The initial reason for us to go to Houston was a Citrix conference that Kenny needed to attend for work. His conference was from Tuesday to Thursday, but we decided to stretch out the week and stay from Saturday to Saturday.
The first stop we had to make once we got there was, of course, going to PaPa's Barbeque to pick up some lunch and then go to Bertie's (Kenny's former neighbor) for a visit. I had not met Bertie before, but we hit it off quite well. She is 90 years old and is determined to live for at least another 20 years. She walks around her neighborhood twice a day and has hundreds of different types of plants growing beautifully in her back yard. Later that evening we took Bertie out to Sudie's for dinner, the best fried catfish and shrimp in town.
We spent Saturday and Sunday night with friends, James and Holly, who graciously let us stay at their place. We had a lot of fun staying up late talking and playing with their two boys, Ben and Will. I met a lot of Kenny's old friends at Church the next morning. That evening they had a get together at Scott and Shelly's so that we could have dinner and catch up with everyone. James made a special Beans & Rice dish from a favorite restaurant Treebeards. It was sooo good!!!
On Sunday afternoon we drove up to Cady, TX to visit with Kenny's cousin Jennifer and her 11 month old daughter Abriella. We had lunch and got to know Abriella, who is very sweet and full of energy.
Kenny and I took off on Monday to go down to Galveston. I didn't know a lot about Galveston before going, but it is very historic. It was a thriving city prior to 1900, a port town, many immigrants came through this little island. There were many beautiful homes built here, we took a tour of Bishop's Palace, one of the many mansions that survived the great Hurricane in 1900 which almost destroyed the entire city.After doing some sight seeing and looking through some local shops, we went for a swim at the beach. The beach here is much different from the ones out here in California. While we may have clearer water, it is cold on the west coast, in Galveston the beach water was nice and warm!
Tuesday evening we had a fun dinner at our friend's Doug & Erin's beautiful home. Their daughter Alivia is 13 months now and is lots of fun! She's grown up so much since we last saw the Helm's in San Francisco last August. Doug is a former work colleague of Kenny's when he lived in Houston and worked at Pennzoil. Doug grilled some delicious burgers and we had hours of fun conversation.
On Wednesday I drove west to Austin to visit my good friend Lauren. I finally got to meet her husband, David, and see where she lives. We went out for dinner at Papasitos, a very good TexMex restaurant and then got some ice cream at a neat place near the University of Texas.
The next day I drove back to Houston to meet up with my friend and former college roommate, Cortney, who just had a baby boy named Braden. Our friends Sarah, David, and Tiffany also flew in to visit for the weekend and we all had lunch together on Friday.
Friday evening we had dinner with our friends Bart, Deann, David, and Amy. We ate pizza and jammed to their new Rockband game. It's a lot of fun, we all have an instrument and the game keeps points of how many notes you hit as you play along with popular rock songs. Their kids River, Racer, and Rain like to be the lead singers. We stayed the night with Bart & Deann and the next morning we had a photo shoot in Bart's studio and went out for barbeque before catching our plane home.
One more picture, we thought this was a great picture from the plane. As we were flying over the mountains you could just see the snow covered peaks above the clouds.Our trip was very blessed and we had a great time! Thank you to all of you who opened your homes to us and took some time to visit!
1 comment:
Wow! You did have a whirlwind tour! We were so glad to get to spend some time with you guys.
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