San Antonio to Austin – Day 4

Blackout shades + no cats = another morning with us sleeping in late.  Eventually we got up, packed up and met up with Kevin for breakfast as everyone else had left on an early flight.  The three of us went back to Rolandos for more delicious breakfast tacos, just as yummy as before.  Afterwards we took Kevin to our final mini-golf challenge of the year, which BK won after a tiebreaker.

We dropped Kevin off downtown, then hit the road north to Austin for New Years Eve.  Aimee met us at the Sheraton and we drove down to the main part of town to begin enjoying the festivities.  First stop of the night was Peche, an absinthe bar recommended by Steve.  BK got absinthe that was actually pretty smooth.  I had a Dark & Stormy made with house-made ginger beer and Aimee had a real lime dacquiri.   It was a great speakeasy/prohibition style bar.

From there we wandered down the street to Frank’s for dinner, home of artisan hot dogs.  Aim & I each had the Notorious PIG (with mac & cheese and BBQ sauce) while BK had a couple different dogs.  We shared a couple different desserts, including chocolate covered bacon – weird but good.  Click here for pics.

After dinner we strolled up and down 6th street, the main drag of nightlife in Austin.  Since it was a holiday they had it closed down to car traffic, so it was fun to see everyone arriving for parties and to listen to bands that had already started playing through the windows and doors of big clubs.  The bar we had planned to settle into was a little farther off the main drag so we eventually made our way over to the Mean Eyed Cat, a Johnny Cash themed bar closer to campus.  They had two fun bands playing that night, the bar had a great vibe and was not overly crowded and crazy – the perfect spot to hang out.   Around 11:30 though we snuck out of that spot and headed back to the hotel to ring in the new year quietly at the hotel bar watching the ball on drop on tv.  Happy New Year!