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Thursday, April 10, 2014

Thursday Travel Tales: Austin Part II

Last week I went over our thrilling, not-so-festive Christmas night spent in Austin. The next day was much more enjoyable thanks to Zach. His Christmas gift to me was a scavenger hunt that took us all around the city. He doled out clues to me, then I had to solve them without using my phone and once I made my way to the correct location, he would hand me the next clue.  When Zach gave me the first clue on the plane I was a brat and said “Awesome, do these lead to some big gift?” And his face fell and he said, “Oh, no. This is the gift…” Oops. This gift did end up being awesome and I’m so impressed that he was able to put together the whole thing without ever having visited Austin. Here are the places I was led to:

1. I got my first clue on the plane, and it led me to this baggage claim area with all of these guitars. The clue said I had to act like a rock-star (instead I acted like an insane person).

2. The following morning I got ready for a day of biking around Austin looking for the rest of my clues. It started out frigid!

3.  My second clue led to this cool mural that looks like a postcard. I have no idea how Zach found this place using only the internet.

4.  Here’s a statue of Stevie Ray Vaughn in some park. I’m still really cold at this point and wondering who this is a statue of.

5.  The next stop was to the former French Embassy to the Republic of Texas. 

6. Then I had to find the clock tower at UT Austin. My only clue was to go to the north of the city and look for red roofs, then find a gold clock – so I’m lucky I happened upon this fairly quickly.

7. I needed Zach’s help to get to this next place, which was a museum on UT’s campus that housed a copy of the Gutenburg Bible. They also had the first photograph, which looked like a black piece of paper.

8. Next I found this huge star in front of the Texas History Museum.

9. Lunchtime! Going to Whole Foods Headquarters was definitely the highlight of the trip for me.

10. Walking from Whole Foods I found this tree which is called the Treaty Oak. It was a former meeting place for some Native American tribes and has been named “the most perfect specimen of a North American tree.” I wonder how many other things have been named “the most perfect specimen” of their kind. Is that title given often?

11. After the tree I walked over to Book People where I got to pick out anything I wanted. I bought a pretty travel book for our coffee table, but I actually got it from Amazon.com a few weeks later because it was cheaper there, but the intent to buy me any book I wanted was what counted anyway.

12. The capitol was next. We went inside and checked out where the House and Senate meet and walked to the very top. It was very impressive, which is not unexpected for such a large state.

13. The last stop was a miniature train ride at Zilker Park. We were definitely the only people on it without kids, but it was still entertaining.

After a day of solving clues, we headed back to our rented studio apartment and did a jigsaw puzzle, cooked dinner, and watched Orange is the New Black on Netflix (this show is the opposite of Chirstmasy).
That’s it for our Austin trip. We did spend one more day there but all we did was walk an insane distance to pick up our rental car, visit Whole Foods three more times, cook exciting meals, and watch the Hobbit at a brewery/cinema place. Then we drove the car (I ended up getting us a free upgrade to a Mustang) to San Antonio.

In San Antonio we tried to ride bikes around like we did in Austin, but found out quickly that the streets in San Antonio are way too narrow for that. We just walked around downtown instead and discovered the River Walk, which is insanely cool. Besides the River Walk though, we found San Antonio to be super lame so we spent most of our time there chillin’ in our apartment watching movies and doing puzzles.


That sums up the Texas trip. I’m so lucky to have Zach who made this trip so special and memorable for me. We’re planning a trip to Portland and Seattle for this summer and I’m trying to put together a scavenger hunt for him while we’re there but it’s so much harder than I thought it would be. It’s difficult to estimate how long everything will take and you have to hope that certain attractions will be exactly where the internet says they will be so that your clues don’t lead to the wrong place. So special kudos to Zach for pulling it off! 

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