Austin - Again

Dear Friends:

This week, I was in Austin, Texas...again. I was attending more meetings at our company's HQ, located there. This time, however, I was able to bring my wife and youngest son with me. We had a blast!

As I've noted in previous posts about Austin, the city is famous for...bats. The Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin is the summer home to North America's largest urban bat colony. There's an estimated 1,500,000 Mexican free-tailed bats that live under the bridge, which eat an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects each night. Lots of tourists wait until dusk, when the bats leave the bridge to eat. We decided to join everyone and see the bats.

Waiting near the Congress St. Bridge, for the exodus of bats to begin...

I tried to shoot some video, to give you an idea of what we saw. Hopefully, you can see the bats on this video - but you're going to have to look closely. I uploaded it to YouTube (here), and you can select the 720p version of the video, which will show the largest size and best quality. Half-way through the video, you'll see a red light - this is from a boat on the river, which will give you the best look at the sheer number of bats flying out of the structure.

While in Austin, I had a chance to meet the man who will become my new boss. He's brand-new to the company, so it was a good time to meet, and get to know each other. We had a great discussion and I'm looking forward to the projects that we'll be working on.

As some may know, we're actually moving to Austin. Part of a promotion at work, and working with this new manager, means that I need to be at the company HQ. So another reason for this trip was for my wife to get to know the city a little better. This means that when we're ready to move, we'll understand the neighborhoods and layout of the area a bit better. We did manage to look at some homes while there. One that we really like, looks like this:

We're a little early to start looking at specific homes, but we wanted to get an idea of what's available. As you can guess, our housing dollars will go much further in Texas than Massachusetts ; )

We also took G-Man to the Austin Zoo...which was nice, but not something we're going to spend time at again, for a while ; ) He had more fun with his Mom at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. This is a wonderful botanic garden and play area. I don't have pictures...because I wasn't there. However, my wife will post some gorgeous shots of the Texas Bluebonnet flowers very soon - on her blog.

No trip to Austin would be complete, without a visit to Rudy's. This is my favorite BBQ restaurant, which I've written about in previous blog posts (here). I converted another couple of fans:

G-Man enjoys the free bread that Rudy's offers with all their meals...

Austin is only about an hour from San Antonio (which is where the nearest LDS Temple is located). My wife has friends that live in San Antonio, so we decided to meet them half-way in-between the cities. The location was San Marcos, Texas - home of the famous Prime Outlet Stores. Now, I've seen my share of outlet stores...this one blows all of them away. Voted the “Third-Best Place to Shop in the World” by ABC’s The View, these are the largest outlet stores in Texas and the third-largest in the world! There are over 140 stores, with every possible brand that you could imagine. If only there was such a thing as an Apple outlet store ; )

I'm sure that there will be more trips to Austin, before we actually move. I'll try not to repeat myself on subsequent blog posts ; ) All I know is that we had a great time together.