One of the biggest surprises of the year Matt and I spent traveling with Tommy was the three months we spent in Austin, Texas. Neither of us had expected to like it there, but it ended up being one of our favorite stops. In fact, it was hard at the end to pack up Tommy’s beloved trains and leave.

Austin is justifiably famous for its bar scene, but with gorgeous parks, tons of local family-friendly restaurants, and a great children’s museum it also has to be one of the best places I’ve been to visit with kids. And the people who live there seem to feel the same way: Everywhere I went with Tommy in Austin I encountered parents and children. The former were almost always willing to chat. In fact, a typical conversation opener was this: “Have y’all been here before? No? Well, welcome to Texas. We’re glad to have you.”

The hat in the photo comes from the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in downtown Austin – I believe that the kid’s meal we ordered for Tommy in the cafeteria there came served in it. This museum is a great place to start a visit to Texas, offering an interactive and kid-friendly history of the state starting with its earlier people and moving through time to the Alamo and eventually the development of the oil and aerospace industries.

And why a picture of Texas on this fine Friday? I’m getting you ready for next week when starting with my Monday Dreaming post I will be offering one lucky reader the chance to win a family vacation in San Antonio. It will be easy to win, so I hope you’ll be back. And until then, please visit Delicious Baby, where in addition to the other great travel pictures for Photo Friday, you can also enter her San Antonio giveaway contest (see here for the ten other opportunities to win). Have a great weekend!

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]]> http://www.motherofalltrips.com/2010/05/welcome-to-texas-were-glad-to-have-you.html/feed 7 http://www.motherofalltrips.com/2009/03/mondays-are-for-dreaming-zilker-park.html http://www.motherofalltrips.com/2009/03/mondays-are-for-dreaming-zilker-park.html#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:25:00 +0000 admin

As I’ve written before, Austin, Texas holds a very special place in my heart. We spent three lovely months there in 2004 and I would go back for a vacation (or a longer stay) in a heartbeat. I’ve been thinking a lot about Austin this weekend because several of my travel blogging friends including Pam Nerd’s Eye View of and Sheila of Family Travel Guide are at the annual South by Southwest Conference, a huge (and supremely cool) meeting of creative minds that includes lots of great music and panels on everything from iPhones to independent filmmaking.

One of the reasons I liked Austin so much is that it had a generally happy vibe. I got the impression that people who lived in Austin really liked it there. Public spaces tended to be full of a palpable joy and goodwill. Few places demonstrated this better than Zilker Metropolitan Park, the largest and most well-used park in the center of city, which sits on the banks of Town Lake (which I just discovered was recently rechristened Lady Bird Lake in honor of Lady Bird Johnson – thanks Wikipedia). This lovely lake is actually a reservoir created by strategic damming of the Colorado River divides the city in two and is a wonderful spot for everything from long strolls along the shore to kayaking.

One of our first outings to the park was on a Sunday in late January. It was an incredibly beautiful day, warm and sunny with a brilliant sky. We parked near a large and crowded playground which was full of ramps, slides, and an antique fire truck now outfitted as a jungle gym. When Tommy tired of the playground, we walked about fifty feet to a dais overlooking Barton Springs Swimming Pool, a football-sized spring-fed pool with a constant temperature of 68 degrees that was open year round. Here, next to a large concession stand selling soft serve ice cream and hot dogs and bread to feed the birds, Tommy chased pigeons around the picnic tables and threw rocks into puddles. We watched swimmers doing laps in the clear water; the air was like a blessing. On another visit we would discover steps at one end of the pool that led down to a path that ran along the rest of the lake. This rocky path offered a number of excellent vantage points from which to hurl stones into the water, an activity preferred by so many young boys there that I sometimes wondered that there were any rocks left to throw.

But the real reason for our visit that day was to ride on the Zilker Zephyr, a little green diesel engine pulling a line of small, open-air cars that runs for three miles through the park every day of the week. The depot was situated between the playground and the pool, and we arrived in time to purchase tickets ($6.50 for all three of us) for the first run of the day. As we waited for it to emerge from the tunnel next to the playground where it spent the night, a happy hum of expectation filled the air. It was obvious that tourist and native alike adored this train and that many families made special trips here to ride.

Tommy loved every minute of the 25-minute ride, from the regular whistle blasts to the fact that he could see the joggers on the bike path that in many places paralleled the track. Every time we passed a stroller or a dog he would cry “baby!” or “doggie!” We went under a bridge and admired its graceful stone curves. We watched ducks swimming on the sparkling surface of the lake and looked at the large cranes that hung over the cityscape in the distance.

