Fredericksburg, Day 1

To celebrate our anniversary, Nick and I headed south to Fredericksburg for a long weekend. We decided to wait a couple of weeks past our anniversary date to avoid busy Spring break time. Nick took Friday off work, so we headed out that evening and spent the night in Waco before continuing on south.

We stopped in Llano for a little bit because I was excited about the Roy Binks Bridge, which had a pedestrian sidewalk. We parked at the beautiful courthouse and walked down to the bridge and halfway across. The view was pretty awesome, although the bridge is heavily trafficked and every time an 18 wheeler would cross it Nick would grab me as if we were both going to fall. It was a little bit scary.

Then we headed straight to Enchanted Rock, a massive pink granite dome that is a 425' incline to the summit. We hiked up the Summit Trail, which takes you to the top. It was rough, I'm not going to lie. We had to stop halfway up because I started feeling nauseous and dizzy, and the when realized that the sort of lunch we had eaten on the way probably wasn't enough food for a hike. Thankfully we had a bag of pretzels in the backpack, so we munched on pretzels until I felt better. I quickly discovered that it was much easier to walk up in a wide zig-zag pattern, rather than the straight up approach. It was quite steep in places, and the incline was much easier to deal with when you were walking across it rather than directly into it. Sure, I took more steps this way, but I felt much better.

From the bottom.

At the top.

The reward for reaching the top was definitely worth the effort. You can see for miles up there! We had a beautiful sky of clouds. The wind was insane though. I took some video on my iPhone and had to hold it with both hands because the wind kept trying to knock it from my hand.

We didn't take a straight approach back down. We circled around the side so I could get a better view of the other rock next to the big one we climbed. We saw a couple of really fast lizards running around and even saw a hummingbird buzzing around.

By the time we got back to the bottom we were exhausted and hungry for sure.  We stopped at our cottage on the way into town to leave our stuff there and freshen up, then we went to eat. Bill had told us to visit Andy's while we were here, and we were in time for the Friday night seafood buffet. They are the longest running restaurant in Fredericksburg. After dinner we walked down the north side of Main St. Most of the shops had closed for the day, but we were really just walking off dinner anyway. We did find a little ice cream shop open so naturally we had to have a scoop. It was all homemade and so, so very good. After 2.2 miles of walking (I mapped it of course), we were exhausted and headed home for the night.