Austin, TX

Day Five: Picnic in the park, followed by a tour of the Botanical gardens. I could have walked around those gardens all day, they were so gorgeous, if it weren't 105 degrees with sweltering humidity :) We only saw a couple of sections of the huge gardens before we were drenched...this was an old window in one of the first houses in Austin. Gracie had to do a little dance on the ledge...Our favorite section was the Oriental gardens.
In the pre-historic garden...yes that is a velociraptor behind us. After the gardens, we decided we needed to go swimming and cool off a bit. Just as we were about to get ready to go a HUGE rainstorm hit! The raindrops were gigantic! We ran around in it (Gracie's first time, and she loved it!) and it definitely satisfied our need to cool off, and we ended up not going swimming. Here is some of the dancing-in-the-rain action!

That night we watched the fifth Harry Potter (which Jared, my Dad and myself realized we had never seen!) in preparation to see the sixth. I am excited to go...

Day Six: we headed to San Antonio. It's only about an hour away from Austin, and is well worth the drive. We loved it there. They took us on the river walk, which reminds me of what Venice would look like. There are lots of old stone bridges and walls with gorgeous flowers and trees everywhere. The river is lined with tall old looking stone buildings and restaurants. It was so pretty....Here is Jared and Elliot with Saint Antonio: The pictures really don't do it justice.Directly across the street from the river was the Alamo. The history behind it was really fascinating. To be honest, I didn't know much about it going in. I should have researched it a little better, and listened better in history class. They had tour guides giving us a brief history, and I learned a lot. Here it is: After walking around, Lia came down with some sort of heat sickness...poor little thing...so we headed back to Austin. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Posado's, which was the best mexican food we've ever had! Jared was so excited about it, I thought he was going to cry. :) Gracie has been such a good little traveler. She sleeps a lot in the car with her little baby as her travel pillow. It's cute.