With these past few weekends we’ve started to get our local swagger going; we’ve become more familiar with our surroundings, allowing us to dive into what I like to call knowledgeable exploration.

As we learned in CO, you can feel like a deer in headlights while trying to navigate through life in a completely foreign surrounding.  Now it seems the “what do we do first anxiety” is fading and we’ve settled in to a nice exploratory routine.

Needing a fix of outdoor activity we ventured back to Austin’s amazing 350 acre Zilker Park where we hiked along the Barton Creek Greenbelt.

This trail is 8 miles long with really beautiful scenery on the immediate outskirts of the Austin metro area – so nice!

We rested up for a little bit after the hike and got ready for what turned out to be an awesome night.

First we hit up Salty Sow.  This place is UNBELIEVABLY good.  By far the best food to date in Austin and we’ve had a lot of really good food!

From there we were feeling Jazz music and heard the Brass House was a good place to go; definitely an official jazz spot.  The place has the ambiance you would want for this genre of music and the cocktails were solid.

We decided to keep it moving as the early band wrapped up and remembered that there is a weekly comedy show at the Velveeta Room that starts at 9.  We hit that place up for a laugh to end the night.

If you’re thinking “wait, end the night when the show starts at 9?” Yes, you’re right, early night.  We were home by midnight with bellies full of good food and booze and we’re not sorry about it 🙂

As the next weekend rolled in we got lucky.  The forecast was incorrect and instead of a rainy Saturday we got a beautiful day of warmth and sun.  Weather in Austin at the end of November definitely doesn’t suck.

We decided to take advantage of our good fortunes and hit up Bull Creek Green Belt.  To fuel up for our hike, we found yet another amazing hole in the wall breakfast shop, S-H Donuts.  This place had awesome reviews for its Kolaches which we fell in love with after our visit to the Czech Stop on our Dallas excursion a couple weeks back.

This place is legit!

With full bellies, and motivation to undo all the good badness we just ate, we headed to Bull Creek District Park to get on the trail.

Pretty sweet houses over looking Bull Creek.  Gotta love the Hill Country!

Once we got past civilization this place was super nice; exactly what we needed after our workweek.

With all the rain Austin has been getting the water was unusually high disrupting what would normally be an easy crossing.

A little bit of water aint stopping our day out.

That evening we decided to follow the winning formula from last week: dinner and some sort of show.  Second Bar & Kitchen had awesome reviews and were deserving of them.  Yum!

After dinner we took a walk to Cheer Up Charlies, a super cool little venue, unfortunately the bands we stayed for sucked.  Oh well, still a great night out in Austin.

Grateful for the past couple of weeks going into Thanksgiving.  Tacoma, WA coming up for our trip for the holiday.