Our first day in Austin, The morning edition

After getting into Austin so late, we decided to sleep in a little bit on Friday morning. Once we got up and got around, we started looking for a place to get some breakfast. There are so many different options in Austin that it was hard to decide. My brother in law had started to make a list before our trip of places we wanted to visit, but we quickly learned that two days wasn't going to be nearly enough time to hit them all. In fact, I don't think we visited any of the places we had found ourselves salivating over ahead of time.

Instead, for breakfast we found ourselves at a cool little local chain called Snooze AM. There are locations all across the United States, but it isn't one of those large national chains like Bob Evans or anything like that.

Snooze has a cool retro diner vibe and the place was pretty full with large groups of people laughing and talking and enjoying their food. That is a pretty good indication to me of how good this place was going to be.

I decided to get the corned beef hash with two eggs over easy and hatch chilies in the hash. For my bread option, instead of going with the traditional toast, I opted to get homemade flour tortillas.

My brother in law went with the pancake flight. I can't tell you what flavors he got, but he said they were quite delicious.

I also got a plate of their OMG bacon to share with my brother in law. It is this candied bacon that has a jalapeno maple glaze to add a bit of heat to the sweetness of the syrup. The name OMG definitely fits the bill for this bacon. It was addictive as crack.

My wife and her sister both got the egg white scramble thing with a chicken sausage patty. My wife also got some hashbrowns on the side. All of the food was really good, but what really stood out was the bacon and the flour tortillas. In fact, my wife and her sister ended up getting a side plate of tortillas because they were just that good! I would definitely recommend heading to Snooze if you ever get the chance.

Our next stop was the University of Texas campus. We knew that they had a home football game on Saturday, so we wanted to do a walk around campus before it got completely packed with people. Believe it or not, it was still packed on Friday morning. Between kids going to class, people shopping (probably in town for the football game), and the regular business people, it was quite busy downtown. We passed these two cops on horses just riding down the road on our way from Snooze to campus.

We actually got really lucky that we hit Austin in the middle of a cold snap. The temperatures before we left were in the 90 degree range. @mrsbozz was starting to question why we had picked Texas as our destination. Lucky for us, the temperatures dropped to the 70 degree range while we were there, then were supposed to jump back up to the 90's after we left!

The University of Texas is such a big brand that so there were hundreds if not thousands of poeple shopping in the stores for Longhorns gear. In fact, there were three apparel stores right next to each other, and all of them were packed with people buying their Texas U merchandise. In one of the stores called Barefoot Campus Outfitter we saw a guy filling up this cooler of beer. If you can't read the sign, it says

"Free Beer, no tricks, just treats (must be over 21)".

In Michigan, you can't just give away free beer as a store, so we were pretty confused. We tucked a couple cans away in our bag feeling like we were doing something really wrong. The guy filling the cooler apologized that the beers might be kind of warm, but we told him we didn't mind.

We actually got talking to the guy and it turns out he was the owner of the store. He explained to us that in Texas if you have a liquor license you have to sell the alcohol, but if you don't have a license, you can just give it away. He told us since we had bought some merchandise to feel free to stop back in throughout the day as we were shopping and get more beer. So crazy!

He also mentioned that the Tex-Mex food in Austin is amazing and he gave us a couple of his recommendations (that will be another post though). Finally, he was telling us about the store. They have about 14 different locations on University campuses across the country. He told us he tried to get a location in East Lansing at Michigan State, but every time he tried to negotiate with the owners for rent they would change the terms of the deal.

He said that in the south, when you shake on a deal that is as good as having it written down. He complained though that he would shake with the guys up in East Lansing but then he would fly home and they would send the contracts and it would be different than what they agreed upon. We apologized that he had that experience with people from Michigan. It's too bad they had to be like that.

He also explained that his company is mostly run by women, and they do the majority of the design and style selections for the apparel that they sell. It was a nice talk with a really cool guy and I'm glad we ran into him and just happened to ask about the beer.

As we made our way through some of the other stores, we noticed that they were also giving away free alcohol in one form or another. It still took us a bit to get used to it. I can only imagine how crazy it probably was on game day Saturday with everyone swarming to the campus area.

I noticed on @worldmappin that there is another user from HIVE named @nils1990 that has done a good number of posts on Austin already, but hopefully my posts will be different enough from his that you can still enjoy them.

I'm going to cut this post short there. Check back next week when I continue our travels through Austin Texas!

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