The Hills Are Alive...

We took off early this morning to explore the Hill Country. The schedule called for us to go through 3 cities with a combined population of 11,225. The first thing you need to do when you get out of the city is remind yourself that you are in Texas. I say this because we saw rolling hills along our drive that reminded us of the east coast.

The first city was Fredericksburg about a 1 1/2 hour drive. This city was settled by immigrant families from Germany in 1846. This area was on Comanche frontier but when the Germans arrived they signed a peace treaty with the Indians that surprisingly was kept. The Germans and Indians learned to live together and even trade. Many buildings have the traditional German styles. About 15 miles north of the city lies Enchanted Rock.

It's a massive dome of solid granite that was of Indian legend. We set off to concur the summit in 96 degree and Texas humidity heat. Hearing only flip-flops, shorts and t-shirts we walked the 1/2 mile up the face of this dome.

The peak is 1,825 feet high and we climbed 425 feet of it. It's like climbing up steps on a 42 story building.

Let's just say that we, okay, I was breathing very hard by the time we summited. After catching my breath we set off to take pictures and look out at this scene before us.

Here are a couple of pictures that we took just chill'in on the rock face. Reta is relaxing on this huge mound of rocks.

I took the time to sit down on them and take in the view.

Okay, the truth is it was only three rocks we picked up to bring home as memories. We just set it up to look like we were on them.

We made it back to Fredericksburg to find the Brewing Company. The building was built in the 1890's and still holds the German brewing tradition and cuisine. This city has the biggest population of 10,000 people of the three cities we visited.

The next city we stopped by to explore was Luckenbach. It has a staggering population of 25. That's right, 25. We stopped in and it added 10% more people to the population. Here is the general store that also serves as a beer tavern, traditional rural dance hall and sometimes as a blacksmith shop. At one point it also served as the Post Office.

In the slide show you will see the other city that we visited called Johnson City with a population of 1,190. This place is best known as the hometown of President Lyndon B Johnson. There are parks and his farm which is now a National Park.

We traveled a total of 220 miles and took just about 8 hours to complete our tour. Couldn't help but laugh at some of the road signs that we saw. Here is another example of what we found. Too scared to drive up and see if there really were convicts at the end.