Ellie's Mothers Day Adventure

Last Sunday was Mother's Day so Ellie and I decided to open the adventure book and spend a long weekend at her favorite B&B in Comfort, TX.  The weather was beautiful when we left home Friday morning. We drove through Johnson City, boyhood home of LBJ, and then through Fredricksburg to Kerrville.  Although this hasn't been the best year for wildflowers we were delighted to see that there were quite a few in bloom on the stretch of road between Fredricksburg and Kerrville, where we stopped for lunch at a little restaurant with the cumbersome name “Rails ... a Cafe at the Depot”.  As the name implies, Rails is in a restored 1915 train depot.  It was pretty hot by the time we reached the restaurant but Ellie and I opted to eat on the patio because we just like to eat outside on nice days.  Rails has lots of goodies on the menu and we had a hard time deciding what to get but finally Ellie opted for the Farmer's Market Grilled Chicken Salad and I had Creole Shrimp Tostadas, which was one several lunch specials of the day.  The price was a little more than we usually spend for lunch, but the food, service and ambiance were great so we felt that it was well worth the money.

After a delicious and filling lunch we were ready to tackle a few antique shops.  We did a lot of looking and Ellie bought a couple of things but I mostly just followed her around and browsed through the aisles looking for something unusual that I couldn't live without.  Didn't find it though.

In mid-afternoon we headed to Comfort and checked into the Meyer Bed and Breakfast, Ellie's favorite hill country get-away, which is situated on 27 acres along Cypress Creek in Comfort.  The rooms are in a melange of old restored buildings including cottages, mercantile buildings and a historic stage coach stop guesthouse.  Many of the rooms have screened porches on the creek side from which guests can watch deer that are attracted to a feeder installed across the creek.  The whole thing is only about a block from downtown.  Even better, Comfort itself is at the center of a collection of unique little towns like Kerrville, Fredricksburg and Boerne, each of which has a variety of attractions.  So Ellie and I use the Meyer as a base of operations from which to do the tourista thing across a wide swath of Texas hill country.

We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping the antique stores in Comfort.  Then we had dinner at a more or less German restaurant called Guenther's on the outskirts of town.  The food was good.  We split an order of Black Forest Cobbler, which was a combination of chocolate cobbler-like cakey stuff covered with cherry pie filling and topped off with a huge scoop of French vanilla ice cream.  Awesome!  While we were there Ellie got a kick out of the fact that a guy who looked like he had just ridden in from the range, all dressed in cowboy hat, boots and such, whipped out a bottle of Germ-X to sanitize his hands before he ate.  It did seem a bit incongruous. 

We had planned to spend a relaxing evening just chilling out on the screened porch at the back of our cottage but there was no peace in Comfort that night, at least not at the Meyer.   It was pretty much wiped out by about a dozen loud and obnoxious middle-aged, and apparently drunken, women who were spending the weekend in a block of rooms just behind ours.  They sat outside in a common area whooping it up like a bunch of yahoos the entire evening and scared the deer away from the feeder in the process.  By the time they took it inside it was too dark to see the deer even if they had been near the feeder.

In the morning we got up early and were able to see the deer slip through the mist to the clearing where the feeder is located and then melt away again down a path across the creek from our cottage.  There were more of them at the feeder when we went down to breakfast a little later.  The Meyer provides a fantastic breakfast buffet.  There is usually at least one egg dish as well as pancakes, fruit, pastries and the best bread pudding this side of New Orleans.  It was all delicious and we both ate too much.  On the way out of the dining hall Ellie spotted the woman who owns the B&B and told her that we thought the ladies of last evening were a bit too boisterous for an inn that advertises quiet nights in the hill country. The owner agreed and told us that we weren't the only people who had remarked about the noise.  So we had high hopes that our second evening would be a little more quiet and restful than the first.

Most of the stores in Comfort hadn't opened by the time we finished breakfast so we just walked around downtown admiring the old buildings along the main street.  We stopped to talk to a woman about our age who owns a bakery along the road and who had some freshly baked soft pretzels for sale.  She filled us in on the local lore and told us all about the historic house in which she lives and works. We enjoyed talking with the little old Comfort baker and bought one of her pretzels to eat while we finished our walk.  On the way back to the B&B we stopped at a used book sidewalk sale which was a fund raiser for the local library.  Between the two of us we bought about half a dozen books. 

By the time we had taken our purchases back to our room it was lunch time.  So we drove back into downtown and had a terrific tuna nicoise salad out on the patio of a cafe we had passed on our walk.  After that we drove to Boerne, a quaint little tourist town on the Guadalupe River.

Beorne has a larger and more eclectic mix of shops downtown than either Comfort or Kerrville.  We spent a couple of hours shopping and then decided that it was time for something cold to drink because the weather had turned sunny and hot.  We hoofed it down River Road out of the shopping district and stopped in a brew pub called The Dodging Duck Brewhaus.  It was too early for dinner so we just had some drinks and munchies.  Ellie doesn't drink alcohol so she had to be content with a Coke while I had a draft of freshly brewed pecan ale.  While we were chilling on the deck at the Dodging Duck we met a young couple who were having a late lunch there.  The woman was just finishing a pediatric dental residency in San Antonio and her husband, who is a commander in the US Navy, was about to be transferred to a post on the northwest coast.  So they were kind of having a last hurrah in Texas before moving north.  We both enjoyed visiting with the young couple.  I think the opportunity to meet new people is one of the things that Ellie likes most about these little adventures.

We did a little more shopping in Boerne and spent a few minutes at a quilt show that we ran across in a park near the town square and then we headed back to Comfort.  After freshening up at the B&B we went to dinner at a little restaurant called the Hen House Cafe.  My wife decide to go moderately healthy and have a black bean burger and grilled asparagus.  I figured the salad I had had for lunch was enough healthy stuff for me so I went for the coconut shrimp.  We both enjoyed our dinner.  Afterwards we went back to the B&B and had a little quieter evening than the one before.  We spent the evening on the screened porch watching the deer and taking it easy.

The next day was Mother's Day.  We got up early, watched the deer for awhile and had another great breakfast at the B&B.  Then we packed up and hit the road for home.  All in all it was another fun weekend.  We're both rested up now and looking forward to the next time we open up the adventure book.