Houston Day 1

Well, a couple of days ago I finally made my way down to Houston with my sister and friend to see a good friend of mine who recently moved down here.  He's also my sister's boyfriend...kind of weird to the outside world, but my family has loved him since middle school, so it's all good.  Anyway, Google Maps said this drive was 12 hours 45 minutes, so I thought, big highways and stuff...probably 12 hours.  Well, not really...we finally got down here after 14 hours of being on the road, but a lot of that was interspersed with picking up friends, food, windy roads through the beautiful Ozark mountains in northern Arkansas (seriously gorgeous, but no pictures to be had because I was driving), and stopping at "The Best Buffet in the State rated by The Arkansas Times!"  It was Brown's Country Restaurant/Buffet/something like that and boasted a 100 foot buffet, but it was kind of underwhelming.  Still, we had some really good fried catfish (if you've ever been to the Lake of the Ozarks region, you would know this is quite the staple in our diets) and it had a lot of country charm and coonskin hats! (That was the selling point for us) Here's a picture of some stuffed crabs that were also on the buffet...kind of creepy looking, but they were pretty yummy and fun to play with!

We're just two crabs in love.

We finally got to Houston around 10pm, after seeing many hilarious sights and I finally got some delicious Whataburger fries and ketchup at a gas station (we don't have Whataburger anywhere remotely close to where I live).  I've been missing these bad babies for awhile and they were wonderful.  My friend greeted us with some great baked spaghetti, garlic bread, and what can only be described as instant mashed potato soup.  Seriously...it looked almost like Alfredo sauce.  The rest of the dinner was great though, and I taught them a little Slide 5, which is a fun German card game that's easy to pick up but packs a lot of strategy planning as well.  Needless to say, after a couple of games, I crashed into my wonderful queen-sized air mattress and slept for a long, long time.  I'm still not completely over this sick stuff (I'm suspecting bronchitis as the culprit), but it was nice to get to sleep in after a week of getting less than 6 hours everyday while hacking up my lungs.  More catching up from tomorrow's visit to Johnson Space Center will be had, but for now I'm going to go try out my legs by running around my friend's neighborhood.  Wish me luck...it's my first real run that's not on a treadmill!