Austin, my love hate relationship

I can relate to the city of Austin, as most southern Californians can. It is very much like my home city of San Diego. It is like one big downtown and no suburbia. It has a night life, hip nifty cafes, all kinds of city life, loft living, people out exercising, high rises, things you just do not see in San Antonio. People in San Antonio would rather lay down their fat asses and die before walking or having a bike ride or pulling a row boat or, lord forbid, exerting energy, no no, not here. So like I said, Austin is much more of what I am used to in a city, an active, young metropolis not filled with morbidly obese lazy wannabe drugstore cowboys that have never touched a bovine or equine in the flesh in their entire lives. It is an 80 mile hour long drive for me though so sadly I do not go very often, only if I have a darn good excuse with the price of gas lately. It's been almost a year since we've gone I think. Well the kid and I have been into hooping lately and there's a group of hoopers that get together up there once a month and practice and go over a move or two. So this Sunday was the day, the dh was working ot all weekend and he suggested that we go and have a girl bonding day together, I wasn't going to but ok, whatever. I suppose that's what I get for thinking right? My success rate for an Austin run is at about 50%, even when I Mapquest before we go we can only find the place 50% of the time. This time I didn't even have an address. It was 'the corner of 4th and whatever st.'. I did Mapquest it and it did give me an area but when I printed it out Mapquest saw fit to not print out the area I had centered on, it only wanted to print out the exact corner of the two streets. Technology, it will be the death of me. Mapquest knows best of course and would not let me zoom out a bit more and print so that I could get a bit more of the map in relative to the freeway so that is what I was stuck with. On with the trip we went then, all 80 miles up to Austin, whiny kid and "Are we there yet?'. She did not shut up the whole way. She prattled on the entire way, would not shut up. I managed to find one of the streets by the time we made it up there. Couldn't find the other. With out an address of course I really couldn't narrow it down of course. Ended up in a seedier section of town, the kid asked why all the houses looked abandoned, I told her it was a lower income neighborhood. She started whining again and I after about 20 minutes of me telling her that she was lucky she was not living in that neighborhood I told her she was going to be left on a corner and she could walk home. It shut her up for a whole 3 minutes. No, make that 2. I should really not listen to the dh any more, his ideas about me and the dd having bonding days that include 80+ mile away drives are just all around bad ideas. I really know better, it does nothing but damage the relationship between me and the kid. This evening I now open my mouth and she flinches. Special trips and hobbies like this just need to exclude the kid.