Lake LBJ

We have an incredibly generous friend who has a second home on Lake LBJ, about an hour outside of Austin, TX. Gail was actually my husband's boss at one time. We've been going out to her lake house for years now. My boys first water-skied behind her boat, in fact.

We were invited to come on out this past weekend to enjoy some R&R and to see if we might want to buy a weekend place there ourselves. Gail's house is big and beautiful, much more house than we're looking for. But it's always a pleasure to be a guest there.

For instance, here's the second refrigerator, which she keeps well stocked with adult beverages:



All weekend we looked at houses in our meager price range by car and by boat. The weather was beautiful.



The bossy lady on our truck's GPS helped us find many addresses, but this one stumped her:



One of the neighborhoods we looked at had deer strolling around in people's yards.



Lake LBJ is in the Hill Country, one of the most beautiful areas in Texas.



And Austin is a very cool city, so if we bought a weekend place on the lake and kept it for our retirement, I think we could be happy there.



The only problem is tha I'm having trouble letting go of the idea of a beach house. If you've been reading here for a while, you know that we were in the market for a house right on the beach near Galveston. We were going to buy it with friends and rent it out but also use it ourselves when it was empty.



We were weeks away from making an offer when Hurricane Ike swept through and wiped out everything on Bolivar Peninsula, where we'd been looking. (FYI: I don't know why, but news about the devastation there has been pretty hush-hush. Trust me- hundreds, maybe thousands of people died and entire towns were swept out to sea. I've been there. But that's another blog.)

Beach houses were A LOT cheaper than the lake houses we looked at. It was sobering to see what we could afford on the lake. From what I've gathered, Texans like to visit the beach but would rather live on a lake, if given the choice. Perhaps it has to do with those pesky hurricanes?

As you can see by my photos the wildflowers are spectacular this time of year. Bluebonnets were out in all their glory, though I think being the state flower has gone to their heads. They're protected. You'll be fined if you get caught picking them.

So they just grow everywhere, even in the middle of my neighbor's lawn. You just know they're thinking, "That's right. I'm smack dab in the middle of the grass. Whatcha gonna DO about it?" I'm kidding. They're beautiful and can grow wherever they want to as far as I'm concerned.

I just read this over and I think it sounds pretty snooty- us looking for a second house on the water somewhere when people are losing their jobs in this terrible economy. It's something we've been saving for for a long time. We've made sacrifices since we first got married so that we could have this one day. And it's the house we'll move into when we retire.

All of that aside, it was a lovely weekend. We left the cares of everyday life behind for a few days. Unfortunately, it was all here waiting for us when we got home. *sigh*