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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shadowdancer" data-source="post: 331572" data-attributes="member: 515">Let me also put in a plug for Central Texas. I live an hour north of Austin, and go there frequently. It's a great place, very eclectic, very unlike any other city in Texas, or most cities in the South and Southwest.Go to Congress Ave. at dusk and watch millions of bats emerge from the colony beneath the bridge. It's pretty awesome, and there are restaurants nearby with patios overlooking the lake which are very close to the bridge. You can feel the air off the bats' wings as they fly past.Then go to 6th Street at night. You can bar hop up and down the street, hearing great live music at every venue, or just find one place you like and watch everyone else circulate past. Funky mixture of well-off, upwardly mobile young adults and college students, and seemingly homeless street performers.Also, in San Antonio and Austin you can find plenty of places that serve good Tex-Mex food. As someone else suggested, avoid the chain restaurants and look for the Mom-and-Pop places.Since you live in Europe, you may have already seen the original, but in Kerrville, a nice Hill Country town northwest of San Antonio (if your driving I-10 from New Orleans through San Antonio to points west, you'll go right through it), a man has built a three-quarters size replica of Stonehenge. It's pretty cool, and in a really nice setting in a field down in a river valley. He's also erected some Easter Island heads, too.Other places to check out in West Texas as you're driving from San Antonio to El Paso include Alpine (a very nice town in Texas' only true range of mountains) and Marfa, where you can go see the mysterious Marfa lights after sundown.Although it's well off I-10, I highly recommend a detour to either San Angelo or Lowake (a small town east of San Angelo) to eat the best chicken fried steak in the world at any of the restaurants owned by the Zentner family -- Zentner's Steak House, Zentner's Daughter or the Lowake Inn. Actually, this wouldn't be too much of a detour. After Kerrville, you could cut across to San Angelo, continue northeast to I-20, and then head west. I-20 and I-10 merge in West Texas before you get to El Paso.If you'd like to take a different route, and don't mind a little bit of the macabre, you can take the "Central Texas Atrocities Tour."(TM) Start in Dallas at Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository to see where President Kennedy was assassinated. Then travel south on I-35 to Waco to see where the Branch Davidians compound was burned to the ground by government agents. Continue south on I-35 to Belton (wave to me as you go through Temple), then take US-190 to Killeen and see the Luby's Cafeteria that was the site of the largest mass killing by a single gunman in the history of the U.S. Then drive to Austin and tour the University of Texas Tower, where Charles Whitman used a rifle with a scope to shoot several people back in the 1960s. Hey, I said it was macabre.One site in Arizona no one has mentioned, and it is fairly close to the Grand Canyon, is the Metorite Crater. I would suggest driving from El Paso through New Mexico, including Roswell, then across eastern Arizona to the Metorite Crater and then to the Grand Canyon.</blockquote>

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