Waco and Austin- Wednesday, August 1, 2018

      Julie is a big fan of the television show Fixer Upper, and its two hosts- Joanna and Chip Gaines.  They have become hugely popular in recent years and have become nationwide celebrities.  Julie really wanted to come to Waco to see the shopping complex that they built here, and that really was the driving force to get us to come to Texas this week in the first place.  Like many of the husbands who are brought here, Scott had resigned himself to let Julie choose what to do through the day today.

We skipped hotel breakfast in order to get to Magnolia Table, Joanna’s restaurant.  She has it decorated in her black and white style with subway tiles on the wall.  We got there shortly after it opened and there was no wait.  We both enjoyed the breakfast, but Scott didn’t get the buttermilk biscuit that was supposed to come with it and suspects it was a conspiracy since Cracker Barrel didn’t give Julie her cornbread last night.  The highlight here for Julie might have been the zucchini bread that she ordered as a side.  The waitress said that you couldn’t really taste the zucchini as much as the brown sugar, the pecans, and the love.  Julie got a small loaf of it and still has some for tomorrow.  During the meal she was texting several people, including her friend Sandi from work, and taking pictures to show them the floor tiles and the décor.   Julie says it was the happiest breakfast that she ever had.

After breakfast, little else was open, so we went to look for the statues of cows we had seen before.  That ended up being a great stop.  The statues are posed as if they are on a cattle drive, and the cowboys are about to herd them across the large white suspension bridge.  The bridge itself was built across the Brazos River here in 1866, and there are several markers that show it was a landmark on the old Chisholm Trail.  The weather at this point was beautiful, and the temperature was in the 70s.  We walked across the bridge with very few other people around.  We saw lots of birds from here, and Julie even spotted a cute little green turtle.  He was floating in the current, slowly going under the bridge like he was playing Poohsticks.  A heron sat on a nearby pylon, pruning himself while we watched. 

The statues and bridge were part of the Waco Riverwalk, and we strolled down it a ways in order to explore it.  We got back in the car and drove further up the river to see what was next.  After the Riverwalk came an area called Cameron Park.  It had lots of beautiful overlooks along the river, with large green trees that often arched over the road.  We were impressed with the scenery and went out as far as a cliff called “Lovers Leap.”  It was were an Indian princess and her starcrossed lover from another tribe were supposed to have committed suicide together.  The weather was still gorgeous and there was almost nobody else around.  We were having fun.  Julie said she was impressed with how green Waco is.

We made our way to the Magnolia Silos area which is the big retail area that Joanna and Chip have built.  The silos themselves were used to load and unload grain onto the passing trains.  There are plans to use them for more in the future, but for now, the buildings around them have been turned into an attraction that brings in an enormous amount of people (and money).  We started at the Magnolia Bakery, where there were many kinds of cupcakes and sweets to choose from.  Even though breakfast hadn’t been that long before, Julie got a peach cupcake and ate it there and a strawberry lemonade cupcake that she saved for later.  We sat and enjoyed the scenery, and eventually got into the line of people who were waiting for the Magnolia retail store to open its doors at 9:00.

When that store opened, Julie "Facetimed" her friend Sandi back in Cheektowaga, and the two of them giddily went through the store together.  Julie had said that she wanted a wooden spoon and found one, but that seemed like going to the Eaton Centre to buy shoelaces.  She got a few other smaller things and a t-shirt for herself. Julie probably wouldn’t have bought as much on her own, but she now had her friend Sandi to go on the virtual shopping trip with her.  Julie showed her different items with her phone, and Sandi had her put them in our shopping bag.  Scott was along to hold the bag for them as they went.  Shopping here was fun, but the home decor items that were here were not much different than the items that Joanna sells in Target stores now-- there's just a lot more of them.  Julie said she was expecting more furniture, and that might be in their plans for the future.

After shopping here, we sat in the shade of the Silos to have some water and people watch.  This is certainly a money printing factory for them, and they are attracting a certain demographic that comes with money to shop.   We ended up our time here by going to the Magnolia Seed and Feed, where plants like Joanna’s favorite lavender are available.  

After the Magnolia Silos, we considered taking a bus tour of Waco, but decided to continue to explore on our own.  We went to a very large shop called Spice Village.  It’s a crafty kind of co-op that takes up the second floor of what was either a large warehouse or factory.  It had lots of funny items, many with a local twist.  Julie ended up buying a few things here, including some presents that we will put away until Christmas.   In that same building were several restaurants and we went to a Mexican place for our lunch.  Scott had Dr. Pepper to drink, since it was first made here in Waco.

After lunch we went to the Waco Visitors Information Center and passed the Dr. Pepper museum on our way there.  At the Visitors Center, we got a list of some of the homes that Chip and Joanna have renovated on Fixer Upper.  For the most part, the addresses of nearly all of the homes from the show are kept secret because they don’t want people like us showing up and taking pictures all the time.  That’s understandable.  But the nine properties on this list were houses that were eventually made into rentable vacation homes.  We decided to go around Waco to see which ones we could find.  We started with the one that Chip called the “Shotgun House,” which wasn’t too far from where we had been.  It’s a long narrow house that is now a dark green color.  From there we went to “German Schmear House,” and Julie remembered a lot of details about that one.  Chip had to learn how to learn to “schmear” the bricks on the outside of the house.  Nearby was the “Mid-Century Modern” house.  As we were driving to these two, we could easily see what they mean on the show.  They always introduce Fixer Upper by saying that they look for the “worst house in the best neighborhood.”  There were certainly a lot of really nice houses in the neighborhoods we were driving through.

