AUSTIN
Residence Inn Austin Downtown · Convention Center
United States
TRIP OVERVIEW
Day 1 – Texas State Capitol · Bullock Texas State History Museum · Blanton Museum of Art · Ellsworth Kelly's Austin · LBJ Presidential Library
Day 2 – Zilker Botanical Garden · Barton Springs Pool · Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum · Lady Bird Lake
Day 3 – Mexic-Arte Museum · South Congress Avenue · Stevie Ray Vaughan Memorial · Congress Avenue Bridge · Rainey Street Historic District
Day 4 – Harry Ransom Center · Mount Bonnell
Day 5 – The Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria · Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve · Cathedral of Junk · Sixth Street Historic District
Day 1
From Hotel: 🚶 15 min · 🚕 6 min → Texas State Capitol
1. Texas State Capitol
Texas's 1888 capitol is built of distinctive pink granite and stands taller than the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Free self-guided and docent-led tours lead through the rotunda, the legislative chambers, and the soaring dome.
🏛️ Monday - Friday 7:00am - 8:00pm
🏛️ Saturday - Sunday 9:00am - 8:00pm
⏰ ~1 hr 30 min
Free
🚶 13 min · 🚕 7 min → Bullock Texas State History Museum
2. Bullock Texas State History Museum
The state's flagship history museum traces Texas from its Native and Spanish-colonial roots through statehood and the oil boom across three floors. The polished granite lobby floor and the 35-foot bronze star out front are landmarks in their own right, and an IMAX theater rounds out a visit.
🏛️ Daily 10:00am - 5:00pm
⏰ ~2 hr
🚶 2 min · 🚕 2 min → Blanton Museum of Art
3. Blanton Museum of Art
One of the largest university art museums in the United States, with 22,000 works spanning ancient Greek pottery, European Old Masters, and twentieth-century abstraction — along with the largest public collection of modern and contemporary Latin American art in the US.
🏛️ Tuesday - Friday 10:00am - 5:00pm
🏛️ Saturday 10:00am - 8:00pm · Sunday 10:00am - 5:00pm
🚫 Closed Monday
⏰ ~2 hr
⚠️ Free Tuesdays
🚶 12 min · 🚕 7 min → Ellsworth Kelly's Austin
4. Ellsworth Kelly's Austin
A freestanding limestone chapel on the Blanton's campus, completed in 2018 as Ellsworth Kelly's only architectural work. Fourteen colored-glass panels cast shifting light through the white interior, alongside two large marble panels and a redwood totem.
🏛️ Tuesday - Friday 10:00am - 5:00pm
🏛️ Saturday 10:00am - 8:00pm · Sunday 10:00am - 5:00pm
🚫 Closed Monday
⏰ ~30 min
Free
🚶 5 min · 🚕 2 min → LBJ Presidential Library
5. LBJ Presidential Library
On the University of Texas campus, the presidential library holds 45 million pages of Lyndon Johnson's papers and a faithful seven-eighths-scale replica of his Oval Office. Exhibits cover the Great Society, the civil-rights era, and the Vietnam War.
🏛️ Daily 9:00am - 5:00pm
⏰ ~2 hr
🚶 36 min · 🚕 10 min → hotel
Day 2
From Hotel: 🚕 11 min → Zilker Botanical Garden
1. Zilker Botanical Garden
Twenty-six acres of themed gardens — rose, Japanese, prehistoric, and cactus among them — terraced into a hillside above Barton Creek. The Hartman Prehistoric Garden recreates a dinosaur-era landscape around real local fossil finds.
🏛️ Daily 9:00am - 5:00pm
⏰ ~1 hr 30 min
🚶 18 min · 🚕 5 min → Barton Springs Pool
2. Barton Springs Pool
A spring-fed, three-acre swimming hole inside Zilker Park, fed straight from the Edwards Aquifer. A beloved local ritual, it is lined by a grassy slope and shaded by pecan trees.
