Austin, TX

I forgot to write about the Austin part of our trip. It's only about an hour away from San Antonio, making it a nice day trip for us when we are visiting. If you have never been to Austin, it's a huge college town (1.6 million if you count the surrounding Round Rock suburb) with lots of great non-chain restaurants, live music nightly, a very nice university art museum, etc. etc. It's definitely the "coolest" city in Texas and a foodie paradise. Chris and I have eaten in Austin quite a few times and have yet to have a bad meal.

On this trip, we decided to try out Shady Grove, a roadfood.com suggestion. We were pleased with the cheese fries (so good that Chris didn't even offer to let me eat the last one), Chris' hippie sandwich (a bunch of grilled veggies on their homemade hippie bread) and my Monterey Chicken (grilled chicken topped with bacon, green chile strips, Monterey Jack cheese and green chile sauce). I was also very happy with the homemade jalapeno ranch dressing for my side salad. It was so tasty that I thought about getting another side salad to use up the rest of the dressing!

After lunch, we made a stop at LBJ's Presidental Library that is located on the University of Texas campus. It's free admission (free parking too) and worth the stop. An old lady at the admission desk talked our ear off for about 10 minutes explaining the museum layout to us, but we couldn't really complain because she was so excited about everything!

Our last stop in Austin was Amy's Ice Cream. I had heard about this terrific place while watching Food Network before our last trip out there and I am addicted now. The ice cream there is fabulous (14% butterfat--how could it be bad?). I was excited to see that she had a location in San Antonio (which I ended up visiting a couple of times).

We were disappointed that we missed out on a roadfood find, Eva B's Bakery and Cafe. They were closed by the time that we drove by and we didn't get to try all the delicious looking kolache that they have. It looks like we'll have to make another trip to Austin in the near future...bummer.