Austin. 2nd November 2025.
After experiencing the traffic around Austin yesterday, we decided to take an Uber into town today. Our first stop was the Bullock Museum, the Texas State museum and we were pleasantly surprised to learn that it was “First Sunday Free”. Of course that meant we were not the only visitors with many families attending with their children. Most of these seemed to have visited to see a major T Rex exhibit and the queues for this were long and winding. We decided to give the dinosaurs a miss.
The main museum tells the history of the State of Texas over three floors, the first floor concentrates on the early inhabitants of the State and the arrival of the first Spanish and French explorers. The prize exhibit here is the shell of “La Belle” an early French ship that was sunk in 1686 off the East coast of Texas.
It was rediscovered in 1995 and recovered along with over 1.8 million artefacts, including weapons, trinkets and food.
The second floor followed on with Texas relationship with Mexico and the USA including items from the Texan Revolution and battles such as The Alamo. An interesting fact is that in 1830 Mexico banned immigration from the USA into the Mexican province of Texas, how times have changed!
The top floor took us right up to the modern day through cattle ranching, oil discovery and space exploration.
All in all a very interesting morning.
From the museum we walked along Congress Avenue towards the Capitol building passing various statues on the way.
Unfortunately there is plenty of construction work happening in the area which rather spoiled the views of the Capitol from the rear. Happily the front was free of too much scaffolding and we were able to get some decent shots.
They say that everything in Texas is big and that is true of this building which is of course the biggest Capitol building in the USA, 14 feet taller than the one in Washington DC.
I popped inside through the security barriers but decided not to go on one of the organised tours. Outside there were plenty of visitors taking advantage of the beautifully sunny Sunday.
After having a coffee and cookie in a small restaurant we continued our walk down Congress Avenue towards the Colorado River.
Most of the shops were closed which I felt was a mistake considering the number of visitors that were around. When we reached the Congress Bridge we took the river walk that went under the bridge. This is the bridge that in the Summer months is home to more than a million Mexican free-tailed bats that set off at dusk to search for food. Although the vast majority of the bats have now left to fly south for the winter, you could still smell their presence as we walked under the bridge.
Walking back through the city we could see many Waymo driverless cars but when we used Uber to get back to the hotel a human driver was present.
