The best hamburger I've ever ingested

When this trip started, we were pretty excited for Austin. In fact, Austin was the last city chosen, beating out Fort Worth and San Antonio for our Texas stop. At the top of our list for Austin activities was live music. We were looking forward to getting a few drinks at a music club and staying up late jamming out to some great music. Unfortunately, Chicago well exceeded our expectations, we didn't die in Memphis, and, as you may know from my last post, New Orleans was a pretty epic night. Thus, nothing that could even possibly happen in Austin could actually live up to our expectations, right?

Wrong. In what seemed to be little more than an attempt to grab a good bison burger and entertain ourselves around dinnertime, turned out to be the best hamburger I've ever eaten. Okay, I know that's a strong group of words. And I bet that as soon as you saw that you began thinking about the best hamburger you've ever eaten.

And I guarantee you it wasn't this.

Sure, I've had great hamburgers in the past. But this hamburger was at least good enough to be in consideration. And it didn't come easy, either. Our first task was trying to figure out the antiquated parking meter technology:

Where's the touch screen?

Once we successfully inserted the $5 into the small slit, we completed the transaction by pushing the money further into the box with a small piece of metal (also known as a "bill stuffer") that was hanging by a string off of the machine. At which point, since we received no beeping or talking confirmation that the process was completed, we wondered if we had done it right. It appeared that we had completed all four steps of the parking meter process, so we continued on. 

The burger place was called Hopdoddy Burger Bar. Normally at this place, most customers stand in line and order their burgers from a long list of specialty burgers, including beef, bison, and lamb burgers. Then, they wait for their food and find an open seat, cafeteria-style. However, when we arrived the line was out the door and around the block. At this point, most people (tourists) would probably just wait in the line, but not us. We're seasoned veterans at avoiding long lines for food.

Flashback to Las Vegas last summer with George, Anthony, and Eric. You think it's easy to acquire a round of buffet like this?

No wonder we were too full to go to the bars after this.

Well it's not. The lines to enter Las Vegas buffets are generally long, sometimes reaching two hours. Add the fact that we had to walk through the desert and, at one point, climb up a highway overpass to get there faster, and you can imagine we were pretty disheartened to see a long line once we arrived.

I think this was taken right after we scaled the the overpass.

But we were smart and saw a sign that mentioned something about an "extra fee" and "next in line." So  we shadily meandered through this hallway, which turned out to be the exit for customers leaving the buffet. We then arrived to the side of the hostess' desk, where we paid an extra $10 to get a seat immediately. Was it worth the extra $10, you might ask? Take a look at the picture of the food again.

So the point is, we've had some experience with skipping lines and getting a lot of of disgruntled glares from unhappy line-dwellers. 

This is pretty much what we did here, too. Only this time, the trick was to find an open spot at the bar, order a beer, and then have the bartender take your order. And serve it to you. No need to stand in line and wait around for your food without a beer, and then scramble to find an empty table. So this is what we did. 

Unfortunately, we then had to choose which hamburger we wanted to order. This is an especially difficult task when every single one sounded delicious. Anthony and I struck a deal to split two different kinds, at which point George expressed his anger at his exclusion (Sorry, it's just too hard to split a hamburger in thirds, in my opinion).

Luckily, all worries washed away when we received the food and began eating. I ate half of a spicy bison burger, with pepper jack cheese, a few peppers, onions, salsa, and chipotle mayo. The other half hamburger I chose was a spicy BBQ Angus beef burger, complete with cheddar cheese and jalapeños. We've done a good job about photographing all our meals, but we were too hungry and the burgers were too good. This is how long it took us to remember:

The burger was so good there was just no time to drink the beer.

Anthony and George topped off their meals with homemade milkshakes. Caramel chocolate pretzel and raspberry Nutella white chocolate, or some crazy flavor combination like that. They looked good though (maybe someday there will be a cure for nut allergies):

Again, we were off our picture-taking game.

All in all, Austin did not (could not) live up to our previous stops. But the hamburgers tried to help it out. They would definitely make the top 5 of my hamburger list if I had one. After dinner, we made it to Sixth Street and walked around a bit. Here it is:

Looks like a typical street with bars.

Austin looked like it would be a lot of fun, especially late at night. I can't really say I know how fun it is, though. We were exhausted, and we went back at the hotel room to relax. Why are we relaxing in the hotel at all, you might ask, as opposed to getting out and seeing as much as possible? Well, this morning we embark on a 19-hour drive to the Grand Canyon. We will arrive tomorrow morning around sunrise, and Anthony and George will see the Grand Canyon for the first time in their lives. Then we travel another 4+ hours to Las Vegas, just in time to enjoy dinner, a Cirque du Soleil show, and VIP access to some bars in the Palms Hotel. With that journey in mind, we will happily catch up on sleep and rest for now. 

Stay tuned for more, shorter posts tomorrow and throughout our time at the Grand Canyon and Vegas. I will be in the car for a very, very long time. And we have a car charger for our iPhones. I just hope there's 3G service for the whole ride. Can't imagine what I'd do with my time without that.