Hot in Austin. HOT in Cozumel. HOT HOT HOT in Austin.

We spent a couple days with my parents in Austin before flying to Cozumel, then seven days in Cozumel (great diving, will be posting to my scuba blog details on the trip, not limited just to scuba, but the restaurants, bed and breakfast, etc), now back in Austin.

Austin is a great town. If I had to live in Texas, I’d live in Austin, either in the neighborhood I lived in while doing my pre-vet stuff at UT (Hyde Park), or the Tarrytown area. As someone who used to cook more and fairly decently I might add I loved and still love HEB’s Central Market (yep, you’d shorten your grocery store chain to initials if your last name was Butt(s?) too!) and of course Whole Foods.

Now, we have Whole Foods in California, which, along with Trader Joe’s and the local farmer’s markets, is where we normally shop, but we just ran into their flagship store last night to grab some coffee (thanks again Mom (a non-coffee drinker) for buying a small coffee maker to keep at the house!) and it was overwhelming. Why don’t we have one like that??? Too numerous to count goodies (TNTC, one of those lovely veterinary descriptive terms which really means too lazy to count and plot the multitude of lumps and bumps and warts on a sixteen year old miniature poodle) on countless aisles. Oh, and wine tasting. And beer tasting. Mom and Dave got lost when I stopped at the wine tasting bar. (Well, they continued on their search for coffee, I got sidetracked.)

I treated Mom to a day at the spa at Lake Austin yesterday. (Treated me, too.) Heavenly, worth all the rave reviews. I had the rosemary sea salt scrub and a massage, she had the Moor mud back massage and a facial. This was a birthday gift. The extragavance is in line with the guilt associated with not finishing Mom’s Angora. As much as Mom wants her sweater, I’m sure she’d NOT be wearing it anytime soon, and the spa treatments are probably a more timely gift. Regardless, an awesome experience.