Then we learned about Featherfest, an annual four-day bird-watching event on Galveston Island, and that sounded perfect. On top of that, we learned that April is also the peak time for Texas wildflowers, and since my wife, Julianne, is a wildflower aficionado, last spring we decided to make a joint bird-and-flower pilgrimage to the Texas Hill Country and the Gulf Coast. Friends, a couple with Texas links, joined us, and added the brilliant idea of making it a triangular trip: Hill Country for the wildflowers, far east to the Big Thicket National Preserve, and finally south to Galveston for Featherfest.
We flew to Austin via Dallas, and stayed at a neat place called Habitat Suites. It's an economically priced ''green" suite hotel, with all manner of energy efficiencies, plus full buffet breakfast and happy hour with wine each night. It's a bit away from downtown, quiet, and the staff was friendly.
We visited the elegant stone state capitol, built in 1888 and greatly enlarged and modernized in the early 1990s. There's an excellent tour (and a fine cafe), and we were interested to see that the statues of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston, heroes of the Texas Republic, are exactly life-size, so we could see how short big men really were in days of yore.
In the capitol rotunda, several stories tall, portraits of all Texas governors are hung. When a governer leaves office, his or her portrait goes in the first space to the right of the entry, and all the others are moved over one space. There are many empty spaces in the upper levels between the floor and the dome and plenty of room for future governors. President George W. Bush is the most recent former governer, therefore closest to the main entry. Right beside him is former governor Ann Richards. We admired the bipartisanship reflected in the fact that they will always be side by side, smiling brightly like the best of friends.
