An Interesting Day in Austin

March began with our taking a day trip by train to Austin, Texas, with about 30 other friends from the campground.  The day started early with our leaving San Antonio around 6:30 in the morning.

We had breakfast on the train with Terry and Gloria.

After arriving in Austin around 10 am, our little group consisting of Terry & Gloria, Rich & Kathy, Nancy, and us began walking to the river.

Nice view of the city.

Colorado River

Double-decker spiral walkway that
takes you up to the bride.

 

We crossed the bridge that took us over the Colorado River...

...and walked along a nice recreational trail along the river.

We had decided to walk to the Stevie Ray Vaughn statue.  Stevie Ray was from Austin and a very good guitar player and blues musician -- one of Chuck's favorites.

Mine too!  :)

We sat down for a few minutes to rest and talk about where we wanted to go next.

We decided to keep walking down the trail to check out the bat bridge.

We stopped at a Hilton Hotel to grab a cup of coffee at Starbucks and rest inside for a few minutes.

Cool view straight up.

We walked toward the bat bridge which is home to the largest colony of urban bats in North America and found a really big bat!  :)

I walked into the Yeti Flagship Store to find out specifically where to go and a salesman told me that the bats are not here yet.  They don't arrive for about another month.  :(  We didn't see any bats, but I found a BIG BEAR!  Eeks!  :)

We headed back across the river towards downtown Austin.

You could see the state capitol at the end of the street.

We continued walking around downtown heading toward 6th Street where all the music venues were located.

Some of the older buildings continued to stand right next to the new modern skyscrapers.

The motto for Austin is:  Keep Austin Weird.

A nice saying but not particularly weird.

We walked down 6th Street and picked up some sunglasses for Chuck and a sun visor for Gloria and then went to the Museum of the Weird which was weird.  It was a very small museum filled with what looked like artifacts from carnivals like a two-headed calf.  By this time, we were all pretty hungry, so we decided to eat lunch at the Iron Cactus that had outdoor seating on the roof.  We had a relaxing lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around 6th Street.  We met up with the rest of the group from the campground at a pub and ended up playing the card game "Golf" for about an hour.  We finished up the afternoon with the guys playing some pool and then headed back to the train station by cab.  After a 3 hour delay at the train station, we headed back to San Antonio getting back home around 1 am.  An interesting but long day in Austin.  :)