Magnolia Market and Snake Porn in Waco Texas…

One of the main attractions for many who visit Waco Texas is the Magnolia Market at the Silos, a creation of Chip and Joanna Gaines of the TV show Fixer Upper. As I mentioned before they have really put Waco on the map. At a cost of 1.4 million dollars they opened the Magnolia complex in October of 2015.

The Magnolia complex is basically a large area with a few stores which surround a large courtyard/playground. There are several food trucks parked along the perimeter of the complex offering an assortment of eats. Home decorating and tourist items can be found in the stores but there is also a seed shop selling plants and a fabulous little bakery selling goodies. One tip we can offer is don’t pay for parking. There are signs everywhere offering parking spaces for $5 to $10 yet there is free parking adjacent to the property right off of 8th Street. Another tip is go early during the weekdays as it will be packed with people…

Sharon enjoyed browsing but did not purchase anything since we don’t own a sticks and bricks house. However we could not resist the Silos Baking Co. bakery filled with Joanna's personal recipes and hand-picked favorites. Some of those favorites were "The Prize Pig" bacon and cheddar biscuit and the "Nuts & Bolts" cupcake  which both sounded delightful but it was the large pecan and walnut topped cinnamon roll that won our stomachs over. All I can say it it was very DELISH!!!!

A nice feature at the complex is a free city trolley which takes visitors on a loop of the downtown area. It has a pre-recorded infomercial about Waco playing while driving around and we soon knew all there is to know about what to see or do in Waco. It isn’t a very long tour but the fact that you can hop on and off allows for visitors to easily enjoy other shopping, eating and drinking establishments in downtown Waco.

Since it didn’t take us too long to explore the Magnolia Market at the Silos we found the Lake Waco Wetlands. It is a haven for wetlands critters but also has some hiking trails and boardwalks which gave us an up-close and personal look into the interior of a fresh water marsh. The highlight on this trip was some snakes and crawfish we saw doing some interesting things.

Alongside one of the open water ponds there was a culvert which had water gushing into it as the water source of the pond. Interestingly there were crawfish that appeared to be climbing up a small bank alongside the culvert and then “jumping” off the edge into the swirling waters inside the culvert. It was a mystery we puzzled over and finally figured there could only be two plausible explanations for their behavior.

One is that they were simply having fun – like a water themed park ride and they were riding the wave! A more likely explanation was that there were lots of small fish inside the culvert and this behavior was more likely an elaborate hunting technique with the crawfish hoping to snag a fish as it swirled around the current. Either way it was absolute fun watching them…

Even cooler than seeing the crawfish was the fact that there were also about three to five Water Snakes who were there also hunting the schooling fish. We saw several small fish meet their demise as a Yellow Bellied Water Snake would spear one in its mouth and then swim off so it could secure it better to finish swallowing it. Very cool!

What could top these fun sightings? Well while watching the snakes hunt fish two of them started coiling up together and before we knew it, they were doing the dirty. Yep that's right – snake porn before our very eyes. Check out videos I linked here to see them doing the dirty as well as one that shows one of the snakes spearing a small fish. Sharon caught the fish spearing on video and if you watch it you will hear her excitement at capturing it on film… 

NOTE: We left Waco Texas and went to Jacksboro Texas to hide out for part of the Memorial Day weekend but are now in Wichita Falls, Texas…