Ten years after my first visit to Austin for ApacheCon, we decided to return for a school vacation trip. We flew out of Boston early Saturday afternoon, with a quick layover in Atlanta. We landed in Austin around 9pm and checked into the Embassy Suites hotel on Congress Street.

On Sunday morning, we woke up and enjoyed the hotel’s free breakfast buffet before heading out to explore downtown Austin. Our first stop was Houndstooth Coffee, and it was delicious! We continued up Congress Street and checked out the grounds of the state capitol. There are several different areas and monuments to visit.

Next, we went to an outdoor park at the northern end of a greenway with lots of cool walkways and an interesting river running through it.

We meandered back towards the hotel and stopped at the Museum of the Weird. It was a small museum, but it had some strange and interesting items on display, like shrunken heads, wax sculptures, and even the Iceman!

The kids were starting to grumble about food, so we headed back to Congress street and grabbed some burgers at Burger Bar. The burgers were great and gave us the energy boost we needed for the next part of our adventure. Jennifer had found a book store she wanted to check out in the West End of the city, so we went to the riverfront and followed the trails along the water. It was a long and hot walk, but we finally made it to Book People - the biggest bookstore in Texas! It was nice and cool inside with all sorts of cool sections to explore.

Across the street was a shop that makes rolled ice cream, Frozen Rolls Creamery. We had never tried rolled ice cream before, and it was so much fun to watch them make it. It was getting late in the afternoon and we were all beat, so we walked back to the hotel through the pedestrian bridge. The weather was sunny all day, and we managed to cover a lot of downtown Austin.

After resting in the hotel for a couple of hours, we decided it was the perfect night to watch the bats emerge from under the Congress street bridge. We ordered burritos from Free Birds World Burritos, picked them up, and then sat in the park next to the bridge to wait for the emergence. We arrived about an hour before sunset, and the park quickly filled up with people. A few minutes after sunset, the bats started flying out from under the bridge over the park. They kept flying for at least another half an hour before it was too dark to see them easily. We did go up onto the bridge and looked down, which made it a bit easier to see them. It was still a bit early, so we wandered downtown in search of some sweets and found Yummi Joy for some candy.