Category: Uncategorized Page 4 of 24

Hot Springs National Park. 31st National Park

If you think this is the place to go enjoy many hot springs, you will be sadly mistaken as we were. It’s a historic bathhouse area. Bathhouse Row is now a national landmark. There are only 2 working bathhouses but it meant to be an “experience” of how they were back in the day. It is not much of park now, the national park is a city, it protects the healing waters, and there are many trails.

After the morning it was a long drive down to New Orleans where I had spent my day enjoying walking around with a day to myself.

I was useful and scoped out an RV park close to town where we could walk around. I knew the girls would like the pool. It was secure. And convenient.

I had made reservations to The Preservation Hall. If you ever go to New Orleans it is a must. A real 8 piece jazz band. A very up close and personal experience with real deal musicians. One of the things I like is that at least 1 or 2 of the band members is always over 75 and they just kill it. We had some time so we walked for a minute around Bourbon Street before the girls declared “I don’t like this place”

Wow that was thoroughly enjoyable.

We took the girls down to Cafe du Monde.

So much powder sugar it’s hard not to do something with it.

I even humored then s as of let them paint me.

The RV park was 1/2 mile from bourbon street and has razor wire all around it. We felt ok leaving the girls secured and I took Edwin our to Bourbon sStreet (Frenchman street was too far) and Edwin had never been to New Orleans before. It was entertaining to say the least.

After going to mass this morning on what coincidentally was the 6mo anniversary of dédi passing. Love you and miss you. 🌈 😘

I got on a plane to fly to New Orleans. After seeing my sister and nieces 🙂

Edwin and the girls are in Chickasaw National Recreation Area in Oklahoma.

Texarkana. Where Smokey and the Bandit was filmed.

They went to the visitor center, became junior rangers and next stop was Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas.

Arkansas. 21st state.

They were supposed to make it to the national park today but after a mishap with Daisy in the morning they stayed in Hot Springs for the night.

Whole they were hunkered down in Arkansas…I trolled the Pelicans and Lakers fans.

No comments all fake nothing. But when I walked around downtown there were a few lakers fans that said “I didn’t know they have warriors fans out here” and I homered back “we are still alive”. They chuckled it was entertaining and that was that.

We drove up from Austin last night so I could get dropped off at the airport to head home for Zsolt’s birthday party.

Edwin and the girls are on their own for the next 2 days and after they stop by Dealey plaza they were heading to Oklahoma.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, JFK, was our 35th President if the United States from January 1961 until his death in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

After the museum, this was the lunch place.

But not before passing a “furry convention” Yes, everything exists.

After Dealey Plaza, Edwin and the girls headed up to Oklahoma.

Oklahoma. 20th State.

Chickasaw National Recreation Area.

I was in Athens Bay Area celebrating by brothers 50th birthday. Happy Birthday Z

We stayed at McKinney a State Park and walked their upper and lower falls trail.

We were only 5 miles from downtown. A few different things around the city made it feel like home. Except the humor… This is the first time in awhile that parking was difficult and we were wondering the whole day if our RV would be in one piece when we came back.

…

First stop Voodoo Donuts. So many choices. All so fancy.

Isabella has been asking in every city to rent one if the scooters, figured this would be a good place. Of course, they don’t make it easy after you download the app, get an account and we rented 2 to realize every individual needs their own account in their own app. Irritating, so we each took em for a minutes spin and left then in the side.

Do we have to say who won 😉

We stopped by a Hungarian designer that we came across. And went to an amazing Italian restaurant Red Ash. Everything was so tasty but the wood fired roasted tomato burrata salad was intensely good.

We had such a fun day today. We were close to the space center and it didn’t open till 10am so we enjoyed a lazy morning in pjs with the shades drawn and watched The Right Stuff…. in Sam’s Boat restaurant parking lot. After watching Hidden Figures last night it was fun seeing another movie this morning we were jazzed for the day. It also helped in understanding our day better too.

The girls immediately went to this mind over matter game to try and calm their minds to make the ball move up the tube. We knew it was possible because someone got it to move before us. No such luck. But no worries the girls…and I visited this multiple times throughout the day.

We went on the tour first. First stop was mission control. They are currently monitoring the astronauts in the ISS International Space Station. They have 2 identical mission control offices so if one malfunctions in any way they can move next door. Of course we were at the second mission control center but it was still pretty neat. They also had a large TV showing all the cameras from the current ISS.

