THE HEIGHTS OF HOUSTON

Sunday, November 28 – Off to Carrie’s to bake Christmas cookies. Marsha and Carrie spent several hours baking delicious Christmas cookies. They were rolling dough, scraping bowls, using cookie cutters, and tasting the treats. Paul helped as much as possible…he left and went to Home Depot. But when he got back there were dishes to do. Marsha had the camera but forgot to take any pictures. Oh well, it was a fun day and boy did the kitchen smell good.

Monday, November 29 – We did a little Christmas shopping today. We went to the Galleria Mall in Houston. The Galleria is filled with many “high-end” shopping opportunities, as well as, the usual stores and boutiques. It is centrally located in the Uptown District of Houston. The development consists of a retail complex, as well as the Galleria Office Towers complex, two Westin hotels, and a private health club. The office towers and hotels are separately owned and managed from the shopping center. It is a three level shopping complex with an ice skating rink......JEESH! Once again we failed to help the economy.....we came home empty handed.

Next to the mall ( it's actually attached) is The Williams Tower......Houston's tallest building (this helps explain the title of this blog….also, Carrie lives in the “Heights” district of Houston).   At 64 stories high, 1.4 million-square-foot office tower, it is the tallest building in the country that is not located in the city center. With its floor to ceiling windows, it is said that you can't have a fear of heights and work here! It is a very beautiful building.

Located adjacent to the building is the Gerald D Hines Waterfall Park, a three-acre park with a 64-foot water wall. A water-flowing work of art. Pretty neat!!

Designed by local architects, the amazing wall of water drops thousands of gallons 64 feet, one foot for every story of the opposing Williams Building, every minute. You can stop and linger and enjoy the moment, or marvel at the stunning creation as you drive through the area.

 

It is a soothing experience for businessmen and women in the area who need a quick break. If you find that you really love the spot, it is also a popular wedding venue.

After returning home, Paul decided to list one of our sofas on the Escapee “for sale” forum. It sold in about 30 minutes. Someone called from the Rio Grand Valley and are coming up to Houston (about 300 miles) to pick it up on Wednesday. If they back out, we had calls from several other people in the Houston area that will take it! WOW...should have asked more for the sofa....ha ha!! We are replacing it with a chair and footstool from the Ikea Store. Probably do some cabinet work, as well. We'll post some pictures of this project at a later date.

Tuesday, November 30.........TIME FLIES!!! Where did November go???? We can't believe it is already the last day of the month.....YOWZE!!!

We did some more window shopping at one of the area malls, but again came home empty handed.

Right outside our window were a ton of birds. Bella loved it. Her tail was going back and forth so fast, we thought it might fly off. It was really cool to see these birds so close up. Note: Marsha is so upset about how horrible these pictures turned out. She checked the camera and some how the image size got changed. Alls well now.

White Egert

White Ibis.

Wednesday, December 1 - A little chilly in Houston this morning....down to 32 degrees.....brrrrrrrr!!

We sold our one sofa and the people came to pick it up. They arrived about noon. Again, we use the emergency escape window behind the driver's seat to move it out of the MH. We did have to do some disassembling to get it into the fella's pick-up truck. But it all worked out, and they were on their way back home in about an hour.

Since we were going into Katy, which is on the west side of Houston, to watch Kelly's softball game this evening, we left a little early to do some running around. First stop was Camping World. We were looking for a outdoor lounge chair for Marsha. Of course, it was out of stock and had to be ordered. We then stopped at the used bookstore and traded-in several books and picked-up about a dozen. Dropped off some items at the Goodwill and headed to Kelly's apartment. Paul fixed her smoke alarm that came down, and we visited for awhile. Her Christmas tree looks super! We decided to run to Kohl's on the way to the softball game. Marsha saw a small purse she wanted to purchase.

We arrived at Kelly's softball game....finally. A little brisk out this evening........brrrrrrr. Although it was in the 50's tonight, it felt cold! Reminds us of the high school softball games back in Ohio. Our girls played in some pretty awful weather! Unfortunately, Kelly's team lost in extra innings...6-5. We jumped in the car, turned on the heater, and headed home.

Thursday, December 2 - A beautiful day in Houston. Not near as chilly this morning and it's getting into the high 70's to day.......ahhhhh!!!

We went to the Ikea store to get our new chair. Boy that store sure knows how to do it right. What a pleasure shopping there. We made our selection by writing down the numbers off the floor model. They listed the location of the item in the warehouse by row number and bin number. We headed down to the warehouse and picked out our items in minutes. They even had little pictures of our selection by the boxed item so we could be sure we were getting the correct color. Flew through the check out lane and rolled our cart to the curb. Paul drove the car to the pick-up area, we loaded our items and home we went. We can learn something this foreign owned company.....Swedish!

All the items in Ikea require assemble. All the boxes were in good shape and not over weight or overly cumbersome. When the boxes were opened, Paul found all the pieces in beautiful condition and with simple instructions for assemble. Everything went together easily.

Chair

 

Paul…looks pretty comfortable.

Foot stool

Within thirty minutes Paul was relaxing in our new chair.

 

Marsha wanted to try it out. Nope…she won’t be able to use it…too big for her…LOL

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see y’all again real soon. Have a great day!

FUN WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS

Thursday, November 25 – HAPPY THANKSGIVING!! – We have so much to be thankful for this year. We have been so Blessed with a wonderful family, great health and the ability to travel.

