The purpose of this
trip was Netstock IV, the yearly meeting of women
from the Women's Issues discussion section of the
Issues Forum on CompuServe. Our previous get
togethers have taken place in Boulder, CO, Seattle, WA, and Washington DC. We had a smaller than
usual group this year, but the group came from Texas
(Dallas, San Antonio and Austin), California (Davis,
Santa Barbara, and Burbank), Washington (Seattle),
and two women were there from Germany.
I talked Chris and
Lynn into joining us for the weekend and they fit in
with the group so perfectly people were bemoaning the
fact that they don't have their own computer and thus
can't continue the friendships formed.
Our drive up was
incredible. After a stop to show them the Beer Can House, we finally got on the road
for Austin. About half an hour outside Houston we hit
the first carpet of wildflowers. And in similar
fashion, the flowers carpeted most of the highway
leading into Austin. It's a 3 hour drive, and I'm
sure at least 2 hours of it was filled with a
patchwork quilt of color that made one think of
traveling around the Land of Oz.
We drove to the
LaQuinta-Mopac hotel in Austin, overlooking IBM
(which seemed appropriate), where we met up with
Walt, who had flown in for the weekend. The four of
us joined the rest of the group at the home of Diane,
our hostess. She supplied us with pre-dinner
refreshments, of special interest to Mary, famous for
her boxes o'wine. We also met Mike (different Mike)
& his partner, Ed. Mike is a long-time e-friend,
whom I had never met face to face. He brought durian for all of us to taste (please
do follow that link!). We did not get to
the durian until Monday.
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