Traveling Toward Retirement

We rolled into Starbucks around 10am and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast while thinking about our plans today. We decided to head over the the University of Texas at Austin campus to check out our first Presidential Library. We’ve never been to one and now that we have, there’s a high chance we will check out another. The Lyndon B Johnson Library was a cool way to spend a few hours. The admission was decent and there was a bonus exhibit on MoTown. Win-win for us! There were a lot of cool artifacts and reels on how MoTown changed music for African Americans. Having a record label that was created and owned by another African America led to a lot more music being produced by African American artists. It was a cool addition to the museum all about LBJ - partially because he was the president who signed the Civil Rights Act in 1968. Who knew that JBJ was a teacher before he became a politician? That was news to me. There is of course a lot of conspiracy theories about how he became...

We woke up rather late and nearly missed the free breakfast at our HAMPTON Inn. Have you stayed at one before? We love them. Consistently clean and a wonderful free breakfast. We headed south and stopped at our Hampton Inn in Waco - why? For a jacket that was left behind. Would have been handy to have in Dallas with all that rain yesterday - but at least we retrieved it and don’t have to buy a new one. And can you believe that we stopped in Italy today? Yup, there’s an Italy, Texas and we needed gas so it seemed like an appropriate place to stop. We’ve had a few connections to Italy on this trip that seem to be sending me messages -perhaps our next adventure will be in the boot country. Wait, we’re already there. Hm.... We rolled into Austin around 2pm and since tummies were growling, Todd searched through Yelp for something we haven’t had on this trip - TexMex! We’ve had sushi, BBQ, pizza, Chinese (Thanks PandaExpress for being open on Christmas Day!), and now we’ve had some Mex...

Oh Dallas. Why the rain? It rained on our Dallas adventure today but we still got a few things in despite the dreary weather. We went to the Dallas Museum of Art which is free! Street parking on a Saturday was a chill 95 cents instead of the parking garage for $15. You know this girl always likes a deal! We saw a lot of stunning artwork and some pieces that I think my kids could produce. It’s very intriguing how certain artists become famous and make money off their art. Of course we saw pieces by Monet and Rembrandt but there were many lesser known artworks as well. Here are some of the pieces I found cool. This was a Quaran from the year 1380.  Cool postcard art - there were dozens of these.  Exhibit on the color wheel. String art.  This kind of looked like Dubai in my opinion. With some paint dripping down... After this and a little lunch at the Museum (their salads were quite delicious), we walked around the Klyde Park area. This is a darlin...