Woke up at 6AM. Left at 8 and got to the Ladybird wildflower center in Austin shortly after it opened. We spent a couple hours looking at the natural landscape and trying to commit wild flower names to memory.
Ladybird took on the role of highway beautifier while she was the first lady. She tried to get rid of highway billboards and the wildflower center is one of her pet projects.
Five years of drought have made the bluebonnets and other wild flowers much less numerous but where they were well watered in the more formal plots in the center they were colorful.
We bought some gifts for friends and some fun garden stuff including our own garden armadillo to join Lebeau in our patio garden. We also bought a\ “Texas traveling music” CD’s which we intend to listen to while traveling through the Hill Country today. This one is a Willie Nelson CD dedicated to the wildflower center singing Tejas classics like the Yellow Rose of Texas.
Stops for wine tasting lay ahead. Texas Hills was the first winery after which we stopped at Johnson City to visit the Lyndon Johnson boyhood home.
I bought the third Caro book Master of the Senate at the visitor center and one of the Park Service Rangers told me about meeting the author a few years ago when he was doing research. Caro had broken his arm body surfing and the Ranger had heard this somehow. He had told Caro not to do any more surfing until he’d finished his tetrology on Johnson.
We slipped past the Ranch so I could make a stop at the Becker vineyard for a quick tasting before slipping back to the LBJ Ranch for the last bus tour of the day.
