It's the Holiday Season!

It's that time of year again - the most wonderful time of year! The cold weather has arrived (and left and arrived again). This time of year it never stays too cold for too long. A week or so ago, Paul had a piano recital, so he had to dress in his Sunday best. Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity to do so, Becky got the other boys dressed up as well, and we got some photos for our Christmas card this year. Here are the boys, looking fine and dandy:

And even though we got a lot of great smiles, this last photo sums up how they felt about their photo shoot... yeah. Merry Christmas!

Cold Turkeys

The last couple of years we've headed up to Missouri for Thanksgiving, but this year we couldn't make it due to work scheduling issues. But we wanted to do something fun with the extra days off, so we decided to go camping for the holiday. We had our turkey on Wednesday and used Thursday to drive to Guadalupe River State Park to hang out and camp. I was surprised to find out that camping on Thanksgiving is apparently a popular thing. I'd originally tried to get a campsite at a couple of other parks, but everything was booked up. Either way, Guadalupe River turned out to be a pretty nice place to spend some time and camp out. We weren't as prepared as we should have been, specifically for the cold weather that hit us. On Friday morning, the temperature read 37 degrees, so it was fairly cold for those of us who have been living in steady 80 degree weather for quite some time. The park has a pretty nice area down by the river, which itself was extremely calm and crystal clear. The boys enjoyed throwing rocks, climbing in the trees, and even wading in the chilly water.

 

 

Remember the Rain!

If you're going to go to San Antonio, you're going to remember the Alamo. We'd been before, but since we were right there anyway, we thought we'd better check it out again - and it's FREE, so you can't beat it. We also wanted to check out the Tower of the Americas, the second tallest observation tower in the United States (next to the Stratosphere in Las Vegas). At 750 feet tall, it's up there. The boys enjoyed a couple of 4-D movies and the waterfalls all around the park, and of course we took the elevator to the top to see... well, not much. The rain wouldn't quit and the cloud coverage was pretty heavy up there. It still was a cool view, but it would have been better on a better day.

The view from the top! Amazing!! 

Somehow this giant grasshopper got all the way up here. Uh, if the grasshoppers are jumping this high in Texas, we may have a problem...

I paid a quarter and all I see are clouds!! This is going on Nolan's Yelp review...

Running in the rain! 

There's the Alamo! When I saw they had a special exhibit on Jim Bowie, I thought we were going to get to listen to some classic glam-rock, Ziggy Stardust, Changes, or at least Space Oddity. Turns out all they had were really big knives. Oh well, still a nice exhibit.