Thanksgiving in Texas

Holy hell! 

We drove all the way to Austin to meet our newest nephew, Miles, who was not yet two weeks old when we celebrated Thanksgiving and new life. We had plenty of stuff to hand over, for both Miles and the (as of now) un-born kiddo of family friends in OKC, so flying was off the table.

Driving, though, is hard when you have two kids 5 and under, and the destination is 20+ hours away. The kids did great, with limited screentime or tears. Making us parents feel like winners.

First stop was Phoenix (six hours away), where the kids got to see both Grandma Kate and Grandma Lorraine, one's my mom and the other's my step-grandma, so my kids' only living great-grandparent.

With Grandma Kate

After spending an entire day in Phoenix, we drove on to Fort Stockton, TX, a drive that took about 12 hours of real time, even if we lost an hour and it looked like 13 hours of clock time.

We stayed at a place calling itself the Atrium. The outside was pretty normal, as far as cross-country freeway-traversing goes:

And the stairwells looked like what you may see on our salt-aired neck of the woods:

And I couldn't understand why the place was called the Atrium. Inside the room, there was a balcony door at the back of the room, away from the parking lot door. That's weird, I remember thinking.

Then I went to check it out, and everything started to click:

That balcony looked out onto an enclosed hangar-like place, a weather controlled space with a pool and a work-out cabin (for some reason). It was very surreal.

We finished the drive the next morning, making the six hour drive from Fort Stockton to the north-east satellite of Austin named Pflugerville, betraying the area's rich German settler heritage.

A brand-spanking new subdivision carved out of the formerly remote tall grasslands, our friend and Thanksgiving host Joey's house can be found. Joey was at the Mexico wedding for Mary we attended this past October, so Cass remembered him well. Camille also seemed to remember, and she was mostly enthralled to be there.

Cass too, since there were so many dogs to love on. Here he is with one of them:

Camille wanted to just climb and explore:

Cass got to meet Aunt Stephanie's boy, ten-day old Miles:

It was family, it was wonderful. It was fleeting. I made turkey, but there was so much going on and I didn't really need to do anything besides make turkey, which was easy.

We left Friday afternoon and stopped in Fort Stockton again, after a very relaxing drive along an in-the-cut series of roads that avoided the crowded US HWY 290, which was to be our regularly scheduled return route.

Saturday in the car was brutal, but made sense, seeing as how trying to drive I-10 back to the Southland on this particular Sunday would have fully sucked. We made it over 1000 miles in under 16 hours (but clockwise was more like under 14). I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.

These family visits are always so refreshing, even as they last a total of 50 hours in Austin and 15 in Phoenix, and we're ground down to nubs by the end of he drive.

To family!