San Antonio and Austin

We thought of Texas as mostly a lot of miles to get across, except for two cities - San Antonio and Austin. 

I remembered the San Antonio River Walk fondly from a business trip many years ago.  Created back in the 1920's as part of a flood control program, it consists of walkways along the banks of the San Antonio river, running one level below the streets of downtown San Antonio.  You walk alongside the water, no barriers to prevent an impaired celebrant from falling in, and mostly what you see is one pretty restaurant after another.  No fast food, no T-shirt shops, no gee-gaw stores, just mid to upper class restaurants, hotels, and bars.  The river - which here is really a canal dug for commercial purposes - winds back and forth in a picturesque way, and it's exhilarating to stroll along, taking in the sights and sounds at night.  When we were there, some of the trees had been wrapped with Christmas lights, and it was all pretty spectacular.  One night we ate at Salt Grass Steak House, another at a Tex-Mex place.  Lots of charm.

During the day we took the dogs along on a part of the River Walk that was fairly new and hadn't been commercially developed yet.  We talked with a cop on a bicycle who told us that his primary duty was to keep homeless people from sleeping and congregating on the walk.

On our last morning in San Antonio we toured their other big tourist attraction, the Alamo, and learned its history.  San Antonio is a nice town, and only about 80 miles from Austin, the state capitol, which was next on our list.

We'd heard a lot of nice things about Austin.  Our campground, within the city limits, was McKinney Falls State Park.  It rained off and on both on the way there and during our stay.  We dropped into a tourist office downtown and asked about the drought we had read about.  The lady said that this rain, and some last week, was the first they had gotten in almost a year.  They had thirty days straight of over 100 degree heat this summer and were still experiencing rolling blackouts.

She told us that they would be lighting the state Christmas tree the next evening.  I asked if the governor would be there.  When Nancy made some disparaging remark about Governor Perry, the lady said that there were bumper stickers quoting Molly Ivans, saying, "I TOLD you not to elect a Texan president!"  As we were leaving, the black employee holding the door for us told us that a local columnist had said that Rick Perry and Ron Paul would make us miss George W. Bush.

I'm just reporting the conversations, folks, not making a political statement.

Austin is an impressive city, with a few magnificent skyscrapers, but a downtown that's easily and pleasantly walkable.  Sixth Street, only a few blocks from the capitol building, has a bunch of nice restaurants and bars with live music - and Austin has an incredible amount of high-quality music.  It reminds you of Bourbon Street, but without the girlie shows.  We had a lovely dinner at a fine old hotel, the Driskill, and observed the local population.  It's a city with a lot of well dressed young people and appeared to me to be number one among the places we've visited in the attractiveness of its citizens, for those of you keeping score.  The womenfolk are particularly well turned out.

We visited the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, which is beautifully done, and came away with an appreciation of what an outstanding president he was, in many ways.  The quantity of important legislation under his watch was unprecedented.  Of course his escalation of the Vietnam War made him unpopular and hurt his legacy.

Austin was the birthplace of Whole Foods, and we shopped at their flagship store, which may be the greatest grocery store we've ever seen, though not the cheapest.  For lunch one day we went to the Trailer Park, which is a semi-permanent collection of food trailers.  Nancy said that the shrimp taco may have been her favorite Mexican meal of all time.

The weather didn't allow us to explore Austin as much as we would have liked, but Lord knows they need the rain.  Another reason not to complain is that we heard about the high winds and power outages back in the Santa Cruz area at the same time.  Our overall impression was that Austin would be a great place to live, but not in the summer.