During our “vacation” to Austin, we finally had a chance to try out some of the great trailer food popping up in town … mostly south of the river.  Our first stop was Mighty Cone, on South Congress which was mighty good!  I had been hearing about it for awhile, because it is run by Hudson’s on the Bend, a great restaurant way out near Lake Travis.  Much closer, and much cheaper, this little trailer offers a short and sweet menu with the same interesting blend of flavors.  The cone of choice was the Hot ‘N Crunchy Chicken Avocado cone. The chicken and avocado are covered in a crunchy shell of almonds-sesame seeds-corn flakes-chili flakes-and-sugar, wrapped in a flour tortilla and then topped with mango-jalapeno slaw and ancho sauce.  That’s a lot of flavor in one cone!  It was lip-smacking good!

The picnic area provides shady umbrellas and the tables have special cone holders built in.  Very handy.  Above right: this little pistol-packin’ mama just happened to stroll by our table with her pretend six-shooter ready to take on thievin’ outlaws.  We were definitely in Texas.

I BARTed into the city a few days ago to meet with some artists who are participating in the San Francisco Open Studios with me this month, and I arrived just early enough to make a quick stop by Britex Frabrics – a four-story color-coded Mecca for San Francisco’s textilephiles. The place was packed at 5pm, and the people were nearly as colorful as the bolts; I saw two blue goatees. How often can I say that? and I live in Berkeley…

Here are a few saturated images for you: (from left clockwise) the shelved solids on the first floor of Britex, some silks on sale, a window display on Britex’s first floor (oh so Anthropologie), and of course, while it’s on the mind, the S.F. Anthropologie (I love the open, two-level plan).

Many thanks to Louisa Stegmann for making this a destination point! (We passed by together a few weeks ago when it was closed, and Louisa, with her costume-designer past, already knew of the wonders within.)

Britex, by the way, seems to be the place if you want to do something amazing with cloth: costumes, tailored suits, wedding dresses, etc… If you’re in the Bay Area and are leaning more towards the softy, quilty, homey experience I would recommend Stonemountain & Daughter Fabrics…but that’s another post!

Sometimes it’s fun to take a vacation in your own hometown.  Lucky for us, two weekends this summer brought our cousins to Austin, so we just put on our tennies and gimme caps and went on a road trip … across town.

Our first Austin-y thing to do was walk around the Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail. The trail  around the lake is surrounded by shady trees and the path has that wonderful crunchy sound as one walks on the crushed granite.  Plus, this trail offers the best people-watching and dog watching in town. In fact, we saw several dogs that looked like the possible grown-up versions of Neville, our new puppy, whose lineage is unknown.  We inquired of several dog-walking owners about the breeds of their dogs and we are now pretty sure that Neville might be a Collie-Lab-Rottweiler-Shepherd mix … maybe that would be a Colab-rotshep?

This is Barton Springs!  It is FREEZING … which feels really great on a hot summer day.  Here are the cousins s-l-o-w-l-y inching into the icy water.  Barton Springs is famous for the nude sunbathers that have relaxed there through the years, but we didn’t see any, and even if we had, I would have had to crop them out of my pictures since this blog is rated G.

This is the Zilker Zephyr!  We have happy memories of bringing the girls to ride this miniature train when they were little.  It’s a pleasant 3-mile circle, and I can even remember riding it with my grandparents when I was young!  This 50-year old line is truly the little engine that could!