BACKROADS • JANUARY 2022
WE’RE OUTTA HERE LA CALAVERA CASITA
5002 CREEKLINE DRIVE, AUSTIN, TEXAS 78745 512-914-4226 • FIND THEM ON AIRBNB.COM As you head into the city of Austin, riding across the expansive Texas plains that spreads out from the Colorado River which gracefully bends it way through the Lone Star state, the city stands out like a modern day Earthly bound City of Oz. But Austin hasn’t always been the bustling city that it is today. It was this gentle bend in the Colorado River that had many settlers coming to the region long before the first cornerstone was laid. For hundreds of years, nomadic tribes of Tonkawas, Comanches, and Lipan Apaches camped and hunted along the creeks, including what is now known as Barton Springs. In the late 1700s, the Spanish set up temporary missions in the area. In the 1830s the first permanent Anglo settlers arrived and called their village Waterloo. In 1839, tiny Waterloo was chosen to be the capital of the new Republic of Texas. A new city was built quickly in the wilderness, and was named after Stephen Austin, “The Father of Texas.” Judge Edwin Waller, who was later to become the city’s first mayor, surveyed the site and laid out a street plan that has survived largely intact to this day. In October 1839, the entire government of the Republic arrived from Houston in oxcarts. By the next January, the town’s population had swollen to 856 people. The new town plan included a hilltop site for a capitol building looking down toward the Colorado River from the head
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a weekend destinationkeeping you on the backroads of a broad Congress Avenue. “The Avenue” and Pecan Street (now 6th Street) have remained Austin’s principal business streets for the 150 years since. After Texas was annexed by the United States in 1845, it took two statewide elections to keep Austin the capital city. Nowadays the city of Austin, Texas has a motto of which they are very proud “Keep Austin Weird!” and AirBnB hostess Chris Coxwell (female) and La Calavera Casita is doing its best in keeping the tradition. For years now Chris has been hosting travelers at her home which is one of the most interesting and weird places at which we have stayed in a very long time. Please note that weird here in Austin is a good thing. La Calavera Casita is a very happy place. The word calavera means “skull” in Spanish, but the term is also used to refer to a kind of poem that is written and published especially around the season of the Day of the Dead. The word calavera is generally used playfully: in the different contexts that it is used, it does not have a gloomy or macabre, but rather it has a happy connotation. Calaveras reminds us of the transitory nature of life, that our time here on Earth is limited, and that it’s acceptable (and maybe even desirable) to play and poke fun at ideas about death. Casita simply means a cottage.