We had a wonderful day at Carrie's house. We enjoyed family, friends and delicious Turkey and all the fixin's.

The happy Thanksgiving group.

We had appetizers by Nick and Carrie.

There was 10 lbs. of potatoes to peel. Bo and Kelly had a potato peeling contest. Nick cheers them on.

Kelly and Carrie prepared the potatoes. This was Kelly’s first time making real mashed potatoes. They were excellent.

Tom, Carrie and Kelly. Tom fixed delicious sweet potatoes and artichokes. Good job Tom!

Tom cuts the turkey prepared by Carrie. YUM!!!

Carrie and Kelly got the party started with a little drink. Yes, that is a wine bottle Kelly brought.

We had lots more food. Marsha and Carrie supplied the desserts. Paul made an attempt to keep them all happy by tasting everything....sometimes more than once.

He even volunteered to do clean up.

Bella celebrated with us but had to share the day with three dogs. She did her best to make friends with the littlest of the group.

After dinner it was game time. We had several exciting games of Catch Phrase. What a great group of young people. A real fun time!! Marsha and I couldn't keep up with these twenty-something guys and girls, so we loaded up and headed home. Driving through the city of Houston at night is beautiful with all the lights and NO TRAFFIC.

Friday, November 26 - BLACK FRIDAY! We made an attempt to go out shopping this morning with our daughter, Kelly, but I guess we just didn't have our hearts into it. We started at Best Buy, which was crowded and then headed over to the Katy Mall. We were surprised the mall wasn't too busy. We walked around for a couple hours but left empty handed. We didn't do our part to help the economy. Maybe another day.

We spent the rest of the afternoon watching #11 Alabama almost upset #2 ranked Auburn. In the end, Auburn came back to win. There was also the Oregon victory and don’t forget the Boise upset. We made a quick trip to Walmart for baking supplies. Sunday, Marsha and the girls are baking some Christmas cookies.

Saturday, November 27 – We headed out with the “kids” to the local sports bar to watch college football. Two games in particular.....Ohio State vs Michigan (We're from Ohio.) and Virginia Tech vs Virginia (our daughter, Carrie and most of her engineering friends graduated from VT). Both were exciting games with holiday bowl implications!!! Both OSU and VT won with the exact score 37-7.

Kelly represented OSU and Carrie VT.

Can you guess what this is?

Yes, it is a six shooter. But only in Texas will you find it as the door handle on the women’s restroom door.

We had a good time cheering and spending time with our daughters. After the games, we headed home to watch more football on TV and to relax.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see y’all back real soon. Have a great day.

HEADIN’ BACK TO HOUSTON…HOUSTON…HOUSTON

 Monday, November 22 – We begin our “Holiday Travels” this morning by heading to Houston. Our plans are to stay in the Elks Lodge Campground. We stayed in an Elks at Gulfport, MS and enjoyed it, so thought we would try it in Houston.....actually it is Stafford, TX, a SW suburb of Houston. If all goes as planned, we will be there for about a month......Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

Arrived after a nice 3.5 hour trip. The Elks seems pretty nice. They have 10 concrete pads with 50-amp full hook-up sites. Nice price too! It was very easy access on TX-59 with plenty of shopping near by....looks promising!

There are currently five RV's in the campground. There were three here when we arrived and one additional one arrived while we were away. We are in one of the end spots. We always try to get the end spot, if available. That way, Bella our cat, has more room to roam around on her leash. One less neighbor too and a little more area for us to spread out.







Elks Lodge from our site.



We went over to our daughter, Kelly's apartment, to visit and go out for dinner. We had a great visit and enjoyed catching up with her busy life. Paul brought home her sweeper. It isn't working, so he took it all apart and found the switch needs replaced. He'll look for a new switch at Radio Shack tomorrow.

Tuesday, November 23 - We are meeting Duane and Louise Wegley for lunch today. We met them last year at Escapees Rainbow's End in Livingston, TX, and have been able to touch base with them several times during our travels. They are Workampers for Escapees and are spending some time relaxing in Livingston before their next assignment in Deming, NM.

We had a great time catching up on each others lives. Duane and Louise are doing great and finishing up their R & R. We had a great lunch at Olive Garden. It was nice visiting with them and we'll see them down the road!

Thank you again Duane for the two cravings you gave us. Duane gave Marsha a cute Santa Claus pin and a beautiful cross. You can see a picture of the cross on their website.

Duane, Louise, Marsha, Paul



After returning home, Paul went to the Office to pay our campground fees and to get his free “out-of-town” Elks visitor beer. It is only $325/month (a little over $10/day) which included electricity. He enjoyed talking to some of the men in the lodge. He then fixed Kelly's sweeper.....replaced the switch and a couple crimp connections.....all for less than $5. She's going to owe me big-time!
We heard that Houston set a record today with the high of 85. It isn’t too tough to live in this temperature in November no less.

Wednesday, November 24 – We did a little window shopping this afternoon at Ikea.  We are considering replacing one of the sofa’s with a chair and footstall and wanted to see what Ikea had available.

We passed this AWESOME looking motorhome.  Somebody did a tremendous job rebuilding this wonderful relic from the past!

 

We went to Lowes to buy a Christmas tree and this is what we found.







Marsha went crazy. It just doesn’t seem like Thanksgