Weekend in Austin, TX

Dan and I spent Labor Day weekend in Austin, TX with his family. Only his parents knew we were coming, although I'm pretty his sister and brother suspected something given Dan's perchance for surprises! We flew out of SLC early, early on Saturday morning and his parents picked us up at the Houston Airport and we all drove down to Austin and surprised the rest of his family at the hotel. We spent the first night in the swimming pool and hot tub and the boys watched football. Dan could resist showing off his Texas roots along with the subtle hints from the hotel breakfast... I thought it was pretty funny that even breakfast shows Texas pride. I guess it's more fun when you have a unique state shape...I don't think you'd ever see a Utah-shaped waffle... On Sunday, we played all day at Zilker Park in downtown Austin. Dan, John and I went canoeing down Town Lake.
When we got out of the channel where we rented the canoe, we had a beautiful view of the Austin skyline.

We saw all these turtles just sitting on a log out in the middle of the channel . They were huge and the water was so clear you could see them swimming right below the canoe.

After canoeing, we were really hot so we went swimming in Barton Springs Pool, which is a natural spring-fed pool with a year-round temperature average of about 68 degrees. The pool itself is huge. It was at least 300 M long and the bottom was partly a cement pad they laid don and the rest was just the natural pool bottom with rocks and algee. It was really cold at first, but once you just jump in you got used to it. The weather was really hot but once you got too hot laying out, you could jump in the pool and cool off. After we went swimming, we drove around Austin and some of the surrounding cities. The Austin Capital was fun to see. The front of the building has the U.S. and Texas flags, but in the back there is only the Texas flag.



On Monday, we had planned to do some shopping but all the shops were closed due to the holiday so we spent it sightseeing. We drove through the Texas hill country over to Fredricksburg before driving back to Houston to catch our flight back to SLC. It was short trip, I wish we had been able to stay longer, but we had so much fun hanging out with Dan's family.