If I see that the next bus is due in 20 minutes to a destination that will take me 20 minutes to walk to, then I’ll just walk. And that is how I ended up doing over 12 miles on foot my second day in Austin. That (being far away and on foot) combined with the fact that many places were closed on Sunday cut down on my vegan food opportunities. But here are some photos of the west side of Austin, which has a delightful network of walking trails and bridges along the river.
I started the day with a run on Lady Bird Trail.
The trail goes along the river (you can see a pathway on the other side of the river as well).
Breakfast at the Vegan Nom, which is a taco truck. I have the tofu scramble and tempeh bacon breakfast taco (top) and the Nueva Onda taco (bottom) with sweet potato hash browns. They serve their tacos on two tortillas so that the bits that drop out of your taco can be folded into another taco. GENIUS. It was also incredibly tasty.
Lunch was supposed to be at Hope Farmers Market which turned out to be one of the smallest farmers markets I’ve seen and didn’t have much food. They had a nice location, however, and a free yoga class that started at 12:12 p.m. (I appreciate specificity in start times.)
I caught a bus from the east side to downtown and then used my phone to navigate across the river in the direction of the botanic garden. The phone said, Why not take the Roy and Ann Butler Hike and Bike Trail? It has its own pedestrian bridge across the river. Okay! After the Azores it was fantastic to have data for navigation. The catch, however, is that turning on location services drains the phone battery fairly rapidly. By the end of the day I was back to my Azores trick of memorizing Google maps and hoping for the best.
This goose warned us that he and his buddies were crossing the trail with some cautious honking and then led the charge to the water while the pedestrians stopped to let them cross.
The backside of the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge.
The view from the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge.
On the other side of the river, taking the Roy and Ann Butler Hike and Bike Trail toward the botanic garden.
I’d just been thinking that there weren’t a lot of exotic cars given the size of the city (the nicest cars I’d seen were a couple Mercedes). And then I heard this, which my dad tells me is the 2019 Ford GT Heritage Edition wearing blue and orange Gulf Oil livery. You can tell it’s a 2019 because it has the number 9 on it. (Next year’s cars will have a 6 on them.)
The Zilker Botanical Garden.
Everything really is bigger in Texas. These fish were like yardsticks.
The botanic garden’s bus stop is near a field of wild flowers.
Visiting the Blanton Art Museum on the University of Texas at Austin campus. This is a room in the European section.
This tapestry (called Seepage) is made from flattened Nigerian liquor bottle cap wrappers.
This piece features 600,000 pennies and 2,000 cattle bones. It’s a contemplative space criticizing Jesuit missions for containing indigenous people in South America to convert them to Catholicism.
This is Baton Creole, a food truck with vegan options that is very well hidden behind the fence of a dive bar/beer garden called Shangri-La. I wandered through the neighborhood looking for lunch and couldn’t find it (and my phone was dead), so I went back to Arlo’s instead. After I went home and took a nap, I pocketed my credit card and my charged phone (so I could give my shoulders a break from carrying a purse) and finally realized I needed to go through the bar to get to the vegan food. They asked for my ID, which I didn’t have, but I swore I was only there for the vegan food (and they can probably tell that I’m much closer in age to 41 than I am to 21), so they took pity on me and gave me patio access.
Vegan beignets on a stick (which was a fantastic serving idea). I took it to go so I could thank the door guard for letting me in and then ate it on my walk home.
Birds and turtles at Lou Neff Point (on the trail to the botanic garden).