Impact Fusion

We were in Austin for the Zilker Park Kite Festival. We’ve never been to Austin before and for that matter to Zilker Park . We found the park to be about the most loveliest parks we’ve ever visited. Zilker is mostly a nature park and home to the Zilker Botanical Gardens, which includes the Taniguchi Oriental Garden and the Austin Garden. The park also is home to the Austin Nature and Science Center that offers various programs for adults and children, and offers hands-on opportunities to explore exhibits, live Texas wildlife and science trails. There’s even an outdoor hillside theater that hosts concerts from Country to Jazz and where Shakespeare and summer Musicals are performed. There’s Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum has the best collection of sculptures by Charles Umlauf.

To think we just thought the park was only good for flying kites! Which, by-the-way, was so totally fun! We saw skull and cross-bone kites, octopus kites, Winnie the Pooh kites, Ladybug kites, tons of butterfly kites. All of these kites came in different shapes, colors and sizes, most of them ended up all tangled with other kites. It was really fun to see what would happen when they got tangled, like sometimes the strings would break creating run-away kites the would come crashing down, or other times they would stay tangled, but still stay up in the sky and crash into more kites, making it look like a huge insect/animal aerial battle scene. The Kite Festival is the oldest continuous Kite running event in the US, it’s 81 years old!

After the kite contest, which we wish we would’ve participated in, we went walking around this oasis in downtown Austin. The park was only a block away from local hotels , we were considering staying for the night just so we could have more time to explore this park. Zilker is so totally amazing. A bamboo forest connected one garden to another, there was a miniature train ride, a Town Lake where we could rent a canoe or a paddle boat. A playscape for multi-ages (meaning adults can act like children), a pool to swim in, bike and hiking trails, a huge picnic area, volleyball courts and a nine-hole Disc Golf Course!

Where else but in ‘Keep it Weird’ Austin can you find so much in one area?