Our Shiner Adventure - We'll Be Bock

As promised, here is the story of our trip to Shiner! For my boyfriend's birthday, I took him to Shiner, Texas. If you're a Texan, you know that this teeny tiny town has a brewery of one of the best beers in Texas (not that I'm a beer drinker).

When you go, you get four wooden tokens after show them your ID at the bar - and each token is worth a FREE sample! That's right, you get four Shiner samples for free! The little cup in the picture is us with our first sample. I only ended up using two of my tokens. As I said, I'm not a beer drinker, and Brandon had to finish both of my samples.

Free Beer!

The tour of the brewery is also free! It was really neat to get to see them bottling, putting tops on, and labeling hundreds of bottles of Shiner Bock. I put some of the pictures I took below!

After we toured the brewery and bought a few souvenirs, we headed to a little place I had heard of called Antiques, Art, and Beer. They have over 150 beers and 150 wines!

#ArtisticPicture

We went to a few other places in Shiner, including a gas station with Shiner on tap, and a cute little candy shop. After driving to neighboring towns to look around, we decided to head back to our hotel in Flatonia, Texas.

Y'all. This place was wonderful. Back in June when I was trying to book a Bed & Breakfast, I was sad that the "famous" one in Shiner was all booked due to a wedding. But it ended up alright, because I found one in a town 20 minutes away, with the best room at the same price. And I'm so glad I did.

We ended up staying at the Olle Hotel. We stayed in the Tauch Room, which for a very reasonable price got us a room with a large bed, it's own bathroom, and was in fact the only room in the hallway. It was right at the front of the historic hotel, on the second floor. It was beautiful, and I wish I had taken pictures of the room itself. In the picture below, our room was actually the two windows on the right! The whole hotel is a historic marker, over 100 years old. They have the history of the hotel available in the lobby.

The Olle Hotel

The landlord was very, very welcoming. She provided us with maps of the county for us to keep, a map of the town, in which she circled all of the places to eat (there were three). She also lent us a map of the beautiful Czech painted churches in the area, which ended up being a life saver!

We took a nap, and then ate dinner at one of two local restaurants, Robert's Steak House. Oh. My. Goodness. Such a delicious burger. Afterwards, we headed back to the hotel and drank some wine on one of the back balconies in the hotel, and then went to sleep.

The next day, after sleeping in (no pets to wake us up, HOORAY!), we went downstairs to a homemade breakfast. It was a DELICIOUS sausage casserole made by our landlord. We only ate a little because we wanted to go to a nearby Czech bakery. We walked there from the hotel and ended up being a little disappointed. There were no cream cheese kolaches! I ended up with a peach one that was pretty tasty though.

After this, we decided to go ahead and do our tour of the painted churches. It was really fun, because we did it old style. No phone navigating, just maps. We only got lost once! The Texas country side is just beautiful, y'all. Go get lost in it! 

I didn't actually take any pictures of the five churches we saw that day. It's hard to convey in a picture what you need to see yourself. The pictures below are actually from the day before, from a church up in Shiner. 

Painted church in Shiner, TX

The alter

Stained Glass Window

Monument Outside

Too beautiful for words. The architecture in the church is all wood, but they modeled it and painted it to look like the stone/marble churches back in "the motherland." My boyfriend was in awe, and so was I. The one picture I did take was of this GINORMOUS spider outside of the SMALLEST church we went to. I was terrified, and I'm not even afraid of spiders. It was bigger than my hand!!

Black and Yellow GARDEN Spider

On the way back we saw a farm FULL of these little guys... anyone know what they are??

Dikdiks?

After the churches, I convinced Brandon to go to a local winery called Morovia. For only $5 each, we got a sample of THREE wines. And every sample after that would have been $1. AND they provided free cheese, meats, etc. to go with our wine. 

Wine and snacks!

All in all, it was a wonderful, wonderful trip. The hotel was charming, as well as the town, and it was only an hour and ten minutes away from home! We will definitely be going back. Or as my boyfriend put it, "We'll be BOCK." (Shiner joke...)

One of the cute feral cats around the hotel! So sweet :)

Until next time... Mischief Managed.