My First Official Texas Blog

                                       

I wanted to start my post with a picture of the beautiful blue sky here in Texas. This was taken on a drive to Austin last weekend. While we were there we visited the Whole Foods grocery store, which is also their U.S. corporate headquarters. This store was huge! The bagger informed me there are three levels of parking, with enough room to house 1,000 cars. If you happen to park on the lower two levels, they will send your groceries down the dumbwaiter and valet them into your car at no charge. We had arrived there early enough to get a front row park, but I thought that was a pretty neat service.

                                          

Life has also been very full around our new home. We’ve been spending plenty of time cleaning, unpacking, making runs to the Super Wal-Mart, looking for missing boxes and doing more cleaning & unpacking!

We have managed to squeeze some fun into our days, so that we’re not so tired from all work and no play. Our county fair started on Thursday and ran through today. We quickly learned that this little fair is a really big deal. It is in it’s 122nd year of running, and is the longest consecutively running fair in Texas. Businesses close down and school is let out on Friday so that everyone can enjoy the kick-off parade! We took ourselves down and found a cool spot on Main Street to enjoy the show.

Here’s the kiddos waiting for it to begin:

                                       

Here are several shots of the parade participants. I found some of these to be very unique and unlike anything I’d seen in a parade before.

The first picture is a of the Jr. Texas Rangers. The next is of the Fair Queen contestants. We’re learning there are queens for every festival, fair, farm bureau, chamber, well, you get the picture.

This is the H.E.B. float. H.E.B. is a large grocery chain around here. It’s a great store, and carries a ton of organic and gluten-free items, which makes me very happy!  My husband said the police car belonged in Mayberry.

Conman especially liked the little cars and scooters, and bugged me to take pictures of all of them. 

 

When was the last time you saw one of these driving down the middle of Main Street?

                                          

This seems to be a slogan around here. They even had it painted on some of the horses.

                                          

This gentleman was representing Luckenbach, which is about 10 minutes away from us.

                                           

Lyndon B Johnson State Park is also right down the road from us. Their float represented life from the past.

                                            

And last, but not least, the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine made an appearance. What fun!

                                           

We spent that evening at the fairgrounds where we watched the queen coronation, ate plenty of fried foods and ice cream and wandered through the exhibit buildings. Conman was so excited that he got to ride some of the carnival rides, and we realized this was the first time he’d been to a fair. Back in California, we just didn’t take the kids to the fair, and we certainly wouldn’t have taken them down the midway at our local fair. Here, the fair was the midway.

Saturday morning my mother-in-law and I checked out some local yard sales. It was so nice, because everything is within a 10 minute or less drive! I found some Southern Living and Country Living magazines for a dime a piece and a set of 6 cute little glass jars for $1.00. I’ll probably use them to hold scrapbooking supplies.

This morning we started the day out at what we hope will be our new church. We’d attended it a couple of times on prior visits and were pleased to see it hasn’t changed much. We met quite a few people and received an invitation to attend the small group meeting this week and I was invited by the pastor’s wife to her scrapbooking day at her house. We greatly enjoyed the service, and the fact that it was a much smaller congregation than what we were used to. We finished up the afternoon with lunch at Cracker Barrel, where the boys took on a game of checkers on their front porch.

                                                          

Tomorrow holds a few errands to continue getting us situated. We plan on signing the boys up for the AWANA club that is just starting at a local Baptist Church and Laina is excited to start volunteering for the SPCA.

Whew-that’s a lot for one post, but I think I’m all caught up!

Till’ tomorrow~