🏛️ Daily 5:00am - 10:00pm
⏰ ~1 hr 30 min
⚠️ Closed Thursdays 9:00am - 7:00pm for cleaning
🚶 26 min · 🚕 5 min → Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum
3. Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum
Over 130 bronze, marble, and cast-stone sculptures by UT professor Charles Umlauf fill a shaded outdoor garden and indoor gallery set into a wooded ravine at the edge of Zilker Park — one of the city's most peaceful stops, with works from small portrait busts to large figurative bronzes beneath live oaks.
🏛️ Tuesday - Friday 10:00am - 4:00pm
🏛️ Saturday - Sunday 11:00am - 4:00pm
🚫 Closed Monday
⏰ ~1 hr 15 min
🚕 10 min → Lady Bird Lake
4. Lady Bird Lake
A reservoir on the Colorado River ringed by the Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail, whose lakeside boardwalk carries walkers and cyclists right out over the water with downtown skyline views. The calm, no-motor water is Austin's hub for kayaking and paddleboarding.
🚶 25 min · 🚕 7 min → hotel
Day 3
From Hotel: 🚶 6 min · 🚕 4 min → Mexic-Arte Museum
1. Mexic-Arte Museum
Designated the Official Mexican American Fine Art Museum of Texas, Mexic-Arte mounts rotating exhibitions of Mexican, Latin American, and Mexican-American art across Congress Avenue galleries. The permanent collection spans prints, photographs, folk art, and pre-Columbian masks.
🏛️ Monday - Thursday 10:00am - 6:00pm
🏛️ Friday - Saturday 10:00am - 5:00pm · Sunday 12:00pm - 5:00pm
⏰ ~1 hr
🚶 28 min · 🚕 10 min → South Congress Avenue
2. South Congress Avenue
The most celebrated mile in Austin, South Congress runs south from the Congress Avenue Bridge through a dense corridor of boutiques, vintage stores, food trucks, and neon-sign motels. The view north from mid-SoCo frames the State Capitol dome at the end of the straight avenue.
🚶 15 min · 🚕 5 min → Stevie Ray Vaughan Memorial
3. Stevie Ray Vaughan Memorial
A life-size bronze statue of blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan stands on Auditorium Shores at the south bank of Lady Bird Lake, facing downtown. Sculptor Ralph Helmick cast it in 1993 and it has become one of the most visited spots on the hike-and-bike trail.
🚶 6 min · 🚕 3 min → Congress Avenue Bridge
4. Congress Avenue Bridge
From spring through fall, up to 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats — the largest urban bat colony in North America — stream out from under this downtown bridge at dusk. Crowds gather on the banks and the deck to watch the nightly emergence over Lady Bird Lake.
🏛️ Open 24/7
⏰ ~45 min
⚠️ Bats emerge near sunset, mid-March to early November
🚶 23 min · 🚕 7 min → Rainey Street Historic District
5. Rainey Street Historic District
A two-block strip of early-twentieth-century Craftsman bungalows that were converted, one by one, into bars, restaurants, and coffee shops, creating Austin's most atmospheric outdoor drinking district. The compact street is flat, open-air, and best experienced in the late morning before crowds arrive.
🚶 14 min · 🚕 7 min → hotel
Day 4
From Hotel: 🚶 30 min · 🚕 9 min → Harry Ransom Center
1. Harry Ransom Center
UT Austin's humanities research center holds one of 48 surviving Gutenberg Bibles, the first photograph ever taken — Niépce's 1826 View from the Window at Le Gras — and 40 million pages of manuscripts, rare books, photography, and film.
🏛️ Tuesday - Friday 10:00am - 5:00pm
🏛️ Saturday - Sunday 12:00pm - 5:00pm
🚫 Closed Monday
⏰ ~1 hr 30 min
Free
🚕 14 min → Mount Bonnell
2. Mount Bonnell
At about 775 feet, one of Austin's highest points and a lookout since the 1850s. A short stair-climb reaches a stone pavilion with sweeping views over Lake Austin, the Hill Country, and the 360 Bridge — best at sunset.
