In some ways I didn't mind all the overcast after enduring up to 116 degrees heat index. The hardest thing to see in Austin was black people homeless in this heat being very desperate there. One guy got irate and jumped on our rental car and screamed at us but we kept our windows closed. Black homeless people in Texas seemed to be the most at risk for death in the heat in Texas this summer I noticed. It was hard to watch. we were driving down Cesar Chavez Blvd in Austin and a Black lady crying and maybe on drugs was walking down the center of a 4 lane highway. My wife was driving and was very distressed because she could barely avoid hitting the woman because she seemed like she wanted to be hit by a car and die or something. It was very hard to experience all these things. Another time a black man was on the back of a car carrying a toilet plunger with men on the roof of an apartment building taking pictures with cell phones so it was sort of maybe either a photoshoot? or a gang land kind of thing going on.
Many things happened in Texas that made no sense at all to a Californian I guess that's the best way to say this.
So, it's good to be back where I feel physically safer and I don't have to worry about drivers almost hitting my wife while she was driving to the point where she wouldn't drive our rental car for a day because she got so upset about all this.
However, from my point of view all cities drivers are often crazy just in different ways. In Texas they are much more likely to almost hit your car (for whatever the reason). In Southern California they will dart into and out of lanes on freeways with only a foot or two clearance in front of or behind your rental car so which is more crazy?
It's debatable. However, I got the feeling that it wouldn't be very survivable to be both homeless and black in Texas (at least in Austin where we were part of the time).
We also went to Boerne, Texas which is a suburb bedroom Community of San Antonio Texas.
We also learned that between Austin and San Antonio at least you don't drive at night this route because you are likely going to be hitting animals like deer and porcupines and armadillos and such. Maybe skunks and possums too. So, our hosts in Boerne said they had already hit deer and porcupines and other things this year so we shouldn't drive at night because it is very wide open country with a lot of water and a good place for wildlife to survive quite well.
Most of California is very dry so even if there are animals generally there might be less of them per square mile than in a place like Texas, especially inland in California where it is drier. However, along the coast often in California the fog keeps things pretty wet a lot of the year so there is a lot of wildlife. There also can be a lot of wildlife in the Sierra Mountains that go up past 14,000 feet especially on Mt. Whitney which is the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states.
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