Texas Time

Justin and I have wanted to venture back into Texas for a long time.  Justin couldn't make the family reunion in San Antonio a couple of years ago.  It's been a very long time since we went to Dallas to see Devon and Annette.  Andrew Clark and Katie now live in Texas, as well, so we were long overdue for a visit.  It sometimes seems, even to us, like we're vacationing all the time, because we're going places all the time.  It's actually been close to two years since we took a real family vacation.  The sort where Justin doesn't work the whole time, and we go somewhere and just have fun for more than a long weekend.  Needless to say, we've been counting down the days to our Texas vacation.

We left right after Justin got home from work on Wednesday.  Colorado was cold, windy, gloomy, and we were excited to be heading south.  We drove all the way into New Mexico and then cut east to the small town of Hereford, Texas.  The original plan had been to stay in a hotel in New Mexico, but the hotel in Hereford was $30 cheaper, and got us further down the road.  Let's just say that the weather was such that we would have gladly paid twice that to have been able to spend the night in New Mexico, but we were committed.  There was a crazy thunderstorm, lots of rain, lots of lightning and as we were cruising along on some deserted highway where we literally had not passed another car for at least 45 minutes, something darted out in front of our car.  Justin hit the brakes, and we both started freaking out about what it was that he had almost hit.  We're 99.99% sure that he almost took out a Barbary Sheep.  They're native to Africa, but a population of them were released in New Mexico back in the 1950's.  We were very excited to have seen one, and very relieved that we didn't kill it.  We rolled into Hereford late that night, and waded through the flooded parking lot to our hotel room where we realized that I had failed to pack Ivan's pajamas.  He's quite particular about his pajamas, he was not interested in sleeping in his clothes.  Justin was contemplating rushing out to the Walmart down the street that we passed on our way into town.  The flash of lightning and thunder booming straight over head settled the discussion and I put Ivan in one of my t-shirts for the night.  Justin and I are both a bit scared of lightning ever since that incident at Dinosaur National Monument a few years back.

The next morning things still looked a little cold and drizzly, but nothing we couldn't handle.  We headed out to Lubbock where we met up with a friend of mine, Karen, who I grew up with in Orem.  We haven't seen each other for some twenty years, so it was great to get a chance to meet her husband, and catch up with her.  We met up at the Prairie Dog Town in Lubbock.  It's really just a city park, where apparently they relocate prairie dogs from other parts of the city to live out there and you can come out and visit and feed them.  I brought along some sliced up carrots for the kids to throw to them.  They loved it. 

Ivan kept trying to race up and throw the carrots directly down the prairie dog holes.

After all the carrots were gone Karen showed us where the Lubbock temple is and we walked around the grounds and she took a few pictures there for us.  

Karen, Evalyn and I

Our visit to Lubbock was rather brief, but we thoroughly enjoyed our time there, and hope to be able to see Karen and her family again sometime before another two decades have elapsed.  Also, I would like to note that Lubbock is just as flat as Kansas, possibly more so, and that's really saying something.  I can see why they're part of tornado alley.  

From Lubbock we continued on towards Marble Falls, where we were staying in the time share, and then meeting up with John and Devon's families the next day.  I missed sort of a key turn, and Justin refused to back track, so we ended up taking a somewhat less than direct route to Marble Falls, but we did arrive there that evening without any further problems.

The next morning we had reservations to go to the Hamilton Pool Preserve.  This place looked so cool.  I have done lots of reading about it, looked at a ton of pictures, and I was very excited about this...and then the road to it was washed out by some rain from the previous night.  I was pretty disappointed, but I kept reminding myself that I have two brothers in Texas.  This won't be my last visit to the area.  Thankfully, Justin had read up on a hike that wasn't really close at all, but it sounded great, so we decided to try that instead.  It was beautiful!  I do not envision this sort of thing when I think about Texas.  

Our first glimpse of the waterfall, and we were pretty excited.

Naturally we stopped to take a bunch of pictures

And then we hiked further down and saw this.

I bought him a little portable tripod for Christmas, he left it in the car, hence the weird angle.

It was really spectacular.  The river runs right by the falls, and it was freaking me out how high and fast it was running, so I made the kids stand on that wooden platform the entire time to make sure that neither of them ventured out of my sight.  We successfully made it out with all members of the family still present and dry.  

Also, the wild flowers were in full bloom, and they were amazing.

Thankfully Justin's hiking research paid off and we salvaged the day.  By the time we got back to Marble Falls Devon and John's families had arrived at the time share.  John and his three oldest didn't show up until the family breakfast, the next morning...ish.  When they showed up we decided to go take a tour of the Longhorn Caverns that Annette had read about.  We were pretty impressed with these caverns.  Justin and I have been to a few, and this is probably second on our list, only to Carlsbad Caverns.  

At the Cavern entrance

There were a couple of rooms that were covered in these crystals.

He looks fairly innocent in this picture, but Ivan was a bit of a wild man in there.  Going on three days without naps was definitely taking a toll.

A tiny little bat.

We were perpetually at the back of the tour.

There were some very cool open rooms like that in these caverns.

