Austin

The State Capitol of Texas, Austin

Spring break arrived bringing with it an upturn in the weather, so we decided to join the Spring Break exodus and take a trip down to Austin & San Antonio. Texas history is studied at school in 4th and 7th grades so David fancies himself as somewhat of an expert whilst Alice will be doing it next year, so we thought we'd tick off those historical boxes, namely the State Capitol of Texas and the Alamo. 

We arrived in Austin at lunchtime, grabbed a bite and headed to the State Capitol building where we took the free tour of the building and senate chambers.  David got excited when he recognised big paintings of David Crockett and The Battle of San Jacinto he'd seen in his school books, whilst Rob & I got less excited about the portraits of the Bush's. An impressive building, as the largest US state capitol by square footage, it sums up Texas pretty well.

Congress Avenue Bridge, Austin: A good place to miss the boat.

Afterwards we wandered around Austin and suffered from 'now-what-shall-we-do-itis' as the kids weren't really up for a bar crawl or stroll around the arts district, so we checked in to the hotel to chill out for an hour before heading back in to Austin to see the legendary daily bat flight from the Congress Avenue Bridge. Having not seen the condors at Cruz del Condor after a gruelling 5 hour bus ride to the Colca Canyon in Peru, and not had a better view than the Hubble Telescope whilst Whale watching off Cape Cod or Dolphin watching on the Californian coast, my expectations were low. Which was good, as we only saw about twenty of the million or so bats - the world's largest urban bat colony - residing under the bridge. The upside was that we missed the bat-watching boat tour by seconds because we took a wrong turn (not a rare occurrence for us) and in Texas this usually means at least a 5-mile detour, so at least we didn't pay to see nothing, and we have another story to add to our ever-increasing list of animal no-shows. We ended our day with a nice dinner in the 'Hula Hut', an Hawaiian restaurant recommended to us by our friends that lived in Austin before moving to Southlake.