Yesterday morning, Gulley and I loaded up the kids and embarked on a road trip, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Ingalls family left the Big Woods of Wisconsin for the Kansas prairie.
Except we were only driving five hours to Dallas. In a car.
And I’m pretty sure Ma Ingalls didn’t have to travel with her body pillow. Of course she also made her own soap so what did she know about the struggles that come with being high maintenance?
My little apple with her travel pillow doesn’t fall far from the high maintenance tree.
This is where I have to sing the praises of the new toll road that takes you all the way around Austin. It may be the best thing I’ve discovered this summer, second only to LifeSaver Gummy Sours. I was a little confused about how I was supposed to pay the tolls because nothing seemed to be clearly marked. At one point we stopped at a booth to get some clarification on the toll-paying situation (Thanks anyway, Ray. It may help if you read over your list of frequently asked toll road questions in the back of your employee handbook.) and Will got a little freaked out because he thought we were at a car wash.
Nope, not a car wash. Just a destination for absolutely no helpful information.
But, still, toll road=GOLDEN.
Let’s just hope there’s not a $200 ticket waiting in Gulley’s mailbox when we get home.
As we made our way to Dallas, we made several stops to keep the trip interesting, including a quick bathroom stop at a very questionable Shell Station outside of Temple, Texas.
Fortunately, there were helpful instructions posted for those not familiar with indoor plumbing.
When we drove through Waco we decided to make a stop that really goes against everything we believe as good Aggies, but were desperate for something interesting to show the kids so we decided to stop and look at some Baptist bears.
Please note we’ve trained them well because they all flashed the Gig’em sign as we took the picture.
After we spent five fascinating minutes peering through a very small window to watch some bears sleep (it came as no surprise to me that they weren’t dancing), we got back on the road.
We continued on down I-35 until we saw what was the best thing I’d seen since the toll road.
Who knew that Willie Nelson had his own gas station/rest stop/bar? It’s true what they say, travel really does broaden your horizons.
And you can’t tell because I am such a poor photographer, but the kids are standing in front of a larger than life picture of Willie.
Then, because apparently I don’t get out enough, I had Gulley take one more picture of the kids and me outside of Willie’s Place.
Finally, in the immortal words of Willie we got on the road again until we reached our final destination of Dallas, specifically AJ’s house. Which, by the way, is the cutest little house I’ve ever seen and is decorated just darling in spite of the fact that AJ led us to believe she had no decorating skills and might possibly have a T.V. sitting on some cinder blocks. Gulley even told the kids that staying with AJ would be kind of like camping, so imagine their surprise when we pulled up to a fully-furnished house complete with floral arrangements.
Here’s Caroline with AJ at Wild About Harry’s where we made an essential stop for ice cream.
And here is the entire road trip crew at the end of the evening because nothing says road trip success like a picture with a giant hot dog.
We went back to AJ’s, put the kids to bed and watched “The Bachelorette” while discussing important matters about how you know a guy really likes you when he makes the effort to cook a stuffed pork chop for you. That probably makes no sense to you, but it made a lot of sense to us around 2:00 a.m.
I’ll be back tomorrow with more updates from the road.