market, what market?

As is bound to happen sometimes, the travel books will get it wrong. I'm a faithful devotee of Lonely Planet and so it was hard to switch to Frommer's for the Austin/ San Antonio book (Lonely Planet doesn't have a Texas one!) Anyways, our book had recommended a wonderful open air market called the "Renaissance Market." We were wide awake, ready for another glorious Austin day, invigorated from another delicious b&b breakfast, and excitedly walking to the market. Except, there was no market. Correction, I suppose there was a "market" of some sort, if you count the 2 people with 2 tables set up. We looked around, walked a couple blocks more and finally asked, where's the market? Surely it can't be those 2 people. .... except it was. So I don't want to tell you not to check out that market if it does in fact exist on some other day in a much grander fashion, but I have a hunch that it's not as big as the book builds it up to be. My advice is skip it. Fortunately we were in the same area as a big Austin toy store called "Toy Joy." This was similar to the Monkey toy store we saw the day before on South Congress, but in a much bigger fashion. It was pretty hysterical to walk around and stumble upon old toys we used to play with. The best part of the experience was finding a Little Golden Books section and my favorite, the Color Kittens! Man I loved that book. Around the corner in the store we stumbled into an old school candy section where I discovered another gem: Pop rocks! I definitely purchased 2 packets of that for the bf.
So despite the market, or lack thereof, the morning excursion was worth it to take a trip down memory lane in Toy Joy.
Up next, the mothership