Howdy From Austin, Texas: Zilker Park

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Sometimes it’s fun to take a vacation in your own hometown.  Lucky for us, two weekends this summer brought our cousins to Austin, so we just put on our tennies and gimme caps and went on a road trip … across town.

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Our first Austin-y thing to do was walk around the Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail. The trail  around the lake is surrounded by shady trees and the path has that wonderful crunchy sound as one walks on the crushed granite.  Plus, this trail offers the best people-watching and dog watching in town. In fact, we saw several dogs that looked like the possible grown-up versions of Neville, our new puppy, whose lineage is unknown.  We inquired of several dog-walking owners about the breeds of their dogs and we are now pretty sure that Neville might be a Collie-Lab-Rottweiler-Shepherd mix … maybe that would be a Colab-rotshep?

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This is Barton Springs!  It is FREEZING … which feels really great on a hot summer day.  Here are the cousins s-l-o-w-l-y inching into the icy water.  Barton Springs is famous for the nude sunbathers that have relaxed there through the years, but we didn’t see any, and even if we had, I would have had to crop them out of my pictures since this blog is rated G.

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This is the Zilker Zephyr!  We have happy memories of bringing the girls to ride this miniature train when they were little.  It’s a pleasant 3-mile circle, and I can even remember riding it with my grandparents when I was young!  This 50-year old line is truly the little engine that could!

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