We slept in a bit this morning. It was great. A holiday with the Canadian staff covering – how relaxing! I’ve been doing some catching up on sleep this weekend, that is for sure.
Francesca went out somewhere and picked up breakfast tacos (this is Texas after all) and donuts (which are way more popular in Texas than any other place that I have ever seen) for breakfast for everyone. We ate and watched the Disney channel for much of the day.
Beth came over with her daughter and hung out for several hours. Dominica and I had been planning on hitting the road by around noon but noon came and went without any signs of us getting up off of the couches – we are really loving having a place to sit for a change! Oreo is having a great time alternating between just hanging out in the big, open, fenced-in back yard and snuggling with me on the sofa. He has missed having furniture like this too. Back home in New York he would spend most evenings snuggling with someone while we watch television.
It ended up being around four in the evening before we finally got moving enough to get on to the road. We were hungry by that point so we ended up stopping at Waffle House right around the corner from Francesca’s house to get a late lunch before really getting on to the road and facing rush hour traffic.
After lunch/dinner we drove down to Bayou Vista, a good twenty minutes or more in the wrong direction, to go to Joe and Britt’s house to pick up all of the stuff that we had to store there after Christmas that would not fit into the X3 on the drive up to Irving. We were able to fit the rest of everything this time so Liesl will have all of her toys (that are in Texas) now and we have our camera back and a few other items including quite a bit of our laundry that we had to leave behind.
So it was around five thirty when we finally got on to the road from Bayou Vista to drive up to Irving which Google estimates as a four hours and forty five minutes – a good haul. We hit traffic on the south side of Houston that slowed us down quite a bit, but we were doing pretty well once we were passed downtime.
Liesl ended up not sleeping so well on this trip and was awake and unhappy for two or maybe even three hours! Ugh. That made for a very long trip. We did not have good food supplies for her with us and we ended up being trapped in the vast wilderness between Dallas and Houston without a bottle for her or anything that she could easily eat in the car. Not a mistake that we are likely to make again anytime soon.
We tried stopping at Buc-ee’s, which is apparently a Texan tradition, it is a massive gas station / mini mart / country store (imagine a Sheetz, WaWa, South of the Border and Cracker Barrel all rolled up together) to see if we could find something for Liesl to eat. Dominica ended up getting powdered creamer for coffee because the ingredients are roughly the same as Liesl’s formula! It worked, to some degree. Liesl drank some of it but wasn’t so thrilled with it overall. She only drank about half of the bottle but it was better than nothing.
We got to the apartment in Las Colinas around ten thirty. We got the car unloaded and called it a night. Liesl was awake for at least an hour after we got back if not longer. Dominica tried reading “Inkheart” to her but Liesl keeps grabbing the book and tearing it away from Dominica so that did not work.
Back to normal work life tomorrow. The weather is supposed to be really amazing – as high as the mid-seventies!