My favorite part of the ride was that everyone who saw the train pass got a goofy smile on their face, and many of them waved. It seemed there was not one person in Austin who did not love that train, who did not have time to take a moment to say hello. And at the end, after we passed through the playground with all of the children waving and shouting we entered the tunnel that doubled as an engine shed and all of the adults started making funny noises to hear the echo, ostensibly for the benefit of the children on board but also just because it was fun.

For more information about Austin, please check out my list of great places to eat with kids. You might also enjoy my book chapter about our time there.

Update: I won a goody bag! And it will have Angela’s book in it! Look here in the future for a review. Thanks Angela.

The lovely and talented Angela over at Just Go! (check our her wonderful guidebook about Rome) is hosting a blogapalooza with the Halloween-appropriate theme of “What a strange trip it’s been.”

Since I traveled for a year with a one-year-old, I’ve got more than one er, interesting, experience to draw on, some of which I’ve already shared. There was our arrival in Boston, our jaunt to Cape Ann, and our long trip back from Italy.

But one of my favorite travel stories has to do with the perils of living in a short-term rental with a toddler, something we did for three months in Austin, Texas. I was holding 18-month-old Tommy in my arms one morning as I stood next to the keypad for the house’s alarm system. Before I had time to react or pull away, his chubby finger pressed the activate button, which meant we were prisoners inside the house until and unless we could punch in the code. Satisfied, he looked at me, smiling, his blue eyes wide, his blond hair sticking out around his head like a halo.

I put Tommy down and squinted at the keypad. There were words scrolling and a light blinking and I was pretty sure (although not certain) that they meant the house was armed. My ignorance was no surprise since this was not my house, and was in fact the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…sixth place I’d lived in during the past half a year. A vague memory surfaced: the owner, to me only a voice on the phone, sharing a secret code that shut off the system. But since Matt and I had not been setting the alarm since we arrived in Austin, I had no idea what it was. Every time I came in the door my hands were full of groceries, sippy cups, toys, the diaper bag, and Tommy; I was more concerned that I

Matt, who had come down the hall dressed to go into the research library at the University of Texas where he had a fellowship, did not know the code either. A hasty search for it produced the owner’s phone number at work, but she was unavailable. Matt had missed his bus. We paced the narrow hallway, getting in each other’s way, each too tired after seeing the wrong side of 5 a.m. to come up with any kind of solution.

Usually I am able to inhabit both small spaces and crises with Matt without losing my cool but for some reason on this morning I got crosser and crosser. “It’s not end of the world!” I declared, “I’m just crabby! Moms get crabby sometimes! You should just go!”And then, “I’ll deal with the consequences,” I said, unaware of course what those were. Matt knew better but as I grew more strident, he wisely decided to let me face them alone, making the calculation that he didn’t need to be the person who taught me what I needed to know. He was laughing to himself as he walked away from the house.

He had already disappeared around the corner when the alarm started: exquisitely loud, piercing, cataclysmic. I heard the screen door in my bedroom slam against the wall as Tommy fled to the backyard. Grabbing the phone, I followed and found him running around the perimeter as if the noise was driving him into a trance or seizure. I had no idea what to do or where to go for help. I didn’t know the neighbors, and I was pretty sure that if I just drove away, trouble would ensue.

The minutes passed slowly, the din did not abate, and no solution presented itself. Then the security company called. Although I walked to the back of the yard, I could hardly hear the woman on the other end of the line.

I told her the situation. She said, “Well, what’s the secret word?”

I said “I don’t know the secret word! I don’t know anything!”

She said she’d “make a few calls” and then she was gone. The alarm stopped sounding a few minutes later, but when I went back into the house, I could see on the keypad that it was still armed. We stayed outside. About ten minutes later the alarm started going off again; the noise was all the worse for the respite. Tommy resumed his paces, and two police officers, a man and a woman, appeared through the back door. They looked at me standing helpless as I watched my son tearing around like a dog sensing an earthquake. I could see that the woman was struggling not to laugh. The man advised me to try and disconnect the alarm. Neither of them seemed to think that I was an imminent threat. It was phenomenally loud inside. “I think we’ll leave around the side of the house,” the female officer said.

Just as they departed, the owner called. I started shouting a long and convoluted explanation of what had happened before she broke into my wild speech, saying “Shouldn’t I give you the code so you can turn the alarm off?”

I hope you enjoyed this blissful little tidbit and learned something (I’m not sure what – perhaps always, always, for the love of God, write down the code! And put it where you can find it quickly! Not under a pile of books, which is where I located it later that week.)

