your location four or five times a day. When we arrived in Austin the trees were all barren and the ground was brown, slowly green buds formed, then leaves sprang overnight on most of the trees, flowers bloomed, and a number of trees bloomed sweet smelling purple rows of blooms, according to the humanflowerproject.com this would be the Mountain Laurel trees.

So far Austin dogs are all barkers, some even viscious barkers, none has really shown a freindly sniff to Cheyenne. I wonder if she hasn’t become arrogant with her newfound worldliness? Her eyes have been beadier than usual.

Finally for unusual wildlife encounters in Austin, I saw several large hawks, 3 bright green tropical birds in a tree, and what looked like a wild turkey running down 53rd near Airport Blvd. early one morning, I was later told it was probably a guinea. “On the East Side” we witnessed an oppossum running across the top of a fence while a police helicopter hovered above.

We are detained in Austin with an ATM snafu, I think I will take a look on craigslist….