Hello Texas

We headed out early Sunday morning to head to Texas. I was so excited about going to Texas. Growing up, my dream was to marry a cowboy and live in Texas (even though I had never even been there until now). The drive out of Colorado was amazing, even though I spent most of it knocked out by Dramamine. The views I did get to see was awesome. One of the craziest things we saw was an Amish family traveling down the highway in a horse and buggy. We were surprised to find out that we'd be driving through New Mexico, so that was fun to get to add another state. We passed a sign that said, Las Vegas 111 miles. Joel said that we planned poorly because we should've added that to the list. Then, he started wondering how we could be that close to Las Vegas. He had me google it and it said Las Vegas was 11 hours away. Apparently, there's a Las Vegas, New Mexico. I did get a great Mother's Day surprise when I came back to the car after a pit stop to find a Mexican Coke waiting for me! The terrain got very flat, very fast the further away from Colorado we got. Our first night in Texas was spent in Lubbock. We had a great time catching up with The Austells (a YL staff family that we were on assignment with at Frontier...the year of the swine flu). They treated us to some great mexican food and some frozen custard...yum!

Monday, we enjoyed our continental breakfast at the hotel where they had waffles in the shape of Texas...yep! We headed to Austin. This was definitely the roughest day of travel. I think it's because we were expecting it to be such a quick, easy trip. I didn't take dramamine, and after turning around to do stuff for the kids 100 times, I definitely needed it. Also, there is ABSOLUTELY nothing between Lubbock and Austin (except for the largest windmill farm in the world). We had to use the GPS to try to find some lunch spots. We finally found a Dairy Queen, but on the way, we met a huge blockade where they were transporting some ginormous piping. So, we had to find a new lunch spot. It was a good thing, because Joel found us the cutest little spot in Ballinger, TX at the Main Street Soda Fountain. It was so nice to have a Waldorf Chicken Salad on a croissant...instead of McDonald's. Driving into Austin was really cool. We passed a lot of huge ranches along the way. I was very thankful for google along the way...every time we had a question about something we saw, we could google it. It was also fun seeing the huge houses (well, really just their rooftops) as we drove into the city. We finally arrived at The Creels. Adele is one of Joel's good friends from UGA. We got to stay with her and her husband, Jay, when we visited New York in Nov. 2006. Then, there were no children. Now, we have 3 between us. They have the cutest little boy, James (1 1/2). He was very sweet to let Ford and Mary Kate play with all of his toys. We had a great dinner with them at the Shady Grove and got to catch up a little after the kids went to bed.