The day I’d been waiting for. Schlitterbahn! We were very excited to visit one of Schlitterbahn’s locations. Well, I was. Not sure if Courageous was or not. But I was excited. Fun park, lots of rides. Some of the rides reminded me of Dolly’s Splash Country, a park near my hometown. It made me miss home. More strange encounters with people. No one got any of the jokes we would make. These are the same jokes that we’ve made all across the state but people would just look at us blankly. We wrapped at about 3 o’clock and went home to rest and freshen up. Tried to make a reservation for Gaido’s, only had one table at 8 oclock. I hoped that was a good sign.
Gaido’s ended up being great. A little pricey, but great. We hadn’t spent much money on food in the last couple of days. There were a few tables of kids that had just gone to prom. Everyone in this city seemed to be very socially awkward.
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I got up early the next morning and walked up and down the beach for a minute. We packed up and drove around Galveston to see the parts of the city we hadn’t yet. We were ready to write Galveston off as one of the least favorite places that we’d seen so far. Luckily we made it to the north end of the island, and saw a cool public beach area, and then we headed down broadway where we saw lots of large historic homes. This part of town was good enough to redeem Galveston… for now at least.
We drove to Houston to find our hotel and get acquainted before leaving for our show at Mic Check Slam in Bryan. We were on the 27th floor in the Hyatt Regency in downtown Houston. Houston is even larger than I realized it was the other night. We were staying right in the heart of downtown, and from our room all we could see in every direction was more and more giant buildings. It felt like Seoul all over again.
Even though we’d done nothing we took a quick nap. It was pouring rain out side and many Houstonians were a few blocks over at the Warriors Rockets game. It was a great time for a nap. We got our belongings together and hit the road for Bryan-College station.
We fought the standard Houston traffic, and made it toward the country. The palm trees disappeared and made way for rolling hills, BBQ dives, and agricultural businesses.
We pulled into Bryan at 8:15, show was slated to start at 8:30, we were promptly thanked for being early. The venue was called Revolution Cafe. It reminded me of The Hideaway, a small Johnson City venue, the home to one of my first ever poetry shows. Dark and divey on the inside luckily we weren’t performing inside, they had the venue set up for us to perform outside. It was warm and very windy which made it cool. The crowd was very slim, which was concerning.
We realized that this show was going to be a good one. Every poet was an experienced writer. The host had his own abstract brand of writing, it reminded me of Rives, mixed with Buddy Wakefield.
The seats filled in almost immediately after the show started. The crowd knew poetry, they knew how to react to poetry, and they knew how to write poetry. The DJ apparently had an awesome taste in music and was able to keep the crowd pumped up. It was mostly college students form A&M, more of a punk/indie rock crowd than Hip Hop so to speak.
Our feature was the best poetry club feature we’d ever had. The crowd was loud and engaged. After the show many people came up to us and shared many thanks for sharing our work. We had a few A&M students come up to us and tell us they had connections that could land us a show there. We crossed our fingers and held our breath.
Before leaving we spoke to the DJ and host. They were heading to the Southern Fried Poetry Slam in Greensboro. The day before SoFried we have a show in Knoxville that we wanted them to feature at. They were going to talk it over, but I have high hopes that they come and do it. They invited us to get some chips and queso at a local tex-mex joint, sadly, we were an hour and a half from Houston, and we needed to get back. We swung into WhatABurger, got some chicken sandwiches and started on the long road back to Houston.