9th Anniversary

We celebrated 9 years of marriage this month. This year I told Aaron that we should celebrate our anniversary on the actual day and just deal with whatever circumstances are happening on that day and make time to celebrate however we can. So we celebrated on a Wednesday, the day before we left for a 16 hour car trip. It was great! Aaron was in charge of the food, and I was supposedly in charge of the activity. Only I didn't know that. So we had some really great food, and it was fine. #eatingisanactivity

It was more than fine, it was amazing! We went to this place called Snow Monster which has Asian style shaved ice. Aaron remembers this from his mission in Taiwan. They shave the ice really thin so it isn't crunchy like a snow cone. And then they put fruit and sweetened condensed milk on top. And sometimes, I think, they have frozen sweetened condensed milk which they shave and you eat. Yum...

The pictures say it all.

 That little creation in the back was the frozen sweetened condensed milk. Very delicious.

We did dessert first--we're getting old, we've got to live it up. While we waited for our stomachs to be ready for our next eating activity, we found the Bat Bridge. We parked next to this really cool park with an awesome view:

Dedicated fitness enthusiasts were exercising here in the 100 degree weather. There was even a girl taking quinceanera pictures in the froofriest of froofy dresses. You can't let the heat stop you from living life. We were way too early for the bats, but we did locate the bat bridge, and the drive there took us through a cool part of downtown Austin. We were kidfree/carefree. 

Next, we went towards Texas Hill Country. It's a beautiful area with lakes and, you guessed it, hills and lots of trees. It is also very fancy. There aren't any mundane, plebian disturbances in the landscape like gas stations. We needed a gas station, and there was literally only one. We got gas and drove down a rural-looking road where there was a sign for Hippy Hollow. Truly. It made my day. What made my day even more was that we followed the sign for Hippy Hollow. We did not go to Hippy Hollow. But we did go to a restaurant from which you can see the sun set. Aaron wisely advised that we just enjoy it and not worry about taking pictures. 

The menu had items that were marked as spicy. We avoided those. But my hamburger had some really, really hot chipotle mayo. Aaron was enjoying his brisket sandwich when it suddenly got super spicy. He opened it up to find a cluster of jalapeno peppers with the seeds. So now we know that the Texas spicy scale is a little bit different than ours. This was not our first lesson on this topic. We tried to take this selfie outside the restaurant. This was the best of a lot of bad attempts.

 And here was a fun picture we found.

   

Happy Anniversary to us! Here's to our last year in the single digits. 

Touring Round Rock

So, a long time ago, we had a family adventure in our own town of Round Rock. Cows were very important to the founding of the city. From Wikipedia I quote: "After the Civil War, Jesse Chisholm began moving cattle from South Texas through Round Rock on the way to Abilene, Kansas. The route he established, which crossed Brushy Creek at the round rock, became known as the Chisholm Trail."

We went to the Chisholm Trail park and saw the famous round rock. As you might expect, there were some cow statues. The round rock was useful to the cattle/wagon/pioneer people because it let them know how high the water was. It was cool to be able to see wagon wheel ruts in the rock there behind my head.

 These cow statues were flaming hot in the sun when this all happened way back in July. We would like to report that the Texas weather was lovely this year for February, March, April, May, and even most of June. We're told that it can get really hot in May, but we can't complain about this year. July and August have been really hot, but they were really hot in Utah, too. Anyway...

After eating lunch and looking at the statues (which also included an 8 foot tall pioneer woman) we let the kids play in the creek. Aaron seems to have really been enjoying it.

We really did all enjoy it. A grand family adventure.