Houston

Last weekend Kristen and I drove the 10.5 hours to Houston, Texas. A good friend of mine from class and Cupola (Josh Connell) was getting married to another good friend of mine from Cupola (Stephani Leach, also one of Kristen's sorority sisters). I took the day off on Friday, so we left Auburn at about 3pm on Thursday.


We drove into Lafayette, LA for the first night, listening to James Patterson's Cross on audiotape. While it was a thrilling book, we have a difficult time recommending it (the antagonist is an assassin and serial rapist - and the author spares no detail - the fast forward button was our friend in a few situations). We stayed at a Howard Johnson (HOJO!) that night. The hotel was pretty new and very inexpensive, but that was probably one of the worst nights of sleep either of us has had in a while. It didn't help too much that every 30 minutes the AC would turn on with a BOOM! We turned it off and then couldn't breathe, so we had to turn it back on and endure the fitful night of sleep.


The next morning we enjoyed the continental breakfast and got on our way to Houston. Our first destination was Hermann Park. There's no way we could have seen it all, but Hermann Park has a zoo, amphitheater, garden center, japanese garden, lake with paddle boats, a mini-train that encircles the park, and the museum of natural science. We spent a couple of hours just walking around the park before we got too hungry (we were pretty hungry to begin with).


We were looking for a Tex-Mex place that we'd heard about called Chuy's, so we plugged it into the GPS. We had a few issues with powering the GPS, but we thought we'd figured it out by taking the power input from the Sirius. We plugged the Sirius power thing in, and voila! It seemed to work. So we started heading off in the middle of downtown Houston, taking this turn and that, not really paying much attention to where we were going, when the GPS went black. Turns out our power solution wasn't much of a solution at all. Luckily, we had an atlas in the car that proved useful, except for the fact that the atlas couldn't tell us exactly where we were to begin with. We ended up spending about 45 minutes on Houston interstates getting back somewhere we knew.

We finally got our bearings straight and decided to grab something small at Subway for lunch (we were starving at this point). Then we found our hotel, worked out, and chilled out from our exhausting day for awhile. For dinner we found Chuy's after an intense, GPS-free search, and it was really good! Definitely can't argue that you're having authentic Tex-Mex when you're in Texas.


After dinner, we found the church that Josh and Stephani were getting married at, exploring more of Houston as we went. One of the interesting things that we'd heard about Houston is that there are multi-million dollar houses right next to some very low income government housing, and it was true! Little Mexico came right after 90210. Houston is a really neat city, and everybody who lives there really seems to love it. It's a definite possibility for us after next May, too!

Josh and Stephani's wedding was wonderful; Stephani looked beautiful and Josh told us beforehand that he was going to cry like a baby, which he did. The focus was completely on the significance of their marriage in relation to it's head and anchor, Christ. I got a chance to see several people that I hadn't seen since last year who have since moved down to Houston. The food at the reception was fantastic, too.

We left after having cake and made the long, 10.5-hour journey back home, listening to Clive Cussler's Skeleton Coast. We're still working on that one, and it is worth recommending. We arrived back safely at 2am on Sunday morning, got a few good hours of sleep before teaching Sunday school to the little dudes.

All in all, we're both really glad that we went, and we wish Josh and Stephani the best!