Well, I know that this horrendous fine is one reason why I didn't buy in Lakeway. We are moving back to Texas, and we were really interested in a house at Lakeway (which DID have an attached hangar/garage, by the way). When I found out about the "runway closed at sundown" rule, in conjunction with the huge fine, we went looking elsewhere. I would be frequently making trips where I would arrive about 10pm, so Lakeway just wouldn't work for me. I was told that when they are arriving late, people just divert to AUS, and take a taxi home (expensive, I would think, but less than the fine).

We found airporthomes.com to be useful, as they have a map of airparks in the Austin area ( http://www.airporthomes.com/ap-tx.htm ). We ended up buying in Kestrel Airpark, and hope to build soon. It did take quite a long time to drive from Southwest Austin (where my cousin's house is) through the 3:30-4:00 pm traffic out of Austin to get down to New Braunfels, and then over to Kestrel Airpark, well over an hour. It was, like, an hour just to get to Buda. Traffic in Austin is ...BLECH nowadays. Not like when I was a kid 35 years ago.

We also looked at Horseshoe Bay, which is about 47 miles west of southwest Austin, but it's about an hour and a quarter commute.