On the Road Again

There wasn't too much left to do in San Antonio the second day so we decided, once again, to take our bartender Brooke's advice and head out into the hill country on our way up to Austin. But first, we had to check out the famous pancake place about 15 minutes outside of town: the Magnolia Pancake Haus. www.magnoliapancakehaus.com We could tell as soon as we pulled up that this place was pretty popular. There was a 20 minute wait for 10am on a Thursday. The restaurant is delightful and the pancakes are quite scrumptious. Unless you have a bottomless stomach, do not order a tall stack. We ordered the short stacks and barely made it through one pancake. They were enormous! But, again, quite quite tasty. Pancake craving satisfied we got on the road to hit up some of the small towns in hill country. If you're into antiquing, this is your heaven. Antiquing can kind of be my hell so we mainly drove through the towns of: Comfort, Boerne and Welfare (yes, Welfare). But after an hour we arrived in the German town of....Fredericksburg! www.fredericksburg-texas.com Wait, you mean there's another Fredericksburg other than mine in Va?! ;) This Fredericksburg, or FB dos as i like to call it, is a small town highly influenced by it's German residents for the past 150 years. There are German bakeries, breweries, etc. And once again, there are antiques. But this time we did stop and stroll around for an hour. There's anything from fun wild west type stores to quaint boutiques. Overall FB dos was a cute town, doesn't beat my hometown of course, but it was a lovely stopover. I would have liked to try the beer brewed there, but once again we were holding out for wine. Fredericksburg is nestled between quite a few wineries. I was highly suspicious, to say the least, about Texas wine. Actually I had never even heard of Texas wine before. But once again, as you should used to me saying by now, Brooke the bartender told us to check out Becker Vineyards. www.beckervineyards.com Driving through the hill country it was definitely different to pull up to a vineyard. It's not at all like driving through the lush green in Virginia or New York or even parts of Napa and Sonoma. The vineyard house was really quite beautiful; definitely a Texas-looking structure made of stone with, of course, a lone star above the door. To the side was a huge porch with rocking chairs and tables. We bravely headed in to sample what Texas had to offer. We tried anything from the Viogniers to Chardonnay and over to the Malbec, Cab Sauvs and even a port. I have to say, it was not that bad, not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. That said, it's certainly not the best wine I've had. But, the location is lovely and the wine is tasty enough to make the stop. Actually my favorite part of the winery was that it also has a lovely lavender field. I can only imagine how that looks and esp. smells when in season. I bought some culinary lavender which I'm very excited to try out! I didn't purchase any wine, but no regrets. It was a great stop and it's always fun to test wine, no complaints there. :)
And so our time in the Hill Country came to a close and we headed into Austin in the late afternoon, which was only about an hour away. If you have the time, the hill country is a lovely excursion for a day. Peruse the German town of Fredericksburg, dine on the pastries, sip the beer and then head over to Becker for an afternoon wine while looking out at the lavender fields. Not a bad day.