Happy Birthday, our little groundhog... Kobe had a great party, the only thing lacking was the birthday cake from Arla.
Elan in Florida now Kobe in Texas. Being with family made it pretty awesome and it felt very homey. Happy 5th to our youngest Nelson.
My cousin Jason and his son Brady met us at the rodeo. The only time I use the camera on the cell phone is when I leave the real one at home... Instead of 200 pictures, we have 2 of the rodeo.
The opening ceremonies went like this.
*Starting out with a prayer in Jesus name... you know you aren't in Minnesota anymore
*Fireworks
*Celebrating the 6 flags of Texas (Texas under Spain, under France, under Mexico, as a Republic, in the Confederacy and finally as the 28th state of the USA)
*I wasn't sure if we were going to pledge allegiance to the Texas flag or not, but we ended up with the star spangled banner to the US flag – I'm convinced it could go either way depending on who you talk to...
Having never seen a rodeo, we didn't really know what to expect, but there was a good variety of rodeo events:
I liked watching the flock of kids running down the calves. Some of these kids would leap to grab a tail, then get dragged for a while. If they got help from a friend then they would come out pretty good otherwise: point cow.
Another family favorite was the monkey riding the border collie – he's on the rodeo tour I guess.
They end with the big bull rides of course. Did you know that the bulls have their own trading cards?
Across the street from the Dinosaur Valley State Park there is a Creation Evidence Museum - it's worth an hour of your time. It left me with more questions than answers however... It's strictly a “young earth” creation place and I tend toward old earth, but definitely created.
Here's some real dinosaur tracks that we saw in the river bed. There's dozens of clear tracks - you can see where (they think) a meet-a-saurus was chasing after a couple big vegi-saurus' (sorry for all the technical language).
Replicas of the river bed dinosaur tracks that you can play in.
North of San Antonio is Potters Creek Camp ground. The deer rule this campground – at least 6 big bucks and dozens of other deer ran through our campsite.
We also found a couple big snakes that were sunning themselves. Looking up some information on snakes, I learned that I do not care which snakes are poisonous. If you eat a snake and it makes you sick, then it's poisonous, but if a snake bites you and you get sick, then it's venomous. As we are not planning on eating any snakes... well, interesting and all but I now don't know which snakes are poisonous or venomous.
The river walk is really nothing more than a bunch of shops and restaurants in a very scenic area, but we liked it.
The 'barricade' keeping this area from being flooded.
Here's a hotel that was built modularly in 220 business days. Apparently they took reservations for the 1968 World's Fair but forgot to build it, then had to play catch-up.
Hilton Palacio del Rio, 481 rooms
14,412 steps for Shae this afternoon / evening
I can never remember the Spanish name for the cottonwood trees surrounding the mission but... I think that's legal, you just have to remember the Alamo. Shae finds it easy to remember as it's a character from Sesame Street. No Shae, it's not Elmo, it's Alamo... “that's what I said, Elmo”...um, close enough. Well, "Remember the Elmo" - I guess.
Here's Kobe helping us remember Davy Crockett.
Interestingly, one of the building codes for San Antonio states that you can't cast a shadow on the Alamo.
Bullet holes in an original door.
What would they have thought if Dave and crew were attacked by these chariots?!
The boys were excited to touch a piece of the moon.
Space Food – dehydrated ice cream, yeah you can get better tasting food, but you can't pay more...
Shae wants to be an astronaut, not deterred but rather encouraged by the danger... sigh... but who doesn't want to be an astronaut.
Shae with his new Astronaut hero's
Luckily the moon is lighter in space than it would be on earth
The big butt of the Saturn rocket
The boys really liked Space Center Houston - I have to agree, it was fun and entertaining. We spent about 4 hours there but would have preferred 6 or so. Even so, it was enough time that it delayed us getting to San Antonio and our campground's 10:00 curfew - so we spent the night in a Walmart.
Welcome to Texas. There are many places where you only see the Texas flag flying.
From Friday night to Sunday night these 4 were constantly together – Levi & Elan reunited with Jordan and Elijah!
Ripsticks are the latest toy introduced to us by the Pearson's.
Elijah giving me my first lesson
Sunset at our campground north of HoustonWe were told to not visit the above ground tombs as people are about guaranteed to get robbed there (true before and after the hurricanes).
Drive-by version of viewing the tombs
A mix of Destruction / Construction going on in New Orleans and plenty of neighborhoods with poor living conditions with water-damaged houses.
...from the Hurricane destruction
Our campground with free laundry – is this Christmas?
The boys collected some free beads – this was as close as we got to the celebrations.
There were some people at our campground who couldn't believe that we were leaving as the parties and parades were about to start. Somehow, we tore ourselves away and headed off toward Texas.
The WW2 museum is under construction and will be a couple more years before complete, but there's plenty to see.
The valor of these young men was amazing. As they were about to unload the boats at Normandy, a simple “motivational” word from the platoon leaders to his mainly inexperienced men went like this, “We can't turn back, if you stay on this beach you WILL die -- we have to move forward”. So they made the best of the choices they were given.
In the Pacific, things were often worse with the heat, disease, incredible cruelty and “take no prisoners” mentality of the Japanese – the Allied forces took back ground, island by island.
I reviewed a lot and learned a lot, the story doesn't get old to hear our history. It almost didn't seem right to show those pictures, stories,and videos and then have toy guns for sale in the gift store. I'm alright with guns, and our boys have toy guns, it's just the combo of the situation that seemed awkward. The boys definitely took a lot in, only skipping one video and one extra graphic section of the “Pacific”. It's not like watching a History Channel show, this museum is worth seeing.
Levi in front of a picture showing the relative size of military forces at the beginning of WW2. The US was #16 (I think, it might have been #14) worldwide at the beginning and had #1 military by the end of the war.
A partial illustration of the nearly 5000 vessels deployed on June 6 at Normandy. One German officer marveled “It's impossible... there can't be that many ships in the world”
I'm again very thankful for my dad and all those who fought for our freedom in WW2.
