The traditional 11th anniversary gift is steel. We chose to celebrate our 11th anniversary with a salute towards the gridiron. More specifically, Friday Night Lights style.
We did start our anniversary out the way most parents do, catering to our small children. First up: Ella and Lily’s first swimming lesson (which I’m sure I’ll eventually write about). We brought the small ones to the park (in the hot), and while they played, we sat in the breeze and the shade admiring the fruits of our 11 years of marriage.
We’re only human though, so we left those cuties with their babysitter and blew that popsicle stand for the big city. Loran and I grabbed dinner at Easy Tiger downtown (only a few days later, they were flooded out by some crazy rains, so we eeked that in). After dinner, we walked around 6th street. We peeked in the lobby of the historic Driskill Hotel, it was gorgeous. As we walked 6th Street, I started to feel old, and out of place. Granted, there were plenty of folks on the street more advanced in age than myself, but it was very much not my scene. Way to keep Austin weird, 6th Street. We decided to capitalize on the remaining sunlight and do something we’d talked about doing since we moved to Austin, find the Friday Night Lights locations around Austin. Luckily, there are plenty of sites that map out exactly where to go, so we plugged addresses into our GPS and set off.
First stop: Matt Saracen’s (and grandma’s) house. You can just see him throwing the football through the tire swing.
Next stop: Vince’s apartment. In real life, this isn’t quite the ‘hood and crack den as portrayed on the show.
We attempted to visit the Alamo Freeze aka: Dairy Queen. But what used to be one of those small, dated Dairy Queens which worked perfect for the show’s small town, has now turned into a huge, remodeled Dairy Queen. It wasn’t worth stopping to get photos since it now bared no resemblance to Alamo Freeze.
Next up were the Riggins’ house and Coach Taylor’s House. Both were within blocks of one another.
Riggins Home
Taylor Home
We couldn’t quite figure out if Coach’s home was even lived in currently. It looks like it could be empty.
It was definitely fun/dorky to go see the places the show was filmed. I’m sure the number of drive-bys/photos ops have gone down as years have passed since the show ended, but at the same time, it has to be a little annoying to have people posing in front of your house, or creeping by in their cars. At the same time, I think if I owned one of these properties, I’d keep it up and probably throw something out in the yard to make it fun, like Tim Riggins’ football number on the Panther sign or something.
We didn’t visit everything. The field these used is in Pflugerville, not super close. The field house was a bit off the path given the amount of daylight left, and the Landing Strip is something we’ve passed before and looks exactly the same, and is named the same, and serves the same purpose in real life as it did on the show.
Once we were done with our tour, we tried to find a bar that had Skee-ball, because that’s fun. We failed. Then we headed back towards our end of town thinking we could walk around the Galleria and find some live music and hang out wherever that happened to be. We failed at that too. Hard to believe none of the restaurants/bars had any live music on Saturday night. Kind of a let down. We ended up back at our place by 10:30. Sure, it seems sort of lame for an anniversary celebration, but we had fun, we were together, and we made memories.
Here’s to many more years of making memories and geeking out together.
Texas Forever.
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