Day 35--Austin, TX: Happy Birthday, Ken!!!

Today was supposed to be our chance to see Matt and Dean Hubbard, which didn’t work out, but more on that later. We drove to the Austin area, which took about an hour and a half. Since it was sunny and in the mid-sixties, we decided to go to McKinney Falls State Park first. That was a great decision. We hiked around the lower falls first, then drove to the upper falls and ate our lunch sitting on the limestone ledges at the falls-edge. Afterwards we went through the exhibits at the Visitors’ Center and took the one mile interpretive trail that led to a natural rock shelter carved by the creek and used a thousand years ago by prehistoric natives. We found we were pretty close to our next destination—the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. We felt like we didn’t need to spend a lot of time there since we had already been to the historic park, but we enjoyed the displays and watched the film about his life. While we were there I got a call from Matt, who had just returned from playing in Houston this weekend. It was hard to understand him because I was inside a large building, but he said that he was “on call” for recording and someone had just come to town and wanted him badly enough that he was paying $1000 to record. Needless to say, we couldn’t compete with that. So we settled for going through the Texas State Capitol, which we suspect was designed by the same man who did Michigan’s. We’ll check that out as soon as we have some internet access. The Capitol was renovated in 1997 and is very lovely, reminding us very much of ours. We drove back to the campground and had a late dinner and did as much as we could to prepare for leaving tomorrow, in case the predicted rain does arrive.