🚕 15 min → hotel
Day 5
From Hotel: 🚕 19 min → The Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria
1. The Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria
A 1916 Italianate villa on Lake Austin, now home to The Contemporary Austin's sculpture park. The Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park winds through native plantings and limestone outcrops along the shoreline, with major artworks among live oaks above the water.
🏛️ Wednesday 9:00am - 3:00pm · Thursday 9:00am - 9:00pm
🏛️ Friday - Sunday 9:00am - 3:00pm
🚫 Closed Monday & Tuesday
⏰ ~1 hr 30 min
⚠️ Free Thursdays
🚕 7 min → Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve
2. Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve
A 227-acre preserve with 2.5 miles of limestone trails through cedar woodland and oak savanna, dropping into Bee Creek canyon and rising to a Hill Country overlook. One of the last intact stretches of Central Texas Hill Country habitat inside the city limits, co-managed by St. Edward's University and Travis County.
🏛️ Daily 7:00am - 8:00pm
⏰ ~1 hr 30 min
Free
⚠️ Weekend and holiday visits require a free advance hiking pass
🚕 17 min → Cathedral of Junk
3. Cathedral of Junk
Since 1988, Vince Hannemann has been welding bicycles, televisions, car parts, and toys into a cathedral-sized folk art installation — over 60 tons of material rising 30 feet high. Visitors walk through tunnels, climb platforms, and explore a constantly evolving labyrinth of found-object architecture.
🏛️ Monday - Saturday 9:00am - 5:00pm
🚫 Closed Sunday
⏰ ~45 min
Free
⚠️ Access is by appointment — contact ahead before visiting
🚕 12 min → Sixth Street Historic District
4. Sixth Street Historic District
Listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, this nine-block corridor holds the largest concentration of Victorian commercial architecture west of the Mississippi — limestone and brick storefronts from the 1870s and 1880s, anchored by the Romanesque Revival Driskill Hotel.
🚶 3 min · 🚕 3 min → hotel
🗓️ Weekly Closures
Art Museums · Closed Monday
📅 Tours
Viator
A two-hour stroll from Congress Avenue to historic 6th Street with a clear view of the Texas Capitol — true tales of politics, outlaws, urban legends, and the music history that shaped the city, told by a local guide with insider tips. Relaxed pace, shaded where possible, and fully wheelchair accessible.
⏳ 2 hr · 👥 Small group
🚶 15 min · 🚕 5 min
A small-group day trip pairing authentic Central Texas barbecue with tastings at three scenic Hill Country wineries, with comfortable round-trip transport from Austin.
⏳ 5 hr 30 min · 👥 Small group
🚕 8 min
A half-day Sprinter van shuttle to the legendary Salt Lick BBQ and two Hill Country wineries — brisket, ribs, and sausage served family-style outdoors at the legendary pit, then tastings at two scenic wineries, with round-trip transport from the Austin Visitor Center.
⏳ 4 hr 30 min · 👥 Small group
🚶 5 min · 🚕 3 min
A small-group van day trip from Austin to San Antonio covering the Alamo, Tower of the Americas, a River Walk boat cruise, and Mission San José — 7 hours with round-trip transport and a local guide.
⏳ 7 hr · 👥 Small group
🏨 ↔ 🚐
A 90-minute public group sightseeing cruise at sunset on Lake Travis — limestone cliffs, clear blue water, and Hill Country panoramas from Hurst Harbor Marina, departing at sunset in an open-air boat with BYOB permitted.
⏳ 1 hr 30 min · 👥 Group
🚕 35 min
GetYourGuide
A half-day Sprinter van shuttle to the legendary Salt Lick BBQ pit and two Hill Country wineries — family-style barbecue outdoors at the legendary pit, then wine tastings in the scenic Texas Hill Country, with round-trip transport from downtown Austin.