And now, please visit Just Go! Leave a comment and you’ll be entered to win a goody bag. And who doesn’t love goody bags? I hope you’ll also think about visiting some of the other wonderful blogs listed there. Enjoy!

Before I went to Austin I had what can only be described as a laundry list of Yankee prejudices. Texas was as remote to me as Mars and if you had asked me to picture the landscape, the only image I would have been able to provide was a desert of cacti and cliffs perhaps taken from old Roadrunner cartoons. And my other impressions were no less stereotypical—ranches and rattlesnakes, talk about remembering the Alamo and not messing with Texas, and oil millionaires who wore cowboy hats and spurs and holsters (like James Dean in Giant).

It didn’t take long for Austin to work its magic on me though, especially since everyone was so friendly. (A typical conversation opener in Austin was this: “Have y’all been here before? No? Well, welcome to Texas. We’re glad to have you.”) You may know that it’s a great hipster place to go with fantastic music and a happening bar scene. What you may not realize is that it’s a really fabulous place to go with kids, especially when you’re looking for good places to eat. Austin is chock full of great restaurants serving amazing food that truly puts any chain Tex Mex place to total shame. Here are a few of my favorites:

The Magnolia Café is kind of like a diner on steroids. The food here is just so phenomenally good you would think it would be hard to come by and yet they serve it 24 hours a day (the sign famously says “Sorry we’re open”). It was here that we discovered two items ubiquitous to menus around the city but revelations to us northerners: the breakfast burrito and migas (which is scrambled eggs cooked with pieces of tortilla, cheese, and beans). Equally delicious are the gingerbread pancakes. I can’t really tell you about their lunch and dinner food because no matter what time of day we went, we always had breakfast (see why it’s good for kids?). And there are two locations, so you can get there whether you are hanging out in the northern or southern half of the city. Just like everyplace in Austin, the vibe is friendly and laid back. The last time we were there, a girl scout was walking from table to table selling cookies.

Another great restaurant is in an unexpected place: at the supermarket. Whole Foods is what Austin is famous for (and the flagship store, which was being built when I was last there, is one of the seven wonders of the grocery shopping world). But when we lived there I was a Central Market gal. You really don’t want to get me started on what a fantastic grocery store this is. And the best part is that at the location I frequented there is a large café that serves a full menu of excellent food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The main part of the café opens up onto a deck covered with tables and chairs right next to a large playset. Every Friday and Saturday night there is free live music. When we decided to check it out, we discovered that the clientele was largely made up of families with young children. Parents encircled the playground equipment drinking from beers and glasses of wine while their children tore around. Why this was the only place I’d ever encountered that ever built a bar right next to a playground, I don’t know, but Matt and I, drinks in hand, both thought it was immensely civilized.

But our favorite restaurant by far is the Shady Grove, which, true to his name, sits in a grove of oak trees. It had a stone interior reminiscent of a 1950s ski lodge complete with a fireplace and large plate glass windows. A large silver Airstream trailer is parked next to the patio which extends off the side of the building. Here they serve huge corndogs cooked in homemade batter that Tommy would devour while Matt and I stuffed ourselves full of chicken fried steak covered with hatch green chile sauce and Monterey Jack cheese or tortilla fried queso catfish. If you had told me that I would one day swear up and down that deep-fried catfish covered in melted cheese and chili peppers was just about the best amalgam of flavors God ever created, I would have said you were crazy, but it’s very true. And the best accompaniment: a margarita the size of your head. Makes even dining with a one-year-old a stress-free experience, let me tell you.

Other family-friendly places to try include: Amy’s Ice Cream, Rudy’s Bar-B-Q, Guero’s and the Kerby Lane Café. I’m sure I’m missing tons of places – please comment and share.

If you’d like to read more about my family’s adventures in Austin, including descriptions of some of the fun things to do, I’ve posted the chapter about it from my book. Enjoy, and remember what Lyle Lovett said: Texas Wants You Anyway!

Thanks to Mirsasha for the photo from Flickr, some rights reserved.

Netroots Nation is going on right now in one of my favorite places: Austin, Texas. When we were traveling for 13 months with Tommy, we spent three fabulous months there and almost didn’t leave. Was it the fact that they put queso on fried catfish? Or that there’s a miniature train called the Zilker Zephyr? Perhaps it is because of the fact that it’s the only place I’ve ever been where there is a restaurant/bar with a playground attached (and all this at the grocery store no less. I’m not kidding).

In honor of the MotherTalkers who convened in Austin today (from my favorite blog and a great community of people) I’m going to post a link here to the chapter of my book about Austin. I hope you all enjoy!