Spontaneous Trips: New Braunfels

Last year Joy and I were going to open a wine and coffee bar called Alegria, and we wanted it to have some interesting, unique items, so we went antique shopping and met a guy named Shawn who owned a place called Junkology. He had a fantastic piece of Texan history for sale: a gondola from the HemisFair in San Antonio in '68. He also had the banner. We thought it would make a great addition to our cafe and put down $200 until we could make it back and give him the rest if the money and take the gondola home in a bigger vehicle than what we had with us. Well, the cafe fell through for various reasons and we told Shawn that we couldn't take the gondola. I said I would mail the banner back, but we thought it would be better to just deliver to him at his shop in New Braunfels so we could check out the rest of his shop and find something we could use at our new home, and that we did. Check out our new bikes! Well, old bikes but new to us. It's been a while since I've ridden a bike, so I'm pretty excited about our new adventure. They definitely need some clean up work, which we've already started on. Yea! for learning new things.

While Shawn was cleaning up the bikes a bit and adding air to the tires and so forth, he recommended we walk across the street to a restaurant called Huisache Grill. Boy, are we glad we listened to him. The food was amazing.For starters we had the shrimp cocktail with avocado. Amazing! Then we shared a spinach salad with blue cheese, green apples, candied pecans, pickled red peppers with a vinaigrette on the side and a cup of tortilla soup. For the main course I got the steak medallions. If you go, definitely get the pecan dusted steak medallions with Jack Daniels butter sauce. Delicious! It had green beans and roasted potatoes on the side. Everything was so good. For dessert we had the chocolate buttermilk cake. That was my least favorite thing, but everything else was amazing! Oh, but the ice cream on top was made in house, I believe, and that was really good.

After that we went to Natural Bridge Caverns, a place Joy has been wanting to go to for some time. It had been a while since I'd been. It was just about the same except now they have another cave you can go through but you need special equipment and you have go spelunking to get to the cave and crawl through other parts. I don't think I'm quite ready for that. Maybe next year. We also logged a geocache finding.

Next it was time for dinner, and we debated about going back to Huisache Grill. Yes, it was that good, but instead we went into San Antonio to go to La Fogata to get mole enchiladas. They were perfect. Not too spicy, not too chocolaty. Perfect. Then we drove home. It was truly a great day trip.