I knew we had a long weekend coming up with a holiday where the kids had no school and I had the day off, and we wanted a weekend escape. While searching for places to visit, I had quite a few places in mind but considering it was mid-January and I wanted to visit some place warm, that sort of limited my options. After some discussion we settled on Austin, TX.
It’s been a while since we’ve been to Austin, about five or six years. We’re aware of what Austin has to offer but we were also excited because a lot has changed in those five years. So as usual, about a day before our trip we finalized our plans and figured out where we were going to stay. Since we fly standby, that places some restrictions on where and when we can fly, so for this trip we ended up having to fly into Houston and then drive to Austin. My family didn’t mind because like all of our trips we often drive wherever we visit, taking our time and finding interesting places to stop along the way.
The Drive
My husband always handles the rental cars since he has his preferred methods to find the best deals. While there are numerous travel sites, he has had the best experience and gotten the best rates with these merchants. This is our routine when searching for car rentals:
Costco Travel
Booking.com*
Hotwire.com
Avis offers free Preferred membership (highly recommended as this is what we use most often.) Some of the perks with Avis Preferred membership is that they sometimes assign your car early. We went with Avis for this trip, and to my husband’s surprise we got a Dodge Challenger R/T! I didn’t know anything or really care, but he was excited about this since it’s apparently a much better car than the class of vehicle we had rented. When we got to Austin and started the car up, I realized why he was so excited about it. It was a nice loud American muscle car with classic muscle car styling, a great car to drive around Texas (while not ideal for a family of five, it was somewhat roomy for being a 2-door car, even in the back seats). My daughter wanted to trade it for the small 4-door pickup truck but my husband instisted we stick with the V8 powered muscle car. Oh boy.
We arrived in Houston in the evening and headed straight to Austin, which was about a three hour drive. Even on a Friday night at 7PM there was quite a bit of traffic in Houston.
Torchy’s Tacos
We arrived in Austin without issue but since we were all hungry, we had to stop for some food and settled on Torchy’s Tacos. It seemed pretty touristy and my gut feeling was right, but hey we are tourists in the city after all. We were still very pleased with our food. We eat our share of Mexican food, but Torchy’s is an Austin institution and lived up to the hype. We had a few tacos, but the real stars were the burritos and the street corn. The chicken was well seasoned and sauces were really great.