We don't really take advantage of Austin the way we should because we spend a lot of time with my kids and grands when we're here doing family things. We did spend an afternoon in
Gruene, which is an historic shoppy/eaty/drinky section of New Braunfels.
We took Riggs to the
Thinkery, which is a hands-on learning place that's fun for adults as well, and we went to the family festival at Camp Mabry by accident - we had a trip to the
Texas Military Forces Museum planned and when we got there we found that there was a thing going on.
I still want to get to the Capitol - its ridiculous that as many times as I've been here I have never once set foot inside - and I want to go to the LBJ Presidential Library.
Monello went deep sea fishing over the weekend with my son and his friend, while I joined my future DIL in her wedding dress odyssey, got a haircut, did a little shopping, and kept my grandson overnight.
Austin tourism is a bit daunting just because driving from one place to another is a PITA. Traffic is terrible and the spaghetti bowl freeways are quite convoluted - difficult to navigate without GPS, and sometimes that doesn't really help you. Just taking Riggs to his soccer game Saturday morning and coming back burned 3 hours of drive time, and it's only maybe 20 miles away. But we also aren't necessarily "on vacation". I'm still working every day and we also do general living things, like laundry and grocery shopping, so we don't have whole days to be runrunrun tourists. Weekends is when we usually go on walkabout, but when we're here weekends are spent on cookouts and such with the kids. Which is fun, don't get me wrong, but it does cut into our tourist time.
Also, I hate crowds and I hate jockeying for parking. There was a festival thing downtown yesterday that I had planned on going to, but the more I thought about the chaos....
We have ten days left before we leave for FL to pick up the motorhome and head to Nashville, so we really need to bust a move on the tourism front.