The last house that we found on the list was probably the most famous of all of them.  "Magnolia House" is the rental home that they fixed up on their Christmas episode a few years ago.  As they were doing it, they were intending to use it as a rental.  (It's crazy expensive to stay there and booked until the end of time, it seems.)  The property includes a smaller house that sits behind the main one as a place for the caretakers to live.  The house actually sits a long way outside of Waco, in a little dot on the map called McGregor.  We drove about a half-hour through the Texas countryside in order to get there.  Once we had seen it, Julie called an audible.  We were about half-way through the list of houses, and now a long way from Waco.  She decided that we should continue on in our adventure and travel on to Austin, a little over an hour and a half away, so we did that instead of going back to Waco.

           Once we got to Austin, we didn't have much of a plan.  It was a little after 3:00 in the afternoon, and the only thing we really wanted to do was to see the bats, but they don't start to emerge until sunset.  We tried parking in the newspaper's parking lot, which is next to a park with a viewing area specifically for the bats, but we couldn't figure out how to park and Julie was afraid of getting a "boot" placed on the car.  We did find a nearby parking ramp to the Hyatt hotel, and paid to park there, but that still left us with around four hours to kill.

           While we were looking for parking Julie spotted a Yeti store.  Anna likes their water bottles.  They're supposed to be the best available and are stylish.  So Julie "Facetimed" Anna to shop with her.  We asked the girl at the counter where we could find a place to eat that was "easy to get to" and "within walking distance."  She said there were a cluster of restaurants that were up South Congress Avenue from where we were.  A customer added that they were about "half a mile away."  We decided to try those.  

            Unfortunately, the walk was probably closer to a mile away, mostly up hill, and it was pushing 100 degrees Fahrenheit now.   The walk was quite a grueling trek for us, but we pushed on.  We had to dodge white and scooters as well.  They are the kind you stand on and push with one foot.  These can be rented with your smartphone all around the city, but seem a little hazardous to us because they come up behind you on the sidewalk pretty fast and almost silently.  We pushed on on foot, though.  When we finally got to the restaurants, we found a trendy place that was known for seafood but the girl at Yeti said they had the best cheeseburgers in town.  Julie was impressed by how dog friendly the restaurant was.  We didn't see any while we were there, but there was a whole wall covered with snapshots of the dogs that have come in, labelled with their names.  We heard later that Austin is a very dog-friendly city.  Around the restaurant was an eclectic collection of trendy, quirky stores, and once we had eaten and cooled down a little, we went shopping there.  One store specialized in colorful items from Mexico and many other places in the world.  Another sold boots and cowboy hats.  The one that caught Scott's eye was a huge costume store called Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds.   We went in there and found an early 1800s tailcoat for Pat, the mannequin in Scott's classroom, and even got a 20% discount when they found out we were teachers.

            Eventually, we had to trudge back down South Congress Avenue towards the Texas State Capitol dome and the bats under the South Congress Street bridge.  We took our time, and rested at a Starbucks in the lobby of the Hyatt where we were parked.  At about 7:30 we went to look for a place to watch for the bats.  The concierge at the hotel told us how to find the park to view them, but was we were walking there, we spotted a boat tour company that takes people out onto the water to see bats from there.  We had tried to buy tickets for the boat tour online, but it said it was all booked.  Julie figured that it didn't hurt to ask in person, and we were put on a standby list.  We had to wait, but were eventually called.   Julie was incredibly happy to be able to see her favorite animals, bats, from one of her favorite places, a boat.

            The tour took us to the far side of the South Congress Avenue bridge.  Because of a quirk in the bridges construction, hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats migrate here every year.  The slits left in the joints of the bridge to allow for heat expansion are coincidentally the perfect size for bats to raise families in.  750,000 bats are estimated to come from Mexico each spring, and they nest under the bridge.  Nearly all of these are pregnant females, and when the pups are born, the bat population nearly doubles to probably around a million and a half.  Each night, when they emerge, a few males come out first to scout the area and make sure it is clear of predators.  Then the females and the juvenile pups emerge in what seems like never ending streams.  The bats began in several columns, which flew over our heads and headed east, towards insects in the agricultural areas.  The bats were late tonight.  They had been coming out at about 7:45 or 7:50, but had been as late as 8:10 recently.  It was well after 8:20 before they started tonight and we joked about how we had made Old Faithful run late last summer.  But once they start, they continue to emerge for hours.  The biggest numbers come out in the first 20 minutes or so.  Many people had gathered in kayaks and other boat tours, along the shore and on the bridge itself to see the spectacle.  Our boat driver was good, and tried to keep the sun behind the bridge columns when we were waiting.  Julie was texting what pictures she could to Anna and Emma as we watched.  The boat driver warned us about the "rain" that might happen.  Small drops of "bat pee" hit a few of the people on the boat, but they were like little rain drops and don't carry diseases.  The driver also took us out a little way to show us how you could see the columns of bats over a mile away as the flew from us.  As the numbers of bats seemed to slow, she shined a red light under the bridge to highlight how the bats were following the underside of the bridge now, towards the shore, before flying out in one stream that was still going strong.  After we had seen enough of the bats, she took us for a cruise around Lady Bird Lake, named for Lady Bird Johnson who helped get it cleaned up.  The lake is a damned part of the Texas's Lower Colorado River.

             It was a beautiful end to the evening, and was a high note to end the day on.  It was the kind of day that we think back on and can't believe that the things all fit into one day.  It feels like breakfast and the turtle that floated under the bridge were last week, not this morning.  Scott loves those kinds of days, but we are exhausted.  Furthermore, our hotel for tonight is in San Antonio, and was still over an hour and a half drive away.