The other day, as I paddled the San Marcos River, I looked up in the sky and saw a horse charging through the clouds.
I didn’t mention the illusion to my paddle partner, but he probably saw something else in the white puffs skidding across the sky.
Everybody sees something different when they gaze at the cream swirling into a cup of coffee, eyeball a mountain range or look at a tree branch. And now an app, created by someone I met while whitewater rafting in Colorado this summer, lets you compare your discoveries with friends.
Matthew Burdine, 35, guides whitewater rafting trips on the Arkansas River near Buena Vista. I spent a morning this summer blasting down rapids with him, and as we floated past a cliff face, he pointed out what looked like the outline of a woman in the shape of the rocks.
That prompted Burdine to tell me about the smart phone app he was creating called Ahaa!, which was in development then but has since launched.
Here’s how it works: You take a picture of anything – a cloud formation, a cliff, a mountain or a cup of coffee. You share it with a friend or two, and everybody traces the outline of whatever form they see in the picture. When you press “compare,” the app shows everyone’s picture.
“It’s all about seeing other peoples’ perspective. We all see things differently, but no one’s wrong,” Burdine told me by phone this week.
The idea, he says, applies to more than just clouds. It reminds us that we all have different perspectives on life, and that’s OK. “It doesn’t mean that they’re wrong – it’s just how we see things,” he says.
As a kid, Burdine says he visualized entire kingdoms in the clouds. In second grade, he remembers his mother calling his father as they drove to school on a foggy morning.
“He said, ‘Sally, tell Matt if he wants to touch a cloud, to stick his hand out the window right now,’” he says.
Burdine earned an MBA degree from Ole Miss in 2010. After five years as a rafting guide and ski instructor, he took a solo paddling trip down the Mississippi River to raise money for breast cancer research. That’s when he got the idea for the app.
“Spending six months in a canoe, you can build stuff in your head,” Burdine says.
After the trip he hired a company to design the app he’d dreamed up. The Ahaa! app costs $1.99 in the Apple store. A Google Play version is coming soon.
“It’s just a way to reconnect with the natural world, the outside world, and our surroundings,” Burdine says. “It’s about waking up our imagination, and a way to remind us to look around more.”
And now that we’re stuck at home because of the pandemic, it’s an easy way to engage with friends and family.
“We’re craving interaction, and it’s hard to do that right now,” he says.
I tried the app, which allows you to pull photos from the camera roll in your phone, or snap a new picture. It’s easy and quick, and a good way to get kids involved.
As Burdine told me when our call ended, “Keep your head in the clouds.”

My husband came within a second of getting hit by a truck this morning, as I watched.
It all unfolded in slow motion in front of me, a flurry of screeching brakes, streaking vehicles and screams.
We were biking to swim practice at Western Hills Athletic Club at about 6:30 a.m. It’s still dark at that hour, so we each had bright white headlights and flashing red blinkies attached to our bikes. I was wearing a bright pink reflective vest.
We were pedaling south on Winsted Lane, which runs parallel to Loop 1 (MoPac). As we approached the Windsor Road intersection, Chris was slightly in front of me, and moving fast on the slight downhill.
Our light was green.
I happened to glance left and noticed a pickup truck barreling westbound on Windsor. I could tell it wasn’t going to stop, even though the traffic light on Windsor was red.
I screamed as loud as I’ve ever screamed. I knew they were going to hit. Chris locked up his brakes and skidded; the truck slammed on its brakes and swerved.
I waited for the impact that, thank God, never came.
In nearly 20 years of commuting to work by bike and riding all over Austin on two wheels, I’ve never come this close to a terrible wreck.
Yeah, I’ve nearly been knocked off my bike a few times, but a low speeds. I might have broken a limb or two, but I’m pretty sure I would have survived.
Not this one.
We dragged our bikes to the side of the road to gather ourselves. The truck slowed, paused a few seconds in the darkness, then drove away.
Those seconds keep replaying in my mind. My knees still feel wobbly. I’m so grateful we were able to get on our bikes and keep riding.
Please, look twice for cyclists.

Tiny wooden gavels in hand and elaborate hand-sewn collars around their necks, a group of runners dressed in black made their way through downtown Austin this morning.
The women, the word VOTE printed in white across the back of their shirts, made two laps around the Capitol building, then paused to do planks before dashing back down Congress Avenue. They passed the statue of Angelina Eberly, an innkeeper who fired a cannon at the General Land Office to stave off a rebellion and preserve Austin as the capitol of Texas, then hustled across the Ann W. Richards-Congress Avenue Bridge before finishing near Zilker Park.

Sisters With Blisters running group member Amy Moore helped organized the run after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sept. 18. Another member, Marni Francell, sewed the collars worn by many of the runners.
“I wanted to gather us together to honor RBG because after she passed away we were all feeling pretty down and this was something positive we could put out in the world,” Moore said.
The women have been running together for about eight years. An entourage of husbands, children and friends cheered the women on and snapped photos as they ran.

