HunterTrek.com

Down here in Texas we have various multicolored Santa programs.  They are basically holiday toy drives conducted by various groups (Blue Santa=Austin PD/FD, Brown Santa=Travis county Sheriff and FD, there are others as well).  I’m not sure if this is unique to central Texas, but it may well be.  I’d never heard of it before we moved.  Here is a recent article in the Statesmen about their current troubles with donations.

This year the Blue Santa program was giving horse-drawn carriage rides (a year round staple in downtown Austin) in exchange for toy donations.  I read about it in the paper and thought it sounded fun.  We arrived shortly after it started expecting there would be a line.  Typically a ride for 4 people would be about $60 per half hour so it was really a pretty good deal.  But when we arrived at the downtown fire station we had a carriage waiting for us.  Maybe the cold weather had kept the people away.

It was a pretty chilly night and we bundled the kids up.  Earlier in the day Amber had taken Jillian and Wesley shopping and had tried to give Wesley a Santa hat to wear for the ride.  But he refused saying something along the lines of “No.  Santa will give me a Santa hat.”  So magically a gift bag complete with Santa hat was waiting for us on the sidewalk when Wesley got out of the car downtown.  It is amazing how easily they believe.  He was sure it was from Santa, wore it proudly, and never had a single doubt.

We toured around downtown hitting the highlights including Sixth Street, Congress Ave, and the Driskill hotel.  We were pulled ably by a Red Belgian Draft horse named Clay.  He was friendly and let Wesley give him a few pets on the head at the end of our ride.  Jillian spent most of the ride yelling “Neigh!” and trying to jump from the carriage.  It was rather cozy the four of us cuddled together underneath a red velvet blanket.

Afterwords we drove up Congress to see the Capital tree and then headed home.  The strings of lights in the picture, which look all white are actually new LED lights the city is rather proud of.  They’ve been touting their energy efficiency for a few weeks now. And in truth they are very neat. They change color, play patterns and in general look nice when viewed down Congress Ave.

That’s right.  We got snow. The first in several years for Austin (though they did have some rather large ice storms a couple of years ago).  What makes this even more unusual is that on the 9th, the day the snow fell late in the evening, it was 81 degrees.  A record high.  By the time the snow started falling just before midnight we were at freezing and getting some lovely flurries that I woke Amber up to see.

It wasn’t much, a quarter inch is probably generous, and it had mostly melted by the time the kids got up, but Amber got a few shots of them before they were too cold and had to go in.

And here is Jillian doing her best to clean up the deck. She is very fastidious.

This will likely be it for as long as we live in Texas.  I came home after my morning run to play with the kids, but it was much less impressive in the daylight.  No snowmen. Oh, well.

So here is a very late and abridged version of our camping experience…  This is the positive highlights.  I will keep the not so positive parts as distant memories that I don’t really want to relive.

We camped with a group of Joshua’s co-workers and friends June 21-22 at Emma Long Metropolitan Park, which runs along Lake Austin.  This is the view from our campsite looking down to the water.  (It is taken at about 10 at night.)

A friend got a boat for the morning and the group took turns going out on the boat.  Joshua, Wesley, Jillian, Elliott and I were all passengers for the following pictures:

Wesley was unsure of being on the raft.  He was on it total of maybe 3 minutes.

Joshua love it!!!  He was amazing.  He was even doing a couple of 360’s.

Then it was my turn with Jillian.  But all she wanted to do was go to sleep.  She almost fell asleep on her 3 minute raft ride.

Then I told Bill (who was driving the boat) that I wanted to crash into the water.  Big mistake.  It really hurts.  This is me right before I landed face first on the lake.  My black eye lasted less than a week. 

Then after lunch, Joshua took the kayaks out.  He took Wesley and Elliott for a ride and Mat was in the green boat.   After he took the kids out he went out on his own.  He paddled  down and into a channel and saw some amazing wildlife and a really cool zip line that connected two houses on either side of the channel.  How cool would that be?

While Joshua was out on his own, Jillian really wanted to be in the kayak.  She tried to climb into the seat and then climbed up on top of the kayak and back down the other side over and over.

The rest of the time was pretty much spent doing this…  They both loved the water.

Here is Joshua and Wesley at the end of the day.  He did not want to leave the water.

It was a fun experience.  I think the next time we go will be in the fall when it is much cooler and we can have a real camp fire.

Epicurious has released a neat little interactive map that shows you what is in season for each month of the year for each state.  A handy little tool when we get produce that looks good, but tastes like cardboard filling our supermarkets yearround.  It is especially helpful when you say, I don’t know, move across the country to Texas and you don’t have a clue when anything is actually ripe.  It isn’t perfect, for instance it never lists Strawberries in Washington despite the fact that I have many friends who picked these summer after summer, but it is worth a look.

Epicurious “Peak-Season Map”