KatelynOctober 17, 2021 – October 25, 2021
Where We Stayed: Hyatt Regency Austin & Tru by Hilton Austin Airport
Trip Highlights:
- Watching some F1 racing
- Seeing the Austin Bats
- Delicious margaritas
Favorite Restaurants:
Our trip to Austin, Texas was split into two parts. During the first half of the week, Sam and I stayed at the Hyatt Regency Austin just across the river from downtown Austin, where we spent our time working from the hotel and exploring a bit of the city. During the second half of the trip, we met up with friends and moved to a hotel near the airport to watch the F1 United States Grand Prix taking place at the Circuit of the Americas that weekend.
Our travel to Austin was relatively uneventful. We had a layover in Houston before a quick 45 minute flight brought us in to Austin. We arrived at our hotel in the early afternoon, just in time for a quick walk and dinner at a restaurant on South Street. Our hotel had great views of downtown across the river.
After dinner, we made our way back to the hotel for the evening to set up to work for the week and settle in. Our hotel overlooked the Congress Avenue bridge, which attracts lots of tourists every night to watch the Austin Bats, a colony of over a million bats that live beneath the bridge, as they emerge each night to eat. We couldn’t see the bats much from the hotel, but we ended up seeing them from below the bridge later in the week, so more on that later.
We spent the first three days of our week working during the day and exploring downtown Austin at night. Our first night, we enjoyed Torchy’s Tacos for dinner (a place we would return to several times throughout the week) and walked through downtown Austin to the state capitol grounds. Our favorite part of the capitol grounds were the many sculptures, especially the Texas African American History Memorial. That sculpture was not only an interesting sculpture artistically to look at, but also had a lot of interesting information about the history of African American culture in the area, which we enjoyed reading.
Thursday morning we wrapped up our work week and began to meet up with our friends as they made their way to Austin. After one final lunch at Torchy’s Tacos with Robin and Carly, we packed up our hotel room and grabbed an Uber out of the downtown area to our new hotel near the track. Dinner that night was at one of the only restaurants that was a walkable distance from our hotel: Javi’s Best of Tex Mex. Despite being one of our only options, it was a surprisingly delicious, and we enjoyed eating there many times over the latter course of our trip. Later that evening, Nico and Lucy arrived, and we made plans to begin exploring as a group the next day.
While the track was open to us on Friday, we decided to take the day to be tourists in Austin as a group. Our first stop was breakfast at a southern classic: Waffle House. This was the first trip to Waffle House for a majority of our group, which was a nice greasy treat.
We decided to spend a bulk of our late morning/early afternoon at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. This museum walked through the history of not only the city of Austin, but Texas as a whole. It covered many different topics, from the various wars that had taken place in the state, innovations that came from Texas, and other historical facts about the area. I think these local history museums can be really interesting to visit, and we greatly enjoyed this one as well.
Dinner that night was at Austin Eastciders, a restaurant and local cidery not too far from the hotel Sam and I had stayed at earlier that week. We spent a couple hours trying various ciders, eating dinner, and chatting.
Once we finished our meals and drinks, we walked from Austin Eastciders back toward where we had been staying previously to see the Austin Bats emerge from Congress Avenue bridge. Each night, part or all of the bat colony emerges from the bridge and flies down the river to eat before re-entering the space below the bridge several hours later. Their peak season is in August, when nearly 1.5 million bats can emerge in a single night, but even in October tens of thousands can emerge from beneath the bridge in a single evening.
Sam and I had seen the crowds gathering below the bridge for the days we stayed at the Hyatt Regency overlooking the bridge, but hadn’t been able to see the bats emerge from our hotel room (despite my many efforts to try to see them every night we were there).
We joined the crowd sitting below the bridge, and we could hear the bats chirping and making rustling noises in the space under the bridge even before they began to emerge. Eventually a few began to flutter out, eventually growing into a huge stream of bats that seemed to continuously exit the bridge for nearly ten straight minutes.
Saturday was our first day heading to the Circuit of the Americas for the F1 United States Grand Prix. That day our plan was to wander around the grounds, watch practice, and eventually watch the qualifying rounds before the race the next day. However, Austin had different plans for Sam and I.
It was unbelievably hot. And while we were prepared with sunscreen and hats, neither Sam and I were actually prepared for the strength of that Texas sun. We arrived relatively early to the track, and checked out some of the merch carts before eventually finding our seats in the bleachers for the practice session. I really enjoyed watching practice. Sam and I had seen less F1 than most of our friends we were with, but it was cool to see the cars and racers that we had begun to follow in person on the track.
After the practice session, there was a break before the qualifying rounds were supposed to begin, so we left the bleachers to get some food. At this point, the busy crowds and heat of the day were starting to get to Sam and I. We were sweaty, definitely sunburnt, and overall just not feeling well. We decided to split from the group and skip watching the qualifying rounds so that we had a chance of feeling well enough to enjoy the following day. It was a little disappointing, but definitely the right call.
We went back to the track to watch a bit more racing the following day. Due to the crazy heat and some logistical issues that the park had regarding transportation (it was very difficult to get an Uber home from the track) we didn’t end up staying for as much as we intended, but we still had a good time.
Most of us had a bit of travel chaos on our way home. Several of us nearly missed our connecting flights, which led to Sam, Nico, and I running through the Nashville Airport in an attempt to catch our connection (we made it just as they were boarding!). Luckily, everyone was able to make it home relatively close to when they expected to get there.
There were definitely portions of this trip that didn’t quite turn out how we expected them to. But, part of the fun of travel is embracing some of this chaos and not taking even the unexpected experiences for granted.