⏳ 4 hr 30 min · 👥 Small group
🚶 5 min · 🚕 3 min
📅 2. From Austin: San Antonio Day Trip with Alamo and Boat Cruise · GetYourGuide · 4.9⭐ · 96+ reviews
A small-group van day trip from Austin to San Antonio covering the Alamo, Tower of the Americas, a River Walk boat cruise, and Mission San José — 7 hours with round-trip transport from Austin.
⏳ 7 hr · 👥 Small group
🏨 ↔ 🚐
A full-day small-group van tour from Austin through the Texas Hill Country — LBJ Ranch, Fredericksburg's main street, Luckenbach Town Hall, and wine tastings at a Hill Country vineyard, with Austin.
⏳ 8 hr · 👥 Small group
🏨 ↔ 🚐
TripAdvisor
Half-day shuttle tour to Salt Lick BBQ and two Hill Country wineries — tastings of legendary Central Texas brisket, fall-off-the-bone ribs, and Hill Country wines, with round-trip transport from the Austin Visitor Center.
⏳ 4 hr 30 min · 👥 11 max
🚶 12 min · 🚕 4 min
A 3-hour evening van tour of three iconic Austin live music venues — a local comedian-guide escorts the group through East 6th Street and beyond, giving insider context on Austin's live music history and the scene that earned the city its Live Music Capital of the World title.
⏳ 3 hr · 👥 Small group
🚶 7 min · 🚕 3 min
A small-group van day trip from Austin to San Antonio covering the Alamo, Tower of the Americas, a River Walk boat cruise, and Mission San José — 7 hours with round-trip transport and a local guide.
⏳ 7 hr · 👥 Small group
🏨 ↔ 🚐
☕ Cappuccino
Desnudo Coffee · 4.6⭐ · 91+ reviews
🏛️ Thursday - Sunday 7:30am - 2:30pm
🚫 Closed Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday
🚶 10 min · 🚕 4 min
Houndstooth Coffee · 4.3⭐ · 514+ reviews
🏛️ Monday - Friday 6:30am - 7:00pm
🚫 Closed Saturday & Sunday
🚶 12 min · 🚕 4 min
🫕 Restaurants Near Hotel
Garrison · 4.6⭐ · 303+ reviews
Live-fire steaks and New American fine dining over post oak.
🏨 In the hotel
🏛️ Tuesday - Thursday 5:00pm - 9:00pm · Friday - Saturday 5:00pm - 10:00pm
🚫 Closed Sunday & Monday
Moonshine Grill · 4.4⭐ · 6400+ reviews
Southern comfort food and brunch on a historic creekside patio.
🏛️ Monday - Saturday 11:00am - 10:00pm
🚫 Closed Sunday
🚶 2 min · 🚕 3 min
Banger's Sausage House & Beer Garden · 4.1⭐ · 2947+ reviews
House-made sausages and a 200-tap beer garden.
🏛️ Daily 11:00am - 10:00pm
🚶 6 min · 🚕 3 min
Emmer & Rye · 4.0⭐ · 1021+ reviews
Tasting-menu New American with rotating dim sum carts.
🏛️ Tuesday - Sunday 5:30pm - 10:00pm
🚫 Closed Monday
🚶 8 min · 🚕 3 min
Cooper's Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que · 4.0⭐ · 2255+ reviews
Llano-style pit barbecue served straight off the counter.
🏛️ Daily 11:00am - 10:00pm
🚶 12 min · 🚕 3 min
🍽️ Downtown Restaurants
Comedor · 4.1⭐ · 557+ reviews
Modern Mexican with Texas influences.
🏛️ Monday - Saturday 5:00pm - 10:00pm
🚫 Closed Sunday
Red Ash · 4.4⭐ · 1579+ reviews
Wood-fired Italian steakhouse in the Warehouse District.
🏛️ Daily 5:00pm - 10:00pm
Wu Chow · 3.9⭐ · 1191+ reviews
Farm-to-table Chinese with Sunday dim sum.
