New Braunfels

We spent the day further up in the Hill Country today, in the town of New Braunfels. We drove up there with friends J & J, leaving here right after breakfast this morning. It was a beautiful day, a little cloudy this morning, then clearing up to a 90-degree sunny day.

We had lunch at a little cafe in the old part of New Braunfels.... I remember the name, but I can't spell it correctly...... delicious food with a Tex-Mex flair. We also stopped at the 'oldest bakery in Texas,' coming home with a small shopping bag filled with homemade pastry-- all of which is now in the freezer. The pastries are delicious, 'real' bakery items, not the run-of-the-mill supermarket bakery stuff that's so popular here. My husband and I are 'bakery-snobs,' coming from the northeast where every neighborhood had an Italian bakery and a German bakery.... real bakeries with from-scratch recipes, not cakes from a box.

J & J drove to an outlet mall up near New Braunfels... acres and acres of brand-name stores surrounded by a sea of parking spaces. I'm not a mall person.... I don't like paying for brand names.... but it was interesting to see all the stores. Every brand, every chain store you can think of-- it was there. J said that the outlet mall popped up there in an area which was just pasture land years ago.

We walked through some of the small shops in the town, and there was an antique co-op store that was of course filled with vintage treasures of all shapes and sizes-- those are the stores I love to browse through, so that was fun. And my husband found an old steel and iron bridge built in the mid-1800s that we could walk across and see the Guadalupe River down below. The bridge is closed to vehicles, but it was nice to walk across the old wooden planks and see the river flowing across the spillway.

Between our town and New Braunfels, there are countless acres of farmland, pastures, ponds... property for as far as your eyes can see, and then some. Because of the lack of rain, a lot of the ponds were dried up, or very low. Even with that, just the sight of all the land is enough to take your breath away.

When we came home, I found a surprise in the mailbox.... my friend J in England sent me a magazine and newspaper featuring the Royal Wedding. I read both from cover to cover and sent J an eMail to thank her for her thoughtfulness. The Royal Wedding is still going on... front page photographs on most of the magazine covers at the store yesterday. Which is fine with me..... I'd rather see William & Kate than any number of breaking-news stories that have hit the fan since the end of April.