A Texan Roadtrip

Well we made it back to Australia and are currently deep in the throes of jet leg. I’m finally taking the sage-old advice of sleep when baby sleeps. We try to push out bedtime by 30 minutes to an hour each day but for the most part, I’m still getting to go to sleep when I’m tired. Bedtime is currently 2:30pm!   At least that’s an improvement on 1pm bedtime the day we got here!

Because our long-haul flight left from Dallas, we decided to break up our trip a bit and have ourselves a little Texan holiday. I relinquished total control of the planning to Bryce, which is a BIG deal for me but I had a lot on my plate trying to get us out the door in Madison. It was refreshing to just go with the flow and Bryce did a great job planning. 

We booked a hire car and were able to use hotel points to book our accommodation. This was our first holiday with a baby and so knew that we would be doing things differently. The biggest concession was to slow down our pace and work on her time, namely around naps. We broke down our drives so that we were mostly only driving during nap times. More often then not, this worked well but more on that in another post. 

Texas is big and we had narrowed our Itinerary down to three places: Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. Despite flying into and out of DFW an infinite number of times, all I knew about Dallas was that JFK died there. I knew absolutely nothing about San Antonio, though every one we spoke to mentioned how great the riverwalk was. Austin, I had lived in for 3 months many years ago, so basically had food on the mind! 

The Alamo, San Antonio

In Dallas, we drove past Dealey Plaza and the JFK memorial, had some amazing Lebanese and Mexican food and had a wonderfully unexpected catch up with an old friend. In Austin, we ticked off all the food boxes, caught the views from Mount Bonnell, explored the Capitol building and meandered around Lady Bird Lake. San Antonio was the biggest surprise. With it’s riverwalk and bridged walkways, Downtown San Antonio a bit like a modern, metropolitan Venice - both California and Italy. We also spent some time at the Alamo and some missions (old spanish ruins, some still active) just outside of town. 

Mount Bonnell, Austin

We were so lucky with the weather which was stunningly beautiful the whole week we were there… except for the last two days in Dallas were rainy and cold! A fitting adieu to the Northern Hemisphere winter! Now we are sweltering back in the Queensland heat, but surviving thanks to air conditioning! We just missed a wicked heatwave (record-breaking through much of Australia), but even the post heat-wave normal summer weather is a shock to the system after a Wisconsin winter.