Miles to Magnolia

Hope all of you are having a good start to the week – I have been so thankful for cooler weather here, even though WA has been blanketed with heavy smoke from Canadian fires. It actually rained for a little bit last night, and it was nice to pull a blanket around my lap in the evening as we watched some TV together.

This is a catch-up post, but every year during the last week in June is the American Family Therapy Academy’s conference. It’s one of my favorites, so I try to go whenever I can. This year, it was in Austin and we planned a few days over the weekend to drive down to Waco (it’s less than two hours away from Austin) to see Magnolia. I’m not sure the trade-off was totally fair – I made sure we went to a good BBQ joint in Austin for Aaron, and then he spent two days driving around looking at flipped houses in Waco with me! 🙂 He’s a good man.

Some of the highlights of the trip:

• I was surprised at how small the silos were! On TV, they seem huge, but they are relatively tiny, and nothing is in them; just next to them (I thought the Magnolia store would be IN the silos).
• The “shotgun” house is just two blocks from the silos.
• It was really fun to walk through the store – we bought some gifts for family and friends, but I mostly enjoyed the decorations!
• We waited in line for over an hour for cupcakes at the bakery – but they were worth it! We got a fresh peach one with cream cheese frosting and a graham cracker crust (my favorite), and a dark chocolate with a vanilla buttercream frosting.
• I took pictures of a lot of the houses we drove around seeing (you can get addresses for a lot of them online, except for the newer ones – those seem to be more under wraps) but narrowed them down to three of my favorites: the shotgun house, the “barndominium” (you have to look hard to see that one in the picture, it was down a gated country road), and the bed and breakfast, which is actually a town over in sleepy McGregor, 30 minutes away from Waco.
• We tried to go to the Magnolia restaurant, but when we got there at about 2:00 in the afternoon, they said their reservation line was already several hours past closing. Yikes! So we went to In-N-Out instead and it was just as good – grilled cheese animal style.

We had the best time, and our only recommendation to others would be to go in winter when it’s cooler and the crowds aren’t so thick!