Texas Hill Country Getaway | Staying in a TINY CABIN, Pedernales Falls, & The Salt Lick BBQ!

This weekend, we're going on a little staycation adventure in Dripping Springs, which is located about 35 minutes southwest of Austin. Dripping Springs is known as the gateway to the hill country, and it's close to a bunch of hikes, other small towns, state parks, breweries, and wineries, and so much more. It's also nicknamed the wedding capital of Texas, and it's where we got married over six years ago, so it holds a very special place in our hearts. We've been living almost full-time in our self-converted Sprinter van for 18 months now, and we have absolutely fallen in love with tiny living. So this weekend, we're going to get even more of a taste of tiny living and stay in a tiny cabin and show you a couple of cool things to do in the area. Welcome to our home for the next two nights. We are at Wandering Star Farms here in Dripping Springs, which is not only a farm, but they have a variety of Airbnb options, and we are staying in one of their three tiny cabins. So let's show you around. When you first walk up to the tiny cabin, you enter the covered patio, which has a fan to help keep you comfortable on the hot Texas days, a huge farmhouse table and some Adirondack chairs, cool wooden slats for privacy, and a grill, which we'll definitely be using later. When you first enter the tiny home, you walk into the kitchen and the living room, and the first thing you'll notice is just how spacious this tiny home feels. It definitely feels like a mansion compared to our van. It just has these super tall ceilings, I think they're about 20 feet tall, and then huge windows all around, just bringing in tons of natural light. But what our favorite thing about this tiny house is, is just the aesthetic of it. It has these really neat plywood sheet walls mixed with shiplap, mixed with a bunch of different metal elements, giving it kind of a industrial farmhouse modern vibe. The kitchen is a full size, fully loaded kitchen. To start off with, you've got tons of counter space here. You got a giant farmhouse style sink, I think that is. More industrial vibes, might be kind of weird to point out the faucet, but it looks cool. And then, what I think we're most excited about is just about every coffee making method you could dream of. So, they even came with a coffee grinder, a Chemex, French press, and a Keurig. And just steps from the kitchen is the living room, where you have a couple different seating options, you have a TV, and then one thing we were not expecting, but we're very excited about, we have a record player. And it looks like we have a few different record choices, so you'll just have to stay tuned and see which one we pick. Just off the main living area, you have a bedroom, a standalone bedroom, in a tiny home. This might be one of the things that we like best about this tiny home. You can stand up in it, you don't have to climb up into it, like the loft options that a lot of tiny homes have. Oh yeah, this will do, this is comfy. And right off the bedroom is the bathroom, which obviously has a toilet and a sink, and then it has a stand-up shower, which has these really cool metal walls, and there's metal piping that the shower curtain goes on. Although the main bedroom isn't a loft-style bedroom, there is a loft in the tiny house, so you'll walk upstairs, which are stairs, not just a ladder you climb up, and you have this awesome space up here. There's a bed for two people, there's a couch you can relax on, and there's a desk if you need to get work done. We are absolutely in love with this tiny cabin. We've been talking a lot recently about building a tiny house in a few years, not anytime soon, but this place is pretty much exactly how we'd want it. It feels super spacious, there's a real bedroom, there's room for guests, it's just absolutely perfect. We love it, we're in love. But the sun is going to be setting here in about an hour or so, so we'll show you guys the rest of the property tomorrow, along with a state park and a really popular place to eat nearby. But for tonight, we're just going to be chilling, grilling, maybe watch a movie, just enjoy our cabin for the night. Good morning, we are off to adventure for part of the day. As we mentioned before, this area is close to a ton of awesome things to do, including a state park that we've been to a handful of times called Pedernales Falls, or Perdenales Falls, depending on how you like to say it, which we can't wait to show you guys. Pedernales Falls is located 25 minutes northwest of Dripping Springs, and there are a couple important things you need to know in case you want to come visit. First, the park is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays unless you're camping, and second, similar to a lot of the Texas state parks right now, you need to make a reservation even to just visit for the day. First up, we came to the Pedernales Falls Overlook, which is probably the most popular area in the park, and it's just a quick walk from the parking area, and you have this amazing view of all the rocks, the Pedernales River. We've been here quite a few times, but it was just even more grand than I remember it being. Pedernales is Spanish for Flint Rock, which is what the Spanish found a lot of in the bottom of this river, and as you can see, it is just huge giant slabs of limestone that the water is just cascading around and flowing over, and fun fact, some of these rocks here are over 300 million years old. Because of the water level and the contours of the riverbed, the water flowing through it creates little tiny waterfalls all throughout and little pools of water, super interesting. We had way too much fun climbing around all the rocks that the Pedernales Falls Overlook area. It's pretty cool how they give you basically free reign to just kind of create your own adventure down there. You could go farther than we did, you could just hang out in