A more interesting combination of attractions might be hard to find: largest urban bat population in North America, enough music to warrant the title of “Live Music Capital of World,” largest public university in the United States, a festival that celebrates Spam and the largest organic supermarket in the world.
Welcome to Austin, Texas, where the improbable is possible, where dining is a destination and a complement to live music.
At the edge of hill country in central Texas, the Baltimore-size city is home to 657,000. For all of its Wild West background, today’s Austin is more Birkenstocks than cowboy boots.
Music
Austin is home to South by Southwest music festival, “Austin City Limits” TV show, a Stevie Ray Vaughan statue, the Grammy-winning musicians Dixie Chicks, Shawn Colvin, Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel, and more than 200 recording studios and music labels.
About 150 live music venues provide something for everyone. Most of the live music is in the Sixth Street, Warehouse and South Congress districts. Many of Sixth Street’s clubs have large doors and windows that open to the sidewalk in an effort to counter the summer heat.
A walk down Sixth even early in the week is worth it. There’s plenty to take in: a few live acts, the Paradise’s mosaic-tile flamingo bolted to the floor, a mountain bike hanging over The Library bar, the large aquarium behind the bar at Treasure Island, a longhorn head in Touche and Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar with vaudeville-style music.
The Hard Rock Cafe is part eatery, part music museum with a dash of live music. Memorabilia is the draw here: guitars from Vaughan, 3-11, Waylon Jennings, ZZ Top, Fabulous Thunderbirds; outfits worn by Elton John, Dixie Chicks, Elvis Presley; Tex Ritter’s six-shooters; and autographed boots of Kinky Friedman, Hank Williams Jr. and Keith Richards.
In the South Congress District, south of the Colorado River, the grassroots campaign “Keep Austin Weird” flourishes. The area has been mostly successful at keeping the pre-high-tech-boom sensibility with mostly locally owned shops, accommodations and nightclubs.
Even the restored San Jose Hotel, a favorite of musicians, continues to nourish a bit of its Hotel California-like atmosphere.
Dining
Austin’s Mexican-influenced dining scene has award-winning restaurants and chefs as well as down-home Southern-style cooking rarely seen in the Northwest, plus traditional barbecue and hot-and-spicy Tex-Mex.
It’s no surprise that many restaurants have strong music ties. Threadgill’s once welcomed rednecks and hippies; hootenannies became a breeding ground for a country-rock-and-blues hybrid (think cosmic cowboy music).
Performers included Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa, Van Morrison, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson and Leo Kottke. Music still flows here three nights a week.
At Threadgill’s albums and photographs from the 1960s and 1970s line the walls. Southern cooking is plentiful: fried green tomatoes, liver and onions, Southern fried oysters, Creole cabbage, Texas caviar (tangy marinated black-eyed pea salad), garlic cheese grits and turnip greens.
Shady Grove’s lunch temptations include green chili cheese fries, spicy jalapeno lime salad dressing and tortilla fried queso catfish. The restaurant’s outdoor restrooms are in an old Airstream trailer; its Unplugged at the Grove schedule brings in well-known musicians.
For an authentic Mexican dinner, don’t miss Guero’s Taco Bar with photographs of the Mexican Revolution, a traditional self-serve salsa bar and hand-shaken margaritas.
The mole enchilada, according to Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau director of communications Cynthia Maddox, “is as good as anything I’ve had in Mexico.”
One of the top 10 pastry chefs in America is Mark Chapman of the 1886 Cafe and Bakery in the Driskill Hotel, home to the much-praised Driskill Grill.
Don’t miss the new Whole Foods Market, 80,000 square feet of choices in staggering quantities. The organic food store is so large it has a concierge, in-house meat and fish smokers, escalator to the parking lot and a cooking school.
Go outside
Austin is serious about nature, beautiful spaces and accessibility. Many concerts, parks, tours and museums are free or nearly free.
A 10-mile trail circles Town Lake (a section of the Colorado River), part of a 50-mile network of hiking and biking trails. Paddlers ply the river, also a prime spot for fly-fishing, and climbers scale limestone cliffs.
When bats started roosting in large numbers under Congress Avenue bridge, many wanted the colony eradicated. But Bat Conservation International, headquartered here, convinced the city to turn fears into an attraction.
Now thousands of people gather at the bridge each night from spring through fall to watch up to 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats soar up and away to eat 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects.
Enjoy the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s 16 gardens and four trails, in bloom much of the year. Take a self-guided interpretive tour of Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve, an oasis of pristine Texas hill country.
Zilker Botanical Garden is the centerpiece of 360-acre Zilker Park. The garden includes a re-created dinosaur habitat with a life-size sculpture of an ornithomimid, which left tracks here in the Cretaceous period.
The park’s Umlauf Sculpture Garden is a gem. Charles Umlauf’s realistic and abstract pieces are set along shaded paths and around a pond: animals, children, religious subjects, a scattering of nudes. The garden has one of the largest collections of touchable sculptures in the United States.
Austin has 48 outdoor pools, including Zilker Park’s Barton Springs Pool. About 32 million gallons a day of 68-degree water refresh the 1,000-foot-long pool that’s popular with swimmers.
How serious is the city about nature? A staff biologist helps protect the aquatic, 2-inch-long Barton Creek blind salamanders and the Barton Springs salamanders.
Keeping to Austin’s music reputation, the Austin City Limits Music Festival is held at Zilker Park, 130 bands playing for 30 hours on eight stages.
Meals, music and meandering; you’ll have to come back for the museums.
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