South Congress and our first taste of Texas BBQ

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After visiting the University of Texas Austin softball field, we decided to go and check out another area of the city south of downtown. This is Congress Avenue and it is one of the main thoroughfares through the downtown area and points beyond of Austin. Please feel free to check out my blog and read some of my previous posts if you want to see what we had been up to in Austin before this point. Just before we got to Congress Avenue, my wife noticed that there was a TCBY on Martin Luther King Boulevard.

Back in the day, @mrsbozz used to work for TCBY. The name stands for The Country's Best Yogurt and it is a frozen yogurt chain that has largely fallen by the wayside. You used to see a TCBY in pretty much every mall or strip mall in the United States, but now it seems there are only a handful of locations left. Austin just happens to have one of them. We felt obliged to stop, so I ran in and got my wife's favorite.

It's probably been about 30 years since my wife has been able to indulge in the treat you see above. White chocolate mousse frozen yogurt with peanut butter cups in it. She let me have a taste, and I do have to admit, it was pretty dang good! I'm glad she got to enjoy this treat at least one more time in her life. Needless to say, if we (or you) ever come across a TCBY in the future, do yourself a favor and check it out.

One of the most confounding things in Austin is the parking. Especially on a Friday, you have to pay for parking pretty much everywhere you go. In addition to that, no two lots use the same app or company for parking, so you can't just load one app on your phone and be set for the week or weekend. We finally found a parking garage to park in off Congress Avenue, and then we paid and set about walking up and down the street. This second of Congress has a bunch of murals like a lot of Austin, as well as a lot of country/western shops.

If you walk a bit down Congress towards the Colorado River, you get into the shops like Lululemon, but in this area, it is less of the chain type stores (sort of).

As you will see in the photos, there are still some chain stores, but a lot of them are local staples that have been in the Austin area for years. We actually walked by a specific section that had three boot stores in a row, and all of them were packed with people buying their cowboy boots. It seems that a little healthy competition isn't a problem down in Texas.

Living Michigan, I have seen my fair share of businesses advertising "deer processing". What I have never seen though is a food truck making that offer on the corner of a busy downtown street. As soon as I saw the sign for Hudson Market and read the fine print I knew I need to snag a shot of this place. I'm actually surprised my brother in law didn't talk me into stopping and buying something from the cart. I bet they had some amazing smoked sausage there.

I just took some passing shots of the store fronts. There isn't much to say about those. You can see the sort of places that were available to visit. Oddly enough, we didn't go into any of them. It was such a nice day out, we just enjoyed walking down the sidewalk. We did come across this awesome mural and since it was our anniversary weekend, @mrsbozz and I both got a shot of it. Oddly enough, we both used the same photo in our social media posts wishing each other happy anniversary. She is definitely the Yee to my Haw!

As we were circling back to where we parked, I grabbed some more shots of the store fronts. Then of course I saw the Willie for President mural, so I had to grab that. What an interesting country the US would be if he actually did run for president and win.

As we started heading back up Congress Avenue towards the downtown area, you could see the capitol building in the distance. We also were amazed at the skyline and some of the interesting buildings. My brother in law had visited Austin a decade or two earlier and he said a large number of the skyscrapers that we saw weren't even there when he visited last time. As we were rolling down the road and stopped at a stoplight, we saw this house with a plaque in front of it. Turns out it was once the residence of writer O'Henry whose short stories have become beloved classics over the years. Perhaps one day @ericvancewaltons house will become a museum like this one.

As we were heading back to the Air BnB to get a little rest for the afternoon, we decided to stop at Sam's BBQ. This unassuming joint was just down the road from the house we were staying in and is apparently a pretty old Austin staple. My brother and sister in law had been walking earlier that morning to get coffee, and they happened to run into "Sam". True to the slogan, he had no teeth, and he went on to tell them about all the kids and grandkids he had as well as the $3000+ per month in child support he had to pay. We felt obliged to stop and try out his BBQ. My brother in law and I both got the smoked sausage sandwich, and it was pretty tasty! I was actually tempted to go back and try out his brisket later in our trip, but we had other things to do!