Houston

My mom, Emeric and I left for Houston Sunday morning. Our flight was delayed so we sat in the Fargo airport for quite a while before heading out. We made it into Houston around 4:30pm and went to pick up our rental car. I saw a really nice Hybrid that looked fun to try and I figured it would get awesome gas mileage so I put in the carseat, packed up our stuff and got in. Only one problem... we couldn't figure out how to turn it on. Finally I realized there's no key, just a push button to start the car. So I get the car started and get out to shut the trunk and it shuts off. I start it again, it shuts off again. We finally decide we have no idea how to run a hybrid car and unpack all of our stuff and choose a normal car! It was still nice, a 2010 with 600 some miles on it!

Our hotel was 25 minutes from the airport and we ended up pulling in there about 1.5 hours later so I figured we made pretty good time! ;) We ordered pizza, unpacked and TRIED to go to sleep. The problem was there was someone above us that walked, and walked, and walked until 2am and the floor was so noisy we couldn't sleep! I'd turned the stove fan on for some noise but it didn't help.

The next morning we woke up to rain! We decided to go to the Aquarium since it was mostly indoors. After getting lost AGAIN we finally found our way. (Houston is the 4th largest city in the US so we had a good excuse!) Once we got there we realized a lot of the stuff was outside(rides and such) so we didn't end up spending much time there. After leaving the aquarium we headed over to the mall(and didn't get lost! Yippee!) and ate dinner at the Rainforest Cafe. I wanted to let Emeric get some little creatures to take with and there was a special to pick out 15 of them so I was sorting through and trying to find 15 different tiny animals. Everytime I'd put the snake in he'd whip it out and say, "Yuck!". Finally I hid it at the bottom so he didn't see it and made our way out with 15! He still whips the snake out when he sees it!

Tuesday morning we decided to leave very early to make it to Emeric's appt. because we'd heard that rush hour can be pretty bad. We left at 6am for an 8:15am appt. and ended up getting there at 6:20am! Oh well, better early than late!

After the appt(which I'll probably post about on Emeric's caringbridge) it was really nice out so we decided to go to the zoo! We saw lots of animals but Emeric was pretty tired. We left to eat lunch and then decided since it was so nice out we'd head to Galveston and see the ocean. My mom hadn't seen the ocean in almost 30 years! It was beautiful there! Lots of palm trees and most importantly SUN! We picked out a lot of shells for the kids and Emeric had a blast. He rolled around in the sand and was filthy when we had to put him back in the car!

Wednesday morning we left for the airport and amazingly did NOT get lost! Whew! It was a long day, we had a pretty long layover in Minneapolis and Emeric was tired and ready to be home.

Overall he did really well on the plane, slept good, and was in a good mood nearly all of the trip! I wasn't excited to see snow again but thankfully a lot of it had melted while we were gone!