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.

Houston Day 3

Yesterday was a pretty chill day, but I think it was my favorite day so far. My run was not that great in the morning, but at least it was something? And the neighborhoods around my friend's apartment are pretty cute, even if they're surrounded by a giant interstate highway and Queenburger (a former Dairy Queen).

While my friend was at work all day, the 3 of us embarked on a journey to Galveston Island to hang out at the beach. It took us about an hour, but I was kind of surprised with my abilities to drive pretty well through all the crazy traffic. I guess living/driving in Albuquerque paid off?

We arrived and found parking pretty easy right along the beach and even though there were a lot of people, it really wasn't that crowded and was pretty awesome. If you're looking to go down there for beach/Pleasure Pier, I would definitely recommend a weekday, but if you're looking to also go ride the rides and things at the Pleasure Pier, don't go on Monday or Tuesday. We've got plans to go to the Kemah Boardwalk with our CityPass (actually a pretty good deal) later this week, so it didn't bother us too much. We wanted to go to Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., so we did and were kind of disappointed. The prices are crazy expensive so we got appetizers for lunch instead. They were tasty, but not really worth it. I wish we could have found some little local seafood place, but we didn't have much time.

We came back into Houston and went to a little Vietnamese place for dinner near my friend's apartment and it was really good! If you're ever in the Lazy Brook/Timbergrove area, check out Dragon Kitchen and hook yourself up with some Pho Tai and a Vietnamese coffee. We also got to watch Dancing with the Stars (meh) on an old school big screen (a little cooler than meh) but who I assume was the mom/owner was a very nice and funny lady. I'd definitely recommend it, and they also have Chinese food as well.

We came home, watched Geek and Sundry's TableTop with Wil Wheaton to teach my friends Munchkin and we embarked on what was the longest game I've ever played. Seriously, it was almost 4 hours (years) long and it was more because we were super-interpreting the rules...and we ended up being totally off on some stuff, which resulted in a much longer game. We still had a great time though! Munchkin is amazing and we're going to go find a game store and buy a couple of decks to make it a little more interesting. More to come!

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!