After a busy Austin Trip 2025: Day Three our last full day in Austin didn’t have quite as much planned. As always we started the day with coffee and tried out Fleet Coffee despite it being about a 20 minute walk from the hotel. Breakfast was the hotel buffet again, which was really a homerun for costs and the food selection was great compared to your usual continental breakfast.

The original plan for the day was to go to UMLAUF Sculpture Garden, but we called an audible and went to Zilker Botanical Garden instead. It was the perfect size place to fill out morning and had some really interesting sections, my favorite was definitely the Oriental gardens and its cool stone paths over the water. It also had a neat dinosaur section with some great water features.

Our final excursion was to Inner Space Cavern just north of Austin. Texas used to be a shallow ocean and so there are a ton of caves throughout the state. The Inner Space Cavern was only about thirty minutes outside of the city so after a quick stop for lunch we signed up for a tour. We were hoping to do the “Hidden Passages” tour, but due to some staffing issues they weren’t able to run the tour while we were there. Instead we were able to go on the “Adventure” tour which is a mile long guided tour through a cave on walkways. It was really great and we saw some beautiful caverns with stalagtites and stalagmites. After returning to the surface we drove back to the hotel, which concluded our venturing out with the rental car.

The kids were toast, but Jen wanted to go look for souvenirs so we walked back to SoCo. We found a really cool local store Paper Work and picked up an ornament. We stopped by Allen’s Boots to check out the amazing selection of boots. They have so many amazing designs and styles with all different shapes and sizes. It is a little out of our price range, but it was worth checking out. We visited a couple more shops before returning to the hotel room.

For our last dinner the kids requested sushi so we went to Maiko Sushi Lounge. I had a great bowl of fried rice and the rest of the family loved their sushi. After dinner we walked a few blocks for dessert at Voodoo Doughnuts and I had the “Old Dirty Bastard” - Raised ring with chocolate frosting, chocolate cream-filled cookies, and peanut butter drizzle. It was a great way to end the last evening of our trip.