Extreme Deliciousness: Day 1

The spectacular weekend in Austin was filled with much fun in the sun and deliciousness. We left on Saturday morning and made it into The BluPnutMM couple's apartment complex at around noon. After a light lunch, we headed off to park with lots of rocks #1. We did a bunch of hiking over some relatively rough terrain while GooseLiverLover took many amusing photos of us. The wind was super strong that day causing all kinds of chaos with hair. Afterwords, we had some hot cocoa and latte at a nice riverside coffee shop while taking some more pictures then went to park with lots of rocks #2 which featured these sheer cliffs on the side of the highway. There was a lone tree at the top growing out of the rocks causing the whole scene to look like it was out of some Wu-Xia movie...minus the sound of traffic right below of course.

The highlight of the day was a trip over to the Salt Lick in Driftwood, TX. This BBQ restaurant is the mother of all BBQ restaurants. The meat is cooked over an open flame as opposed to the usual closed grill and the meat is as fresh as you can get it. The Salt Lick is essentially surrounded by ranches where cattle and pigs are raised. The place is so popular, they had multiple police officers on the premise just to keep the traffic flowing and the crowd orderly. When we finally parked and went to the receptionist, we found out there was about an hour long wait for a table and that this waiting time was actually considerably shorter than the regular weekend waiting times of 2-3 hours for a table. It was a rather chilly and windy day, but Salt Lick had these giant tents set up with space heaters for the waiting masses. They even had live performances inside the tents for entertainment. It's also BYOB for drinks so you had families with big coolers filled with beer and wine just sitting inside the wait areas drinking it up.

We finally got a table about 40 minutes into the wait and the food was on! We had 6 people and 4 of us got the $18.95 all you can eat family deal. Basically, you get this big dish of meat (sausage, brisket, pork spare ribs) that is infinitely refilled. The first bite into a pork spare rib was pure euphoria. It was tender, perfectly seasoned, and the meat basically melted in your mouth. The sausage was good, but not super awesome OMGWTFBBQ good, while the brisket at first, didn't appear to be that good. However, MasterMusician soon requested the marbled brisket and it made a huge difference. The marbled brisket blew my mind as I had never had such good brisket before. Soon, I was struggling between deciding which to eat as I only had limited stomach capacity and two delectable meat factions battling for dominance. We managed to pull through 3 plates of food and just a little of the 4th platter. To our delight, we found out that you could actually bring whatever you couldn't eat home! Don't think I have ever gone to an all-you-can-eat restaurant that allowed patrons to bring the food home..at least legally.

We tried to hit up the Elephant Lounge afterwords for a little jazz bar experience, but the artists there were covering Myles Davis that day and the line was literally out the door. We managed to get a little jazz experience while waiting in line, then headed home shortly afterwords for a fun-filled night of Pictionary.