2024 marked The Creative Pack’s 10-Year anniversary. To celebrate, we all gathered our cowboy hats and boots (not actually, though we were tempted to grab a pair when we were there) and headed to Austin.

We were greeted with a warm Austin welcome at Paperboy. The waiter (we wish we got his name!) brought us out his favorite ricotta blackberry toast, compliments of Paperboy because he said it would be a shame if we didn’t try it. Southern hospitality is real! We spent the rest of the afternoon figuring out the number of bedrooms in our Airbnb (everything is larger in Texas) and catching up about none work events, though we couldn’t help but still ideate on all of our latest projects. We ordered some fun beverages and snacks from DoorDash’s DashMart to try to hold us over before dinner. We had a late dinner at Launderette filled with fun mocktails and lots of creative vegetable dishes. We ended the evening at The White Horse to experience true Austin nightlife, with live music and honky tonk.

Our only full day in Austin was all about, you guessed it, MORE FOOD. We went on an afternoon food tour of downtown Austin, tasting classic dishes like breakfast tacos from Veracruz All Natural, brisket from Cooper’s and smoothies from JuiceLand. One of our favorite parts was visiting the haunted Driskill hotel and hearing about all the ghost stories. To walk off the food we headed to South Congress to do some window shopping and try on some cowboy hats and boots at the famous Allens Boots. We ended our South Congress adventure with heading to Tiny Grocer, a small local grocery store. (We had to check out at least one Microgrocery Store while we were here!) Read our article here, if you want to learn more about Tiny Grocer. We ended the night with a dinner at Olamaie, filled with delicious southern food including their famous biscuits and hushpuppies. We were all too tired to go out another night so ended up getting a scoop of ice cream at Amy’s and calling it a night. Though we did end up talking until 2 am.  

The next morning we grabbed a breakfast taco for the road from Tamale House East and said goodbyes to Austin. It was such a special trip to celebrate The Creative Pack’s 10-year and also be able to be together outside of the office or zoom.