Austin

Last Saturday we visited Austin, the state capitol and supposedly the coolest city in Texas. It's still a city, so that's always hard for us, but we found good restaurants, and saw more eco-conscious places (near UT - that's the University of Texas at Austin) than we've seen anywhere here in San Antonio. I don't know of any Tex-Mex restaurant here that has its own organic garden, for instance!

We'd probably have to go at night, and during nicer weather (it was cold by south TX standards - in the 40s) to take advantage of the other things that make Austin famous. That's the music and the parks. So we hope to go back at least once this spring.

I have always loved visiting capitol buildings. I'm sure part of that is growing up outside DC, and part is from my page days in the Virginia House of Delegates. But Texas's capitol building is different - it's made from red granite, which makes it look brownish. I'm so used to white marble. Its dome is, of course, the tallest state capitol dome in the country.

I liked the terrazzo floors (Pennsylvania's capitol building has so much nicer artwork of all kinds), but the most recent gubernatorial portrait in the rotunda is of W. Sigh. Giving props to Texas, though, they've had THREE female governors in the 20th century, some quite a long time ago.

We spent late afternoon at the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum, which was interesting. Without a toddler, I would have read more labels and learned more about the history, but we liked it anyway. It was fun to look at it as a museum geek again, and critique the content, context, and creation. Overall very good. No bilingual labels though - is Austin that far north of San Antonio that they don't have a Hispanic population? You could NEVER get away with that down here. We also got to hear a honky-tonk band in performance in their auditorium. When I asked Katie on Sunday night what her favorite thing was in all of Austin, she said "the band." My kid.