Moore designed the route so the runners would hit 5 miles at the Capitol to honor RBG’s five Supreme Court victories. They held a plank for 87 seconds, and ran a total of 8.7 miles to honor the justice’s 87 years of life lived in service to the country.
“Doing this was important to me because I was born a few years before my mom could get a credit card on her own, and I am not that old,” Moore said. “It was important to me to honor RBG’s life of always fighting for equality. Her legal work over her entire lifetime paved the way for my life to be easier than my mom’s or grandmother’s. I wanted to honor her so we don’t forget our recent history and her intelligence, feistiness and service to the U.S.”
The group plans to repeat the run in a few weeks.

I’ve been eyeballing a leaning tree in the San Marcos River for the past few months.
Someone nailed a couple of boards along its backbone, and I’ve been tempted to stop and climb it each time I paddled past. Honestly, it looked a little scary, so I never made the time for it – until now.
The tree arcs over a deep hole on a stretch of the river between Shadygrove Campground in Martindale (9515 FM 1979) and the dam at Staples, which I paddle with my buddy Jimmy Harvey about once a week.
Getting out in nature during the pandemic has kept me steady; everything on the water feels the same as it did a year ago, before Covid hit. Jimmy and I get a little exercise, a couple of hours to chat, and pure Texas views of blue herons, turtles and towering cypress trees.

Yesterday, I finally stopped, shimmied carefully up the tree (the trunk is partway underwater, so it’s slippery with algae), and took the plunge.
My hat flew off, but I captured it before it sunk. The water – blue-green and cool, and dappled with sparkling sunlight – felt amazing. I clambered back into my boat and continued my trip down the river.
I can’t wait to go back. I’m climbing even higher into the Jumping Tree’s branches next time I pass it.

I find myself in some pretty unusual places on a regular basis, but last week’s whirlwind trip to Sanderson, Texas, notched a new experience for me.
For the first time ever, I soaked in a horse trough filled with warm water in the courtyard of a retro funky hotel while a four-piece band performed a private concert.
I tilted my head back, swirled the water around the “cowboy tub” where I was lounging outside my room at the Desert Air Motel, and watched stars pop out against a velvet sky as the Terrell County Buzzards strummed and sang Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” and Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville.” A 6-foot metal T-rex looked on from a corner.

The old-school, drive-up-to-your-room motel opened in 1960 in tiny Sanderson, Texas, a short drive from Langtry, former home of Judge Roy Bean. Sanderson is mostly known as a stop along the railroad and the site of a tragic flood in 1965 that killed 26 people, but I’ve been hearing good things about it lately and wanted to check it out.
Sara and Nick Ryza of Dripping Springs couple discovered the West Texas town by accident on their way back from a camping trip in Big Bend National Park two years ago.
“It all began with a wrong turn,” Sara Ryza says.
“All the sudden we were seeing signs for Sanderson,” Nick Ryza says. “We didn’t have any GPS signal, so we couldn’t see where we were until we got into town.”
They’d never been to Sanderson. They’d never even heard of it before. But when they made a return trip to Big Bend with some friends a few months later, they purposely stayed at another old motel, since closed, at the opposite end of town as the Desert Air. “We joked that the rooms were so cheap, let’s just rent entire place – let’s just buy it,” Sara Ryza says.
When their friend, Joe Godin, was driving out of town the next morning, he noticed a for-sale sign in front of the Desert Air. Three months later the Ryzas and Godin owned their own motel.
In the two years since they bought the place, they’ve renovated the iconic sign out front, ripped out the old carpeting and installed new flooring in all the rooms, and replaced the bedding and upgraded the cable system. They’ve installed cool wooden benches outside the rooms with personalized metal brackets, and created a nice picnic area under some big trees in the parking lot.
Now they’re adding a community kitchen, and creating another “backyard,” where guests will be able to sit on top of an old school bus to watch the sun set. The best part? You can get a room for less than $100.
It’s a groovy little spot, and Sanderson’s a crusty looking town with a community of kind (and opinionated!) residents. I got the local’s tour, visiting a memorial to the flood victims, driving through the cemetery where a couple of train robbers are buried, hiked a ridge above the high school football stadium (which doubles as a retention pond), bought a metal roadrunner at the Z-Bar hardware store, and ate an amazing burger at the Ranch House, where the wait staff all wear pistols on their hips.

Add the 2020 ThunderCloud Subs Turkey Trot to the list of races forced to go virtual this year because of the pandemic.
I love this race, and the way you can run alongside folks dressed as pilgrims or wearing hats shaped like turkeys on their heads. It started in 1991, and has grown into the state’s largest 5-mile run. It’s also Texas’ second largest Turkey Trot, behind the one that takes place in Dallas.
This year, though, we’ll have to run on our own, and the competition will be internet-based.
The 30th edition of the race is still scheduled for Nov. 26, Thanksgiving Day. Registration is $20 for the 5-mile run, the 1-mile walk and the Kids K. (Prices increase Oct. 14.) Raffle tickets for a chance to win a brand new Honda Accord are available for $25 each, or five for $100. Register at
https://thundercloud.com/register/.
All proceeds will benefit Caritas of Austin, a non-profit organization that works to prevent homelessness in the Austin area and provide safe housing, groceries, jobs and educational opportunities for those experiencing it.

I plan to run, even if it’s not with thousands of other turkeys in downtown Austin. I hope you’ll run, too. It feels great to knock off a 5-miler before sitting down to a Thanksgiving feast.
Volunteers are still needed at packet pickup. For more information about volunteering, email elewis@caritasofaustin.org