Friday, May 25th - Monday, May 28th

Since we aim to please our loyal blog readers, we are trying to catch up on the missed blog entries. Before you respond by saying "hey, they're getting off easy by grouping days together," I'll mention that the next phase of our trip was in multi-day increments, so we'll make the write ups mirror the number of days we were in the particular spot. Let us know what you think of this new format...

We arriving in Houston on Friday afternoon. No shorter had we hit the road did we encounter torrential downpours. Ben and I both commented that the rain we saw in this portion of the drive was more rain that we had seen combined in the two years we lived in California. Ahh, gotta love the south in the summer and the wonderful rain storms and humidity that come with them.

Anyway, we stayed with Ben's parents in Houston and his sister Michelle and her boyfriend Justin came down for the weekend to hang out. We had a lot of fun. The boys did some boy things like playing golf and putting together furniture (well, Justin put the furniture together while Ben watched and Lu took a nap, but the Dorfman men were there in spirit). The girls did some girl things like getting our nails done and shopping. Both genders seemed to enjoy their respective gender-specific activities :)

While in Houston, we spent a few hours looking through old photo albums from Ben's childhood. He sure was a cute kid! Once we're near a scanner, I'll have to scan in a photo of him that we found and add it to the blog. He looked straight out of Love Boat - it was quite cute! Some of Robin's friends also threw us a wedding shower, which was a lot of fun. They brought some really great recipes and we had a fun afternoon enjoying each others' company and enjoying some freshly made guacamole - yum!

On Monday morning, we woke up early (well, a little later than we had anticipated but still pretty early) and drove to Mississippi for Camp Dream Street. More to come about that later...

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Wow. We are slackers. Amanda blames it on me, since I'm "the blogger" in the relationship, which I guess is true. I know that a blog that has been active for 17 days and abandoned after day 3 is pretty pathetic, so we'll try to get a few posts up here for y'all. This was from two Thursdays ago.

We started the day in Santa Fe over breakfast with Shosh and her brother Steven. We ate at a place called Tecolate (their menu proudly states "good food - no bread") and I had the "Sheepherder's Breakfast" which came with 2 different types of chili and was so spicy the waitress brought me a pitcher of water with a straw. Which I used.

We then walked around the historic (read: touristy) part of town for a few hours and really enjoyed ourselves. The shops and art galleries were all very charming and it would have been great if we could have spent at least another day there. I saw a great little guitar shop that I went into with the idea of playing around with one or two of them before I realized I don't really play well enough to walk into a guitar shop and play around with really expensive guitars. It was cool, though.

We left Santa Fe and hit the Texas state line around 5:00, at which point we got out and took the picture posted below. We then stopped in Amarillo to check out the Cadillac Ranch. For those of you who don't know, the Cadillac Ranch is a weird piece of art in a cow pasture. There are about 8 or so Cadillacs that are upended into the ground, sticking straight up in the air. I don't know the history, but some guy just decided to plant a bunch of Caddys in a field face first a number of years ago. They used to be painted blue (according to the road trip book we'd been consulting, which may have explained the history, but we've already given it back to our friend Tracy who lent it to us), but evidently some punk kids have been spraypainting them for God knows how long, because now they look like a New York City subway car circa 1982. Not that I ever saw a New York City subway car in 1982, but you get my drift. Actually, there was some teenage girl out there spraypainting while we were there, and she gave us a pretty good dinner recommendation. Next time you're in Amarillo, stop at Blue Sky for a damn good burger.

After dinner it was just a dark drive through farm country on our way to Wichita Falls, where we found a room at the coolest Howard Johnson hotel I've ever seen. They had a pool, gym, shuffleboard court, and an arcade, all in the lobby. The whole place smelled like chlorine. It was great, but I enjoy the smell of chlorine. If you don't, you might not have liked the hotel.

Friday entailed a really REALLY boring drive to Houston, mostly through rain. We'll post more about the weekend in Houston, as well as our week at Camp Dream Street, in a little while. This should get you through until then. And again, sorry for the delay.