Where are those Scooby snacks?
Reluctant contestant wins hands down. 🙂
Tag: Family Trips (Page 5 of 6)
Princess J’s friends are giants.
Ready to ride?
Chowing down.
No better place to beat the heat.
So glad to see our friends.
Our Programmer is 18 years old. Loves God and works hard.
What more could you ask for?
On his birthday this year we drove to home to Texas to see friends and family.
The drive from our house to the border took 7 hours.
From the border to San Antonio took another 7 hours. We were happily surprised to discover
Mike’s favorite restaurant, The County Line, less than a block from our hotel.
Yes, our programmer ate the whole chicken fried steak.
Does Mike look happy?
We were all happy to have some good Texas food.
Six Flags was packed. We chose only one ride, Thunder River.
It was cooler out than it had been, but after an hour waiting in line I started suffering from heat stroke. I got dizzy, sick, saw bright white lights and all but passed out. Mike got me to sit down. I felt a little better. All I could think was “How am I going to get out of here?” The line moved up across a bridge and finally to a portion of the fence that I felt like I could climb over.
I missed the cool water of Thunder River but gulped down two water bottles in no time.
After dinner in the car we got to see Stellar Cart.
We had pretty good seats.
Barlow Girl was great. They have a heart for modesty, purity, and waiting for the one God has for them. No recreational dating. I think that’s wise. Less temptation and heart breaks.
Pillar was Mike’s favorite. He had fun playing with our new camera.
Wild hair.
I sat down for a minute so you could see Princess J.
Our camera has “Night Vision.”
Pillar’s new song, “For the Love of the Game,” plays before Nascar Races and the Football Games.
It’s about enjoying life to the fullest where God has you.
I am glad none of my kids have hair like this but wouldn’t mind if it was to help them to reach more for Christ.
The drummer. We were surprised at how well the pictures turned out for how far away we were and it getting dark and all.
We found a good deal at a really nice hotel in Atlanta.
The elevator is lined in this really pretty wood.. not quite this orange. The camera’s on the wrong setting.
Down to the lobby for bed time snacks.
I told Princess J that she had to be careful not to get too hyper after drinking her mocha latte
’cause we were going to bed right after watching “The Forbidden Kingdom” (a new Jackie Chan movie).
She said, “Mommy, I am always hyper.”
My mathematician is reading the LOTR series. He liked the first book best so far.
Please, make sure I don’t put my chin up and slouch during photo taking. This is my effort toward sitting closer to Mike.
We ate lunch at Sonny’s BBQ before making our way to Six Flags. It was pretty good.
We don’t have any good, inexpensive BBQ in Montgomery. 🙁
We’ve made quite a few trips to GA since moving here.
It’s nice to be able to explore and visit new places.
It’s just the four of us so we took Mike’s car. It’s really nice.
Isn’t she cute?
This is the hat I always wear out doors. I love it because it folds up and fit’s in my purse.
Mike got XM radio for his birthday. It’s nice not having to worry about loosing stations between towns. They play some really old Christian songs on The Message radio station mixed in with new ones. It’s funny hearing Phil Keaggy and others again.
This is pretty much what the view looks like all around AL and GA. It’s beautiful. Reminds me of the TX hill country.
I have a riddle for you.
Q: What’s the hardest thing about packing for a family reunion?
A: Knowing that you need to be photo ready every moment that you’re with your scrapbooking, blogging, camera loving family and that those extra pounds you put on will probably not be photoshopped out.
Mike had a class in Huntsville the last week of June. Our Pizza Maker stayed home alone to make pizzas and to register for college but the rest of us got to go with him for a week’s vacation. I have two friends from my Charlotte Mason group in FL that moved to AL before me. LeeAnn and her family who live right outside of Huntsville and Terri and her family who live in Birmingham.
Terri’s the one with the camera and LeeAnn is in green.
I emailed my friends a couple of weeks before our trip to see if I could see them there. They more than obliged. Terri’s sweet husband, Kent, worked it out so that he was able to work in Huntsville the same week that we were there and stayed at the same hotel as us. Then LeeAnn and her husband had us over for a cook out and swimming and told us all the best places to visit and went to some of them with us. We all had a blast.
LeeAnn has a beautiful home with extra rooms she hopes to fill with children from China.
Here are three of our boys.. the one on the left belongs to LeeAnn and Chuck, my Computer Programer, and Terri and Kent’s son, who is shooting up like a weed.
This is Terri’s little girl. She and our Programmer are great friends.
Can’t go to Huntsville and not visit the Space and Rocket Center.
We got an extra special treat and saw some Army guys sing and dance in the opening ceremonies of a covenate signing. I left my camera at LeeAnn’s and didn’t get a picture. 🙁 Chuck brought it up to me later that morning. 🙂
The Space and Rocket Center was OK. We went on a good day. It wasn’t too crowed.
The kids zoomed by most of the displays and went straight for the rides and rock climbing wall.
Needless to say, I don’t think we have any future Astronauts in the bunch.
It was Terri’s little girl’s first try at rock climbing.