2nd stop was the training research center. It was very cool. It’s where the astronauts and engineers practice and build things.

That’s the Orion. The Orion is part of the Artemis mission which will return to the moon. There is a mission planned in 2024 to land on the moon in the first time for 50 years. It will also be the first time a woman will walk on the Moon.

It was pretty cool because it was obvious something was going on down there. It looked as though they were taking some PR pictures and it was also being filmed. NASA is working with a Boeing and it is the first time NASA is using a private company for space travel. Boeing created the Boeing Starliner. A transport spacecraft to bring astronauts to the ISS. Currently, to get U.S. astronauts out to the ISS we go on a Russian space shuttle the Soyuz. The U.S. pays Russia $93,000,000 per flight. So NASA coupled with Boeing to build their own spacecraft to get our astronauts out to the space station. It’s set to be operational this year. According to Wikipedia “Space Adventures announced that it has acquired rights to sell tickets to the ISS on board the Boeing Starliner once operational flights begin”.

Glad we watched the Right Stuff this morning 🙂 it helped put into perspective what we were seeing. The 3rd stop was the Saturn V rocket. The Saturn V put all the Apollo missions into space. The one on display was an unused model. It also housed outside the Mercury-Redstone. The first American man in space, Alan Shepard on May 5th 1961, went up into sub orbital space in the Mercury-Redstone. Gus Grissom was the 2nd man on July 21, 1961. Gus later died in a pre-launch test for the Apollo 1 mission. The 1st man in space was a Russian, Yurin Gagarin, on April 12, 1961.

More mind games. Edwin was brilliant at it and got it on his first try and every time after. Isabella was not far behind and then Vera. I tried so many times before I finally got it. But even then I could only do it twice.

Touring inside the independence was another favorite part of the day. We remembered a few years ago when they retired the Endeavor and it flew overhead in the Bay Area for its last flight. It was neat to go inside of it.

The ISS is now a sub gravity science lab.

The girls ended up getting to do a virtual reality ride and they had a ton of fun

During the “current space exploration” talk vera of course volunteered and got picked to try on astronaut gloves to tie shoelaces and button snaps.

We went up to Padre Island last night. The girls wanted to do the junior ranger badges up there since we were close, they now feel ownership here, and it was mainly about sea turtles.

Padre Island National Seashore is the largest undeveloped barrier island in the world. It has over 70 miles of seashore on the Gulf of Mexico.

There are 5 species of sea turtles that inhabit the island. They are all threatened or endangered.

The Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle is a species they are doing a lot to preserve. To the point that when turtles come on shore to nest, scientists dig up the eggs (to prevent poachers or animals from digging up and eating the eggs) They keep them in a box with sand, incubate them, and the day they hatch they bring all the baby turtles onto the beach for release into the ocean. Once they’re in the ocean they again collect the baby turtles and keep them for a year until they are older and re release them into the ocean. It’s a lot of

Unfortunately human causes, mainly pollution is the biggest detriment to turtles. They get caught up in old fishing lines and ingest more plastic then you’d like to know. Look at the similarity of a jellyfish to that of a drink top. It’s a problem.

Padre Island National Seashore is also a big stop for bird watchers. Half the bird species in North America use Padre Island via the Central Flyway. (remember the eagle sanctuary along the Mississippi River)

We learned that because of the way the wind and water currents are a lot of garbage gets washed up on shore. We went out to collect trash. We were surprised to not find as much trash as we were first expecting, especially after the amount was on South Padre Island, but it was so incredibly windy were convinced it all blew back into the ocean. Seriously it was so windy you could barely look up wind walked by back up the beach.

We drove to Houston. We plan to visit Nasa tomorrow. The girls and I watched Hidden Figures in preparation for tomorrow. We hadn’t seen it yet. I highly recommend it. We all loved it. Edwin found a place near Nasa to have some gulf food…crawdad boil. We ended up camping in the parking lot overnight.

No one enjoyed dinner…except Edwin…who loved it. The crawdads did serve well for entertainment and pranks. And we were in Rockets 🚀 Town do we were happy to be at a sports bar to watch the Houston Rockets do their thing.

We had a fun day driving on the beach, attempting to locate Edwin’s family property, playing catch, and going SWIMMING.

