Touring Austin in the Fog & One More BBQ Joint on the BBQ Trail

We woke up to a foggy morning today but still humid and warm.  But we didn’t let it stop us from sticking to our plans.  Out first stop was a tour of the Austin Capital Building.  It is huge!  It is a beautiful building. The inside of the capital is beautiful as well with all the heavy carved woodwork everywhere plus the terrazzo floors .  The rotunda goes 218+’  up to the top.  You can stand in the center and look up to the center.  I had to hold onto Doug to take the pictures because looking up like that makes me dizzy! I think it is a cool shot! Six countries owned Texas and that is where the Six Flags Over Texas theme comes from.

   

     

Next we drove to the west side of town to Mt. Bonnell.  It is just a park on top with a trail that runs about 100 steps up then winds back down.  A little hike is always good! The mountain area is surrounded by some pretty and expensive homes.  It was still just too foggy to see any of the surrounding landscape.  So here is a picture “with fog” and “without fog”.  I wish we could have seen the better view. Even the pioneers liked this spot because they built a mill in the 1800s and when it burned they moved on out west.

Then we headed out to the south side and  McKinney Falls State Park.  We bought the partial senior pass at Lake Livingston State park so we can get into any TX state park for half price.  The park was really quiet with hardly anyone out there. Of course, this time of year with all the leaves gone, it wasn’t very pretty.  It started to clear a little so we were able to see the lower falls and the upper falls.  Boy, what a mess!  There was so much damage from the worst flood Austin has seen on Halloween of this year.  They have cleaned up a lot of the park but you can see debris high up in the trees.  Imagine! The water was 40’ ABOVE what you see in the pictures!  It really destroyed many areas of the park.  The river was running low so the falls were small. So here is a picture of the lower falls today and then what they look like when the water is high (I took a picture hanging on the wall in the ranger station).  The the upper falls were very small, too. There are a couple of pictures of the flood damage.  Note the debris high up in the tree in the middle of the bottom picture. That is how high the water was!

    

 

So then we went BACK INTO TOWN AGAIN to try Stubbs BBQ.  It was listed on the BBQ trail for Austin.  We should have picked a different trail!  We just got a sandwich and it wasn’t all that good.  Meat out here in BBQ country is smoked, of course. But I don’t care for meat that is so smoked that it hides much of the flavor.  Can’t win them all! Besides there are a couple places in San Antonio, our next stop, that are on the BBQ trail. Oh, my, hide the scale!

So I think that is it for us and Austin because there is some bad weather headed our way tomorrow.  I think we will just stay inside.  I’ll make a HEALTHY meal after all that BBQ!  Rain is expected and temps are supposed to drop to the 30s by nightfall.   There may even be some mixture of rain and ice.  Brrrr….! We leave Friday so I think we will hook up tomorrow night so we don’t have to do that in cold rain!  WE ARE NOT FAR ENOUGH SOUTH!  We are only going 80 miles further south to San Antonio  to take care of a couple things at the military base and I don’t think that will make it any warmer! Yikes!