The Great (Groupon) Escape!

I'm not ashamed to admit that we live on a budget. I've mentioned before that we are Dave Ramsey followers and I live with my very own Dave "Ramsey" Mendenhall. We have a yearly travel budget and the majority of the time, that budget is spent on family outings. We have a lot of family that lives out of town, so travel for weddings, Thanksgiving, visiting grandparents, visiting siblings...it adds up.

The crazy thing is, we've only been on ONE vacation that's just the two of us since our honeymoon! Last year, for Dave's 30th birthday, I took him on a surprise trip to Lake Tahoe. It was amazing, and beyond gorgeous, and it won't happen again for a while!

Don't get me wrong, we had a BLAST in Savannah, and I'm looking forward to a great (and very low budget) trip to NYC in the fall, but there really wasn't a lot left over for the two of us. I had a 2 night hotel stay, for the Hyatt here in downtown Austin, that I won at an event last year, so we decided to enjoy a weekend "staycation" in our city! With our free 2 night stay we decided it would be our challenge to plan our entire weekend using Groupons (or Living Social, coupons, etc). The last 2 months we have been scouting out great restaurants, attractions, etc on these coupon sites. It's been a bit of a game and we were excited for our weekend "getaway" to finally be here.

We both got off early on Friday, we didn't go home, and we started our "staycation" in style! We met at the hotel, changed into our swimsuits and hit the pool for a couple of hours. We had dinner reservations at 7:30pm at Shoreline Grill on Lady Bird Lake. We had a wonderful, over-indulgent meal and then headed over to Esther's Follies. Esther's is a satire, vaudeville-type comedy show that is hilarious!


Saturday, we woke up and rented a kayak to hang out on Lady Bird Lake. Our hotel was downtown on LBL, so we walked the entire weekend and loved seeing our city in a different way. Back to the kayaks...we got SO lucky that it was a bit overcast or we would have been so hot! It was a great workout and really fun to enjoy this part of our city. I can't believe we hadn't done it before this weekend.


Side note: The kayak/canoe rental was packed. I love that Austin is such an active city!


After kayaking, we had a great lunch at Austin Java (seriously, I had a black and blue burger that was to.die.for. Peppercorn and Gorgonzola goodness) and then we cleaned up and went on a Riverboat cruise on the lake. Not gonna lie, it was hot. It was 3:00 in the afternoon. We had fun. I would definitely do it again, but I would do the sunset cruise or go in the fall. Or do the sunset cruise in the fall. :) But, It was awesome to hear things about Austin that I didn't know.


This might be my favorite picture of the weekend. After our boat cruise, we went for dinner and drinks at Ten Oak. I decided on the pulled pork nachos and Dave decided on the rosemary grilled chicken. Can you see Dave's tiiiiiny chicken behind my ENORMOUS plate of nachos? HA! It was literally a breast of chicken on a plate. No sides, nothing. If you only knew...Dave eats SO much and I never finish my plate. We laughed really hard. He ended up pounding my nachos after he ate his chicken in about 2.5 seconds.

We went for a "night cap" at Cedar Door on our way back to our hotel. They have amazing mexican martinis and the night was still young. We snapped this picture as we were headed back to our hotel. The quality of our photos for the weekend isn't amazing considering we took all of them ourselves. Ha!


Sunday, we got up, had a wonderful breakfast at Jo's to use the last of our Groupons and it was beyond wonderful! I had a blueberry pancake that was out of this world and Dave had a 3 egg omelet with enough meat and cheese in it to feed Cox's army!

After our big-boy-breakfast we walked it off on the trail of the lake. We had high hopes of going for a run but my pancake and Dave's omelet kept us to a decent 4 MPH pace. One fun thing about Austin right now...last year, local artist hand painted giant guitars and they were placed throughout the city. They were awesome! After a couple of months, they auctioned the guitars off and people/businesses bought them. All of the money went to charity. This year, they are doing cows. Again, the cows have been hand painted and are featured throughout downtown, along the trail of the lake, etc. These are a few we ran across this weekend. They are awesome! And they have hysterical names like "Cow-Pital" (with the capital building painted on it) or "Moo-lah" for the cash-cow that was outside a downtown bank. This is my favorite below...all of the Austin sites.

We had a ton of fun! We stayed 2 nights on Lady Bird Lake, ate out 4 meals (and dessert), had a few drinks, rented kayaks, went to Esther's Follies, and did a riverboat cruise....and the total damage...$160! We are pretty big fans of Groupon right now!!