Once we got passed the traffic on the beach, we let Daisy out and exercised her for a bit 🙂

We got to what we think Edwin and his family’s property was. Without a super detailed map or internet to help verify location…this was our best guess.

We found this survey marker post but it was just laying on top of the sand so who knows where it came from.

A little bit more beach driving till the end of Island.

There was so much garbage along the beach. There’s no to tell if it’s from beach goers or if it washed up on the beach. We picked up a tiny amount compared to what we saw .

We’re driving back up north and just went through another border patrol stop, This time they opened the RV door and looked around with a flashlight (without coming in)

We weren’t sure if we’d head to Corpus Christi or Austin. Yes it should’ve been an easy choice…but do you know the number of times I’ve gone on or googled Corpus Christi School and ended up with something from Corpus Christi. Texas??? So a drive through at least seemed necessary. Plus we had been also wanting to check out Padre Island. We have been paying taxes on land Edwin inherited with his siblings from his dad. The land is on South Padre Island and although taxes have been very little we have been curious to go check out what this property is all about. Anyway, Corpus Christi was basically on the way so….we had fun with our personal double entendres

We have a leak in the shower somewhere that we found out when we’re all taking showers after leaving Big Bend, so Edwin dropped off me and girls to walk to the aquarium. We had fun going inside the few beach stores open this time of year. It was so hot and muggy, and everyone was telling me this was cold…for here. If did feel nice to wear shorts for a change but it’s always surreal to have it this warm being as overcast as it was.

Across the aquarium is the USS Le I grin turned museum. Which we did not go into but we took pictures for Edwin and Tucker 🙂

Isabella keeps saying “I’d rather be in Hawaii” ….so here you go.

Ok, Corpus Christi Texas our of my system. The amount of oil refineries here are pretty intense. The smell even more so and smells generally do not bother me.

Heading across the bridge to South Padre Island. It was quite a detour to get down here but we figured when would we come back to this area???

We had a map, plot number, and didn’t really know what to expect. We found a real estate agent that could hopefully direct us to the right “development”. Frank also bought property there years ago as an investment so he knew the general area, which was great. What he also niceness us about was we wouldn’t be able to access the property easily… The road ends about 15 miles before the development. We knew you could drive and camp directly on the beach, but we also quickly realized that would be hard pressed with our vehicle….well not possible without getting stuck. Well we’d come all this way…it was a 3 hour drive from Corpus Christi…so now what.

It was too late to rent a Jeep or truck and make it worthwhile do we drove to the end of the road just for kicks.

We asked this guy if we can camp on the side of the road for free. He shines his long dreadlocked smile and replied in his French-Canadian accent. “You sure can brah, I’ve been here for 3 months already. I come here every year for about 3-5 months. But don’t stay down here because the spring breakers like to come to the end of the road abc they’re loud”. Thanks for the tip brah.

We decided to stay another day to attempt to see what this property is all about, But we’ll do that tomorrow. For the rest of the day we enjoyed being on a beach, collecting shells, and playing catch. First time seeing the Gulf of Mexico which was pretty cool. But it was disorienting seeing the sun NOT set over the ocean.

So bc we left Big Bend and had driven a bit but just pulled over at rest stop. Good thing about Texas is you can sleep in rest stops.

You can see the Rio Grande just South of us. Mexico still on the other side. When we had driven into Bog Vend a few days ago we were surprised to see a border patrol checkpoint on the way in. We were then surprised last night when no one was there. I myself gaff found myself curious about what the border looks like in different places. You hear a lot of different things on the news.

The dirt road on the side in the highway is used by the orderb atrolp (Edwin is requesting I use pig Latin) agents. We also saw them dragging 3 tires behind their trucks to sweep for prints??

Got to another town Del Rio and this is the fence a few miles from the border. Don’t know how long it goes

Passed another orderb atrolp checkpoint. They simply asked how many people in the car? 4. They let us go. Do they just trust us? Is their heat seeking monitors to see if we’re telling the truth??

alright alright alright. Near the border town of del Rio…Michael McConaughey was born in Uvalde Texas if you’re curious.

San Antonio. We went to the site of the Alamo. 1836.

Vera can’t pass up a glass elevator. Even if it only goes up to level 2.

Then we fix the obligatory Riverwalk and enjoyed the outdoor music.

It was kind of crazy driving by and seeing the sky lit up by oil field lights.