She was very persistent and conquered the wall after several very good tries.
I think the highlight of the Space and Rocket Center was the hats we found in the gift shop.
So many hats and so little time.
Are our hats making you hungry as an alligator? We were.
We had to get one classic picture in before lunch.
And one of the mommies.
That night after the husbands got off work we all went to our favorite restaurant, Red Robin.They have the best burgers and shakes ever. We had the greatest time talking about things
we could do and see together in the future; rent a house boat, go camping…
It was located in one of the coolest shopping centers I’ve ever been to.
It’s like Down Town Disney. They even had a Apple Store.
The next morning we had some Mommie time and coffee at a huge sale at B&N.
Then took the kids up to a living history museum on top of a mountain called Burritt on the Mount.
We met some really cool docents. One thing that we learned was that the girls bedroom was always up stairs in the loft. You had to walk through the parents bed room to get to loft. Nifty. Right?
If you’ve noticed that these aren’t my pictures, it’s because I dropped and broke my camera the night before. 🙁 I am still recovering from the devastation. I did learn a secret way to get it to turn on. More details later. From what I learned on line it will cost almost as much to repair it as it will to buy a new one. 🙁I am leaving out so many details from our trip.. the first good Mexican food we’ve had since moving to AL at Rosie’s Mexican Cantina, hanging out at the pool, shopping for shoes, the Harrison Brothers’ Hardware store, accidentally finding the corn fields (streets should have only one name) then having my Mathematician pipe up from the back “Our hotel is just a little ways down that away.”, free breakfast and snack time at the hotel… it was a great adventure and we had a great time.
Love you all,
Jenny
The Hendleys met us at our favorite hotel in Atlanta Friday night.
We were all thrilled to see each other.
Princess P is starting high school next year.
Little P is eating like there is no tomorrow and growing like a weed.
J is officially a teenager now and sounds like one, too.
First order of business at Six Flags was to ride Goliath.
We got there early while the lines were still short.
I discovered that first thing in the morning it’s
more thrilling that I’d remembered.
On to Gotham and the Bat mobile.
P got to visit his super hero friends.
My sweetie.
J giving J a stern warning before the ride.
Surprise! I have a flash!
Mike and I, the old fogies, sat out a bunch of rides. I am glad we are growing old together and that I have someone to sit with me while the kiddies ride.
Wooden rides, bumpy or jerky rides, and rides that make you dizzy
are all on our list to avoid.
I think we like more rides in SA than in GA.
It may be that we’re 5 years older now and like fewer than we remember.
After that last photo, we ate lunch and it warmed up quite a bit.
We didn’t last much longer. Tammy got over heated and there
weren’t enough air conditioned shows or shops there to keep us cool,
so we headed for the mall to find dinner.
We had a nice time talking and eating at the food court.
We sure miss our old buddies.
They left from there to East GA where Darrel’s brother lives and
where they recently bought some property and an 100 year old house
that they are completely redoing. They are spending this week
getting started on their big family project.
We can’t wait till their done and get ready to move several hours closer.
We’ll have to find more things to do together in Alanta.
Mike’s parents flew over to visit us for Memorial Day Weekend. We had a nice visit. We are always happy to see familiar faces.
Most of our visits with Nancy and Mitch we spend playing Hand and Foot (a card game similar to Canasta) and Trains with dominos. We tried a bunch of different combinations of teams. Princess J and my Mathematician were unbeatable at Hand and Foot together. They “poned” (a computer game term the kids use that means “put to shame”) the adults. We split them up after that and the game was much more even for some of us.
We discovered that Memorial Day Weekend is Montgomery’s biggest holiday weekend. I think the schools are always out for the summer by that weekend and they have this big Jubilee City Fest. People come from all over for the weekend. They have country western stars and rock stars, a craft fair and stuff for the kids. We went to the free Symphony Concert on the Capital lawn. Everyone brings a picnic. The weather was perfect and we had a nice time.
Mayor Bobby Bright opening Memorial Day Ceremonies. A really good guy we first heard speak at The Call.
Singing the Star Spangled Banner. The front of the capital is lined with the flags from the 50 states. I am sorry to admit that the only one I recognized was the Texas flag.. we do have the best, most recognizable flag. I now know that the AL flag is the white flag with a red X in the middle. The red X is St. Andrews cross and is modeled after the Confederate Flag. We visited the AL Department of Archives and History Wednesday and learned a lot. More on that later.
Symphony at sunset.
The theme for the Symphony this year was Movies Under the Stars. They played music from Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Rocky, The Wizard of OZ and many others. It was fun.
On Saturday evening just the adults went to dinner at Mike’s new favorite BBQ place, Jim and Nicks, and later to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival to see The Count of Monte Cristo. We had a very nice time. The Shakespeare Theater is located in Blount Cultural Park where they also have an art museum that we visited when my parents were here. The Shakespeare Festival one of the biggest tourist attractions here. It’s the seventh largest Shakespeare Festival in the world.
We were sad to see Nanna and Mitch leave, but are looking forward to the activities we have planned for the next few months.
Love,
J
