Vacation 2016

With Esther in school this year we couldn't do our normal off season beach trip to Navarre Beach. Going during the summer school break made the price double so we decided to do something different. And with the girls getting older we feel like we can do more interesting things that they will enjoy. So, we decided to visit the Houston area and check it out. But first we stopped in Austin and spent a couple of days with our good friends Walt, Annie, Chloe, and Naomi. The four girls (ages 6, 5, 4, and 3) had a great time playing, and the adults had fun just hanging out. We then headed to Houston. We spent an afternoon at the Kemah Boardwalk. We all had fun riding rides even though it was crowded and really hot.

This was before the ride started. Once it started Clara's face wasn't so happy!

On top of the ferris wheel.

 The next day we spent at the Johnson Space Center. Our girls have always been interested in space, astronauts, stars, etc., so we thought they would really like it. It was really neat to see inside the space shuttle replica, see and hear about the history of space travel, and play with the interactive exhibits. We toured the facility where the astronauts train and they have life size models of the various shuttles and other training simulators and we also saw one of the huge rockets. The girls had fun seeing all the astronaut things and climbing through the space craft. They also had a special exhibit of MythBusters experiments to try. Josh and I loved that show, so it was fun to play with those exhibits.

We went all through the shuttle and the plane that carries the shuttle.

In the space shuttle

Posing in front of the huge rocket

We then spent a couple of nights in Galveston. We surprised the girls because they didn't know we were going to a beach. Though the beach isn't as nice or as pretty as where we usually go in Navarre, they still had a great time. Galveston sand is much harder to dig in and is more like mud, but Esther and Clara didn't seem to mind. Our beach time got cut a little short due to rain, but we were able to spend lots of time in the swimming pool too.

 Our last day of vacation we spent at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. There were lots of cool exhibits with taxidermied animals in wilderness scenes, Egyptian mummies, shells, and dinosaur bones. They have a huge exhibit of real and replica dinosaur skeletons which was really neat to see and it walks you through the history of the world through all the dinosaur periods up until man shows up. They also have one of the top planetariums (the astronauts actually train there) so we saw a show there. They have a huge butterfly habitat in a rainforest dome with a waterfall that was lots of fun. The girls liked identifying the butterflies that were flying around. There was also a cool interactive entomology area that the girls enjoyed.

You can't see them, but there are lots of butterflies flying around above them.

We bought some crunchy larvae to eat. The girls were excited to say they have now eaten bugs. 

As always, we tried to eat at good restaurants. We had authentic Chinese dim sum at Arco Seafood in the Chinatown area of Houston. I think we were the only non-Asian people in the restaurant and the wait staff did not speak English very well. We ate seafood at several good restaurants. We had an amazing appetizer, campechana, at Goode Co. Seafood. The highlight of food on our trip was lunch at Ninfa's. If you are in Houston, you have to eat there. It was amazing Mexican food. Josh says it is one of the top 5 or 10 meals he has ever had.

We had a great trip and did lots of fun things. The girls did really great on the long car rides. And we all survived several nights in one hotel room. Trips with them are getting better/easier as they get older. We had a rough drive home--it rained most of the way, we were on roads we didn't know, and then less than an hour from home we had a flat/near blow-out tire. But we finally made it home safely.