Houston, TX

We made the 4 hour trek to the Houston - Bay area over Labor Day weekend. The main purpose behind this was so we could get a weekend with Derek. It was a long drive for him (10ish hours) but saved him 4 hours by us meeting him there. It was also great timing because we were able to celebrate Blake & I's birthdays. We've been wanting to explore Houston and this was the perfect opportunity to do so.

The drive there wasn't much fun. I was tired and it rained.....hard.......for about half of the drive, plus we got stuck in crazy Texas traffic.. We timed it all pretty perfectly though with us getting to the hotel just 20 minutes or so before Derek got there.

We didn't really care what we did for the weekend we just wanted to celebrate birthdays and spend some fun, quality time with the family......and be as cheap as possible. ;) Being cheap made it easy to decide what we would do. 1) the Houston Zoo because military gets in free, 2) the Children's Museum because we get in free with our Witte Museum pass here in SA. Since we don't like crowds we figured the Museum would be less crowded on Sunday and since it's smaller that would probably be the best option for that day.

Of course things didn't work out as we had planned. The day we went to the zoo it started raining on us. Luckily we had been there for about 2 hours and were fine with calling it a day. And then the day we went to the museum ended up being free for EVERYONE. It was a Target sponsored event and so the place was packed and wasn't very enjoyable. It did seem like it was a nice museum though and we'd love to go back. It is ranked the #1 Children's Museum in the country by Parent Magazine. I have to say the zoo was really nice too, one of the cleanest we've been to.

The day we went to the museum we got delayed a bit. When we went to get in our car it had been invaded by ants!!!! I had just cleaned the car out so there wasn't any food or anything in it either. There were literally thousands of these buggers.........everywhere. We went and got ant traps but that wasn't working fast enough so we got some spray and sprayed the car like crazy before we went into the museum. It did kill a lot of them but definitely not all of them. The drive back home was miserable because I was paranoid of them crawling on me the entire time. No exaggerating, I killed about 50 of them on the drive home. Since we've been home I've only found 3 that have been moving and they are crawling around really slow. I did some research on these ants and they are called crazy ants and travel in large groups. They were probably seeking shelter due to the rain we had gotten the day before........and they had just been discovered in the Houston/Katy, TX area in July!

Despite all of our troubles we still had a good time and we're going back in October -- this time we're planning on spending most of our time down by the coast in Galveston though. Can't wait!

HOUSTON ZOO

our very own little monkeys

this little guy was not happy for the first half hour or so. we couldn't figure out why. Turns out he didn't like his shoes! It was the first time we had really put any on him.

CHILDREN'S MUSEUM

they built their own rockets and then got to launch them

OTHER RANDOM PICTURES

this kid LOVES tomatoes!!