Tenth Times a Charm

Cody and I have had a horrible pattern with our anniversary's, we always end up going to bed mad at one another.  Finally, after ten years we were able to celebrate in style, and we actually didn't have one single spat for our whole entire anniversary trip weekend!  It was fabulous!!

We went to Wimberly, Tx and stayed at a B&B called the Blair House Inn.  It was nice.  They are known for their culinary expertise (probably a clue that the food would be a little "fancy") and have even been featured on the Food Network.  For any of you who know me, you know that my pallet of food mostly consists of good ole homecookin' and not fancy.  I don't eat salad, I don't eat many veggies, but mostly I don't do weird.  Even Cody was a bit leery of the dinner, and we almost canceled because of our fear of the unknown.  That said you would be very proud of me for the fact that I ate a veggie frittata, some kind of Mexican eggs with a black bean empanada, I tasted the gazpacho (I really don't like watermelon, so it was just doomed as far as my taste buds are concerned,) I actually ate and enjoyed the cucumber salad thing, and the polenta cake and olive tampenade was pretty good. 

Our Saturday night menu

The whole trip was really great.  We spent Saturday morning at Bella Vista Ranch, Texas' first commercial producers of olive oil.  The owner of the ranch has a huge passion for making olive oil, and since they only actual do that two weeks out of the year, he also has a vineyard that he made sound like was only there to help them stay in business.  It was very interesting.  I never though I would actually drink olive oil, but as part of the tasting we did.  We learned the proper way to buy olive oil and part of that was drinking it.  It is supposed to taste smooth in your mouth and have a slight burn at the back of your throat, if it is fresh.  Mine at home does not do that.  We tasted a few aged balsamic vinegars, that were wonderful.  One of them he suggested to put on ice cream, and if you could taste it you would understand why, yum!

Olive trees

Olives on the tree, they are green and purple

The vineyard

Saturday afternoon we headed over to Luckenbach and hung out for a few hours.  There isn't much to do in Luckenbach but to eat, drink, and relax.  While we were there we listened to the Paula Nelson Band play.  She was really good.  Her voice was very distinct and different.  During one of her breaks I almost went and got a cd and autograph but didn't.  After we left we finally put two and two together and figured out she was Willie Nelson's daughter.  We should have gotten the autograph.  One weird thing we did come across, was as we were leaving Luckenbach there was a guy there that had one of those longhorn steers that you could sit on and take a picture.  When we walked by him I told Cody to look at the brand on the cow because it was just like his Granny's brand.  So I pulled out my camera and very unstealthily took a few pictures.  I got caught, so Cody started asking him about where he got the steer.  He said it was from a man by the last name Dillon or Dilling from Kaufman Co.  He had the bar D.  Cody got to talking about longhorn stuff and we left.  After talking with Norman and Sandy, we are pretty sure that the steer was actually one of theirs at one point. 

Luckenbach

The ATM...wonder what it used to be, talk about dirty money

The Paula Nelson Band

The infamous steer

The brand, it reads bar D, the number is 501

One thing that we did that I just loved, was that we were rarely on big roads.  We tried to take all the back roads we could.  It was beautiful!  However, back roads are a little different down there, and after crossing about three cattle guards and seeing a bunch of free roam cows (not a fence in sight!) we realized we much have been driving though someone's pasture.  Oh well, we always eventually found our way.

Please take note of the skill at which my driving down the road photos were taken.

Garrett thought it was so cool I got a picture of the wind, but no those are actually the stripes of my shirt reflected in the window.

Cody loves his picture taken!

I asked Garrett what this face said, and he said I must have been in trouble.

This was after all the cattle guards.

Notice the lone cow on the hill, they all left when I got out to take the pictures. 

On our way home Sunday, we meandered our way across the state by first stopping at Pedernales Falls.  It was gorgeous!!  It is so hard for me to comprehend how you cannot believe in our Creator when you see his magnificent works in front of you.  This was one of those. 

This was the warning sign, hard to see in the picture but this is an actual picture of a five minute time lapse when flash floods did happen.  Scary!

This "rock" was taller than my 6'4" husband

It is amazing to me how these plants can just grow up between the cracks in these boulders.

A lot of the holes were really deep!

A "rock" the size of a small car

The water was so clear, this was probably about knee to waist deep

The color of the water was gorgeous!  There is no telling how deep this goes.  A lot of the "ponds" were like this; they just went straight down.

I thought this one part was so pretty, and if you look close you can see that the circle in the cliff is actually a hole with the rock put in the middle.

closer look

I love how it looks as if the whole cave is held up by this one stick.

Huge centipede!!

When we went through Austin we stopped at the Oasis for lunch.  I had never been there before, so I can't compare to how it used to be, but the view was great.  It was sad though to see how low Lake Travis is.