Wednesday, September 9, 2009

June Travel: Part 2

The weekend of Father's day, found us in hill country of Texas and in the Austin area. Kevin had the honor of being a groomsman in the wedding of John and Elise Mason. We decided to go down on Thursday evening so we could spend Friday doing something fun. We ended up going to the Longhorn Cavern State Park outside of Burnett. It was a really neat cave. The boys seemed to enjoy it.
Waiting for the cave tour to start.

The cave's watch dog. Several Geologists have examined this rock formation and have determined that no tools were used to make this rock formation, thus meaning the rock was formed this way strictly by the river water that formed the cave.


They told us we would see a bear in the cave! If you look closely, you can see that this rock looks like a bear. People are allowed to rub his nose for good luck.

Seth had so much fun in the cave, he passed out!

Friday night and Saturday were spent with wedding festivities. The rehearsal dinner was held in a small community named, Oatmeal! I may never been to New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Miami, but I would imagine not many people can say that they have been to Oatmeal, Texas!

The oatmeal can welcoming you to Oatmeal, TX!

Since I was pretty much a single parent of three kids at the wedding, with Kevin being preoccupied with wedding stuff, I did not get to take any pictures of the beautiful wedding or the lovely bride and groom. :(

Saturday night after the wedding, we drove to Austin to spend the night. We got there in time to check out the bats at the Central Ave. bridge. An estimated one and a half million mexican free-tail bats make their home under the Congress Ave. bridge. Every night between mid-March through early November the bats emerge from under the bridge and literally blanket the sky. I really thought there would be only a handful of people on the bridge to watch the bats come out for the night. But I was wrong. As you see from the pictures, it is a quite popular attraction in Austin.
People bat watching from the ground.
The line of people on the bridge to our left.
To our right facing downtown Austin.This is the best still photo we got of the bats.

Just to give you an idea of just of how many bats there were, here is a video of some of the bats flying out from under the bridge.


On Father's day we went to McKinney Falls State Park, which is actually inside Austin city limits. You would never know you were only a few miles from downtown Austin. Kevin and the older boys played in the creek while Seth and I relaxed in the shade. Before we left for the day, the boys gave Kevin his father's day present that they picked out. What does a 6 year old and 3 year old want to give their father for Father's day you ask?

GI Joe action figures of course!!! Every dad needs GI Joe toys to play with at work don't they?

It was really fun weekend. The boys still talk about the bats and the cave.

June Travels: Part 1

June was a whirlwind of a month for us so I thought I would divided it up into small portions. Instead of one huge post. (Thanks Ashley for the idea!!!)

It started out with VBS June 7-10. Our theme this year was Studio Go Game Show. It was a fun week for the kids and the volunteers. I was co-director of VBS this year. I believe that there were two or three children who accepted Christ as their Savior during VBS! That made all the running around, hounding, I mean, calling people worth it!

Bible School was Sunday through Wednesday. That Friday after VBS was over, we went to Ashley and Chuck's for the weekend. It was the weekend of the Texas Blueberry Festival in Nacogdoches, where they live. We woke up early Saturday morning, to stand in line for 45 minutes in the Texas heat, to eat some yummy blueberry pancakes for breakfast. They give you three pancakes on a Styrofoam plate and the pancakes are as big as the plate itself! We bought four plates. The lady thought we were crazy but out of all four plates that we bought, there was only a few bites left over. We have some pancake eating fools at our house! We also got to enjoy some refreshing and yummy blueberry lemonade inside one the banks downtown. And we took in the Cowboy Max show at another bank downtown. We tried to find all the indoor stuff we could because it was super hot that day. Eli got to be Cowboy Max's deputy during the show! If you want to see pictures from the weekend, check out my sister, Ashley's blog. She actually took pictures and I didn't! I am not even sure if I took a camera at all!

We enjoyed our weekend at the Flurrys. This was our first time to spend the weekend with them. I am sure it want be the last. Eli will make sure we attend the Blueberry festival again since he is a HUGE fan of blueberries!