This is my territory!

This egret was looking with disdain at some ducks on Lady Bird Lake Sunday.  He has this space staked out, by golly!

A Bee Cs of Relaxation

In an area that used to be on a river tucked deep in a working ranch, there is a spa that is wonderful in its tranquility. Tranquility has a steep price, though, and Lake Austin Spa is no exception. FFP and I bid on a two-night stay with all meals (and a massage each) at a charity auction back in June and were surprised to find that we had purchased it. We promised ourselves that we would treat ourselves after we crawled out of the moving morass of the summer. We had a wonderful and tranquil time. While we were walking around the garden I snapped this busy bee. He was oblivious of me while he did his duties.

The spa is wonderful and manages to maintain a serenity beyond belief even though the ranch is a huge housing and urban development now and the river is a lake with skiers and fishermen. I got good some good exercise, had a great massage, ate delicious portion-controlled calorie-reduced food and read and lounged. If you want the perfect place to be when the stock-market takes a deep dive, this is it.

By the way, we've had pictures of and near Lake Austin before but it is a long and winding lake so, for example, the bee's home is probably sixteen miles as the hawk flies down the lake to the dam that creates the lake which is much nearer Mt. Bonnell, our club and such. (And it's almost twenty by car on the roads you have to take.)

Life Surrounds You

"Life Surrounds You" is the motto for the condo complex we hope to live in starting sometime next year. Their sales office is on Rio Grande between 5th and 6th. The building itself is on Nueces. (Between Third and Fourth and, apparently, it will have the address 360 Nueces.) The picture was taken from Sixth Street looking south and a little east at the building from the sales office. This was taken last Sunday. Compared to the photo in the title layout you can see that it continues to rise. (I keep intending to replace the title photo. The 360 is taller and the Intel shell shown there is completely flattened and waiting for ground-breaking for a new Federal Court House. But I do like the energy the picture gives off.)

A little aside about street names. Most of the downtown east-west streets have numbers but used to be named for trees. (See here.) But the downtown north-south streets are named for some of the major Texas rivers. And the river streets that are further west are further south in the state. This means that they logically proceed from Rio Grande (where this sales office is) to Nueces, San Antonio, Guadalupe and Lavaca to Colorado. Here we are interrupted by Congress. Then we have Brazos, San Jacinto, Trinity, Neches and, finally, Red River. So, if you know the rivers you know a little street geography and if you don't you soon will by traversing the streets. Of course, there are more rivers than this in Texas. The Texas Parks and Wildlife department has given names to 11,247 rivers and streams! The Rio Grande is the longest and the next longest is the Red River. They form a good deal of the boundary of the state. Our Colorado River, however, is not the one that courses through the Grand Canyon but a smaller river that actually flows through Austin and is formed into a series of man made lakes. Town Lake is downtown. Lake Austin is the next one north and is shown here.

Top of Mount Bonnell on a Sunday

Before going to our club to work out yesterday, I made a trek up the steps to the top of Mount Bonnell, which overlooks Lake Austin. This vantage point yields one of the best views of the lake in town. Lake Austin, of course, is part of the system of manmade lakes formed by the dams on the Colorado River and it winds through the middle of our fair city.

As Linda points out in her comment, ours is the informally-monikered "Little" Colorado River, not the big daddy that starts in Colorado and goes to California.