the main area, there's tons of cool stuff to see. We realized, we don't think we've ever done any other trails at this park the few times we've been here, so we found one called Wolf Mountain, it's about 5.5 miles or so, so we're gonna go check that one out. Not a ton to report on about the Wolf Mountain Trail. The trail to get up here was pretty flat, but it's a nice wide trail, and once you get to the top, there's some pretty nice views of the hill country surrounding, but they can be a little tree covered like this. We are happy that we did it, we needed the workout because we are about to have ourselves a little feast. For our feast, we grabbed takeout from Salt Lake Barbecue, which is one of the most popular barbecue spots in the Austin area. It's located in Driftwood, just south of Dripping Springs, and opened in 1967. It's a bit of a tourist spot, but it's a really cool experience, it has an awesome atmosphere with an open cooking area, outdoor patio, live music, and a winery, or you can BYOB. We just got a bunch of meat, because that's what we like the best. So we got a half a pound of moist brisket, we got half a, or this is a full pound of pork ribs, and then a half pound of burnt ends, which the burnt ends are cut from what's called the point, which is the fattier end of the brisket, and it's towards the end, so it gets cooked a little more, it gets a little crispier on the outside on the edges, so they call it burnt ends. This farmhouse table is huge, I'm going to lean all the way across, oh my gosh, I'm most excited for these burnt ends, because I don't think we've ever just ordered burnt ends before, and I love me some fatty brisket. Also, they have really good barbecue sauce, it has a vinegar base, and it also has mustard in it, so it just has a really good tang to it, it's probably one of my favorite barbecue sauces out there. Dunkaroo! Mmhmm. These burnt ends, I've heard people refer to them as like brisket candy, or nuggets of barbecue gold, and they are 1,000% right, there is such a good crunch, so much good bark and just flavor, you can taste all the smoke, then the meat is just so tender and fatty and juicy, it's starting to fall apart, but oh my goodness, yeah, if you go to Salt Lake, you have to get this, this is really, really good, mm, mm, oh, it's so, it just has so much flavor, oh my gosh, that's delicious. Oh yeah, this is just so dang good, I don't know, oh man, it's everything you want in barbecue, great crust on the outside, tender, juicy, mm, you can see the smoke ring, the pink on the outside there, perfectly done pork ribs, tender, juicy, falls right off the bone, amazing flavor, I think they mop the ribs with their sauce, like, I don't know, every few minutes or something, just to keep them delicious and moist and add even more flavor. And now for usually my favorite part of barbecue, which is moist brisket, which basically just means it's the fattier cut of brisket, I don't know how anything is gonna top those burnt hens that are so good, but this does look pretty good and fatty as well, that just melts in your mouth, that is, actually, to be honest, better than I thought it would be, we've had Salt Lake before and we really do like it, it's really, really good and it's popular for a reason, but it's never been like our go-to spot in Austin, just because we love like Valentina's and some other places, but this, at least this piece of the moist brisket is extremely just tender and juicy and has really, really good flavor. As we mentioned, the Airbnb is on a farm and the property is really cool, so we're gonna show you around real quick. Just down the hill from the tiny cabins is this really sweet gathering area and also awesome playground. Whee! See you on the other side. Oh, shoot. Oh, no. That tree's dangerous. No hands. Pretty sure they host weddings here, this would be an obvious Austin spot for that. You can rent out this whole space and have any kind of gathering you want, I think. Lantern-like light fixtures are awesome. Besides the tiny cabins, though, we're staying and they also have this really cool yurt, which we almost rented, it just wasn't available this weekend, and they have this big barn that sleeps eight people called a barndo, which we think means like a barn condo, and it looks incredibly cool on the inside. But probably my favorite thing on this entire property are the two donkeys. They are so cute. They love to come up and say hi, and they make the funniest noise ever. It is so loud. They, of course, won't do it right now, but hopefully we can get them to make the noise soon. Good job, chef. We are so bummed to leave this amazing tiny cabin. It was the perfect getaway and it got us so excited to hopefully have something like this all to ourselves one day in the future. I lost count a long time ago how many times we told ourselves, this is awesome. This is a mansion. We could totally live here. We were basically like planning where we'd put our washer and dryer and what we'd put on the walls in certain spots. We're ready to basically transport this onto our own land that we don't own yet. So if you want to stay here, we'll put a link to this place in the description as well as the other accommodations on the property. But for now, it's time to head back to mom and dad's. But if everything goes according to plan and things are looking very, very promising, the next time you see us, we will no longer be in Texas. Wake up. Cock-a-doodle-doo. Nothing like the nice evening sounds of a donkey. Adam's really cold. Trying to warm up. It's cooler and cloudier than we thought it was going to be, so I'm trying to get the blood flowing. And there are a couple important things you need to know if you want to visit. First, what's the first one? Oh, yeah. Although the main bedroom isn't a loft. Sorry. I didn't know if you were being serious. Or if you want to go on a couple's getaway, there's enough space for you here in this place. It rhymes. Did you hear that?