🏛️ Monday - Friday 11:00am - 2:00pm · 4:00pm - 10:00pm
🏛️ Saturday 5:00pm - 11:00pm · Sunday 11:00am - 3:00pm
Roaring Fork · 4.1⭐ · 1430+ reviews
Wood-fired American grill with steaks, game, and green-chile dishes.
🏛️ Monday - Friday 11:00am - 10:00pm
🚫 Closed Saturday & Sunday
Lamberts Downtown Barbecue · 3.8⭐ · 2112+ reviews
Wood-smoked "fancy" barbecue and brunch over two floors.
🏛️ Daily 11:00am - 10:00pm
🍮 Local Tastes
Breakfast Tacos
Austin's unofficial breakfast — warm tortillas folded around eggs, cheese, potato, bacon, or chorizo. The migas taco, with crispy tortilla strips folded into the eggs, is the local signature.
Central Texas Barbecue
Salt-and-pepper brisket smoked low over post oak until it pulls apart, served by the pound with sausage and ribs on butcher paper. Pit lines forming before opening are part of the ritual.
Queso
Warm, melted Tex-Mex cheese dip served with tortilla chips. The layered Bob Armstrong Dip — queso with taco meat, guacamole, and pico — was invented in Austin at Matt's El Rancho.
🎭 Shows, Performances & Concerts
ACL Live at The Moody Theater
Home of the Austin City Limits TV tapings, the longest-running music show on American television. The 2,750-seat downtown theater books top touring artists.
🚶 15 min · 🚕 5 min
🚆 Train Stations Near Hotel
🚊 Downtown Station
🏓 Pickleball
Waterloo Pickleball · Indoor
Only indoor courts in downtown Austin; 1 indoor + 2 outdoor courts on site
🏛️ Monday - Wednesday 5:30am - 7:30pm · Thursday - Friday 5:30am - 6:30pm · Saturday 8:00am - 8:00pm · Sunday 9:00am - 8:00pm
🚕 7 min
Austin Pickle Ranch · Indoor
16 indoor and 2 outdoor courts; non-member reservations available
🏛️ Monday 7:00am - 11:00pm · Tuesday 7:00am - 12:00am · Thursday - Friday 7:00am - 12:00am · Saturday 8:00am - 12:00am · Sunday 8:00am - 10:00pm
🚫 Closed Wednesday
🚕 17 min
⭐ Michelin Restaurants
⭐ Hestia
Live-fire New American built around a wood-burning hearth.
🚶 21 min · 🚕 6 min
⭐ la Barbecue
Central Texas barbecue from a custom backyard pit.
🚕 6 min
⭐ Olamaie
Refined Southern cooking famous for its off-menu biscuits.
🚶 39 min · 🚕 7 min
⭐ Craft Omakase
⭐ Barley Swine
Not shown: 2 ⭐ more in Austin
❗️ Heads Up
Barton Springs Pool — Thursday Cleaning
The spring-fed pool runs every day except Thursday, when it closes 9:00am - 7:00pm for cleaning — the only day with no daytime swim.
Congress Avenue Bridge — Bats Are Seasonal
The 1.5-million-bat colony is only here mid-March to early November, and emerges near sunset — nothing to see in winter or by day.
Mount Bonnell — Car Break-ins at the Lot
Austin police flag the Covert Park parking area as a hot spot for vehicle burglaries, especially at the busy sunset hour.
🦇 Why Austin Feels Like Austin
Two of this guide's stops are really the same story told in stone and water: the Capitol's pink granite was quarried at Granite Mountain near Marble Falls, the same Hill Country uplift whose limestone springs feed Barton Springs Pool. The city's grandest building and its favorite swimming hole come from one slab of geology.
The bats are an accident too. When the Congress Avenue Bridge was rebuilt in 1980, its new expansion joints happened to make ideal bat roosts — and a piece of infrastructure nobody designed for wildlife became the largest urban bat colony in North America, then one of the city's signature sights.