The caverns were definitely a great choice.  Although, we enjoyed the experience, our tour guide really wasn't our biggest fan.  We had a whole herd of small unruly children, and there were a other parties there with a few kids of their own.  A couple of times our guide started talking about something that he seemed to find very exciting, and then his voice just sort of trailed off as he realized that nobody was listening, and he moved us along.  There was one couple there without kids who seemed a bit annoyed with us as well, and I overheard snippets of a conversation between them and the guide at the end where he remarked that we had been a challenging group.  At the time I just wished he would stop yapping with them, since Vivian was dancing around in a state of emergency, having failed to use the restrooms before the tour.  She's four, so this is really a failure on my part, but thankfully her dad was able to race ahead with her and resolve the issue.

We arrived back at the time share just as the clouds broke, the sun came out, and we all headed over to the pool.  I gather that we were similarly unpopular at the pool.  It seemed to me that everyone in our party had a great time.  When I retreated to the hot tub with my tiny, purple, shivering son to warm him up a little bit we were treated to a conversation there about the annoying group in the pool that was playing with water guns, and apparently driving away other resort guests.  

The pool wore the kids down and we called it a night shortly thereafter.  The next morning we regrouped for another family breakfast before Devon and his family had to return to Dallas and we continued on to San Antonio with John and his family.

Our first day in San Antonio was supposed to be a pretty low-key day, to give the kids a chance to recover a little.  John invited us to go meet up with him at his work on the USAA campus for lunch.  We were thoroughly impressed with the campus, and glad that he made the suggestion.  Any other family that goes to visit, you should take the time to do that.  He told us to take a few minutes to drive around after lunch and look at the campus.  For a second I thought he was kidding, he wasn't.  It's beautiful.  

The next day we took some time to go to the Alamo and the Riverwalk, and neglected to bring the camera.  Thankfully, Michelle took this picture for us at the Alamo.  

It was blazing hot outside, and we just came from Colorado, so only a few hours in that humidity pretty much exhausted us.  Even Evalyn: 

She seemed to like her Uncle John

The next day we had reservations to hike Enchanted Rock.  Michelle had some church obligations, so she had to sit this one out.  This was all my idea, but some times I do this thing that I've sort of alluded to on here before, where I suggest a hike, and then Justin gets all enthused about it, and I start to regret it because it sounds more torturous than when I read about it online while relaxing on soft couch cushions.  Justin ends up having to all but drag me to the trail head, and then we have a great time.  That was pretty much the story at Enchanted Rock. I'm glad that he knows me well enough to not let me back out.  We had a really great time.  The kids loved climbing around on the rocks.  We ended up spending the better part of the day out there.  

I know that I'm a little partial, but I think my little people are very cute.

By the time we left we were completely exhausted.  The kids were unbearably crabby, even Evalyn.  We pulled over to look at a weird, huge pile of snakes in the river on our way out of the parking lot, and I think all three were wailing, and then all three asleep before we made it 5 miles down the road.

We had to race back because Justin was helping John out with scouts by allowing John to pretend to be a radio talk show host interviewing Justin about his job in the military.  I'm a little sketchy on details, so all I can tell you is that Justin seemed to thoroughly enjoy the experience, allegedly the boys seemed to enjoy the experience, but one of them was not able to walk properly afterwards because of the number of wall sits he was asked to do during the "interview."

Our last day in San Antonio John took the day off work to spend with us.  We drove out to a place near New Braunfels called Coopers to experience "real" Texas BBQ.  It seemed very authentic to us.  One of the other patrons attempted to talk to Justin and I.  He was wearing a cowboy hat, tight pants, button up shirt, and had something to say about Evalyn.  I thought it was my hearing loss that was keeping me from understanding him, but Justin confirmed later that it was his accent and that Justin had no idea what the guy was saying either.  Justin thinks he was complimenting our parenting, but for all we know he was actually insulting it. All the same, we loved Coopers, and we were very glad that John had the day to come with us.  

We visited the Japanese Tea Gardens on the way back to San Antonio.  They were unexpectedly cool. 

The pools were filled with koi and little turtles

I love Atlee on the leash in this picture

The clear water here made Vivian remark that it made her want to go swimming.

We finished that day off with a visit to John and Michelle's neighborhood pool.  At the end of the day Vivian announced that she never wanted to leave San Antonio.  Her cousin Creed, in particular, was a source of never ending entertainment for her.  

It took us FAR too long to drive from San Antonio to Dallas the next day.  We made one stop outside of Austin to experience a Buc-ees, which was quite an experience, and spent hours sitting in traffic as we had the misfortune of getting stuck behind four pile ups.  FOUR.  We arrived in Dallas somewhat frazzled from the experience.

The next day we spent some time in the morning with Devon and Annette, then went off to meet Andrew and Katie for lunch, and then we were all supposed to go together to the George W. Bush library.  Over lunch there were flood warnings, and the sky in the distance was turning the green that Justin recognized as tornado weather.  We decided to scratch the library.  We spent some time with both Andrew and Katie and Devon and Annette at their respective homes before we finally had to start the drive home.  We spent the night in Burkburnet, Texas, and the next morning tackled an 11 hour drive back to Colorado Springs.  The kids were great on the trip home, even little Evalyn.  The weather was good, thankfully, although it seems that the next day the area we had driven through was riddled with tornadoes.   As for us, we arrived home to a flat tire on the van, had to shuttle Vivian and Ivan off to the neighbors across the street while we returned the rental car, and settled in here at home just as the snow started falling and we woke up this morning to ten inches of snow.  Maybe Vivian was on to something when she said that we should just move to Texas.  She's ready to make every family vacation a Texas vacation.