The Fam in Texas

When Ivy and I left New York, she had a huge issue getting out due to earlier storms in the Atlanta area. It was so awful (for real, it took her a whole twenty-four hours to get home to Seattle after leaving our hotel room) that Delta gave her a voucher. Well, they technically gave me the voucher because I paid for the ticket, but it was in Ivy's name and only she could use it. Since I was already planning on Em coming down for the Matchbox Twenty concert, I decided to have Ivy come down, too. And might as well have my mom come as well to make it a full girls' weekend. 

Em and mom arrived Friday afternoon and we went straight from the airport to Austin (for the Matchbox Twenty concert). Ivy flew into Austin just before midnight. Then we drove all the way back to Denton that night. I stayed awake by listening to various Broadway soundtracks. I put on Twentyone Pilots just before getting to Denton and Ivy woke up to sing-along with me. We got home about 3:15 a.m., but it was worth it to be home and already in Denton. 

We tried our best to sleep in on Saturday, but I have a lot of windows and once that morning sun starts shining it's hard to keep the eyes shut. No big deal though, because our plan was just to hang out in Denton that day. We went to the Square and had lunch at Mellow Mushroom and ice cream at Beth Marie's. We almost didn't make it through ice cream - we were all so tired! So we came back home and all took a nap before going on a evening walk. We closed out the day with a rousing game of Phase 10, which mom won. 

The next we took the train to the State Fair of Texas! I was very excited to share this event with my family; it's kind of a big deal. The first thing we did was get a Fletcher's corn dog. Well, Em has an aversion to hot dogs so she didn't get one. And neither did my mom. Their loss. These corn dogs are seriously delicious. We also tried out this year's new food: fried Fruit Loops. They were okay, but I preferred my fried desserts to be chocolate based. 

We checked out the museums before heading to the Pan Am Arena for the pig races. Except they ended at two and the three p.m. show would be a rodeo/stampede. It was fine, but the pig races are more fun. We checked out the livestock before getting a second round of food. We caught a pet show with all kind of rescued pets - cats, dogs, birds, a porcupine - which was cute and fun. 

I made sure we all got a nutty ice cream bar before we made our way to the car exhibits. We had fun checking out all the cool new cars and trucks and imagining ourselves purchasing one of them! We rode the train back home, and everyone was tired. And poor Em was suffering from allergies. 

They left Monday afternoon, all on the same flight from DFW Airport heading for SLC (Ivy's connection to Seattle was there). Hopefully they had a good time in the great state of Texas!