Houston Day 4

Yesterday was a pretty low key day and was more driving around than anything.  First things first, I am getting pretty good at navigating through Houston traffic.  Second, Houston traffic sucks, so the traveling rule of avoiding roads at peak hours applies big time.  Unfortunately, with accidents randomly happening, it's almost like peak hours are anytime.

Anyway, we woke up kind of late (like almost always) and headed out to do some stuff around noon.  Our first stop was Nan's Games and Comics Too for some Munchkin packs to add some fun to our Munchkin game that night.  To be fair, I really only stayed on one side of the store (the board game side), but it was a pretty cool store with prices that you would expect from a standalone store, meaning that most of the games can be found a little cheaper on Amazon.  I did buy the Munchkin 2 expansion, along with the Naughty and Nice & Easter Eggs booster packs.  Naughty and Nice was a few dollars cheaper than Amazon, so that was an added bonus. I would have bought a few more expansion packs, but it adds up pretty quickly and my husband and I don't really have an established group to play with yet back home.  We'll invest eventually...probably once we move to Albuquerque.

The Santamobile has apparently become more "santa-fied" than this picture shows...our visit had it decked out with graphics as well.

After this, we were starving (since it was around 2pm and no one had eaten yet that day) and found a high-ranked build-your-own-pasta type of restaurant right on the other side of the highway called Papa Mio.  It was pretty dead, but it was in the early afternoon when no one is out eating (except for us), so we gave it a shot...it did have 4.5 stars on Yelp.  It was pretty dang good! Not sure if it was homemade pasta or not, but it did kind of look like it, with mine being a spinach pappardelle (which I've never really seen before).  The BYOP starts at $5.95, but if you want anything other than sauce, it's 99 cents per additional topping.  Still, not a bad price...especially when we've been seeing ridiculous prices for food at touristy-type restaurants.  Also, the tiramisu was sooo good and probably also homemade.  My total for everything was $15 plus tip, so if you're ever in the area looking for some inexpensive and good Italian food, I'd say Papa Mio is a good place to check out.

Not a fan of the silly garnish, but the bread was pretty good and I was extremely happy they
had olive oil and balsamic vinegar to use for it.

We then decided after seeing cool pictures on TripAdvisor of the Sculpture Park, we would go there next.  I wanted my picture with the giant hippo because my hubby is OBSESSED with hippos for some reason.  Well, we drive all the way out to this place and it was extremely disappointing.  Let me say, this place is not an actual park with sidewalks/paths or even a parking lot.  It is a small area off the side of a freeway meant as a "look at it while you're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic" with nowhere even remotely close to park.  We thought we might find some random place to park to walk back to it and traipse around, but no.  Also, not a very good area of town, considering the gas station we stopped at had signs up saying "stop begging, no loitering" and things like that, complete with bars on all windows.  Needless to say, we got our gas and got out of there, heading for the complete opposite of that area, the Houston Galleria.  Holy cow, this mall is big and full of designer stores.  We really didn't do anything but walk around and bought a few things because we had coupons (and of course, it was for stores that we have back home anyway).  Still, it was a cool sight and we got to watch some kid rock out for hours with some Xbox Kinect dance game in front of the Microsoft store.  I'm sure they were paying him, but he was so into his dancing and it was some funny stuff.

All of those culminated in "speeding" through rush hour traffic on I-610 (ha) back to my friend's apartment, where we spent another nerdy night of our vacation eating Domino's (Italian food day, apparently...not that you can call Domino's Italian food) and playing with our new Munchkin cards.  My sister won this time after we tried so hard to crush her.  She's one of those mysterious, silent types who keeps a good card in her back pocket...very good Munchkin strategy.  Also, I discovered my friend has a Dalek tumbler! I was so excited to drink some much-need Coke (for caffeine purposes) out of that; it made my nerdy Doctor Who heart sing with happiness.

A perfect vacation in my eyes.

We WERE planning on taking our day trip to San Antonio today (meaning Day 6, which I am writing this on), but my other friend and I stayed up waaaay too late playing my first real game of Civilization V (on Steam, of course), so I guess it's in the cards for Day whatever (I think I'm getting my days mixed up since I caught up a lot on Monday..originally Day2/3, depending on how you look at it).  I'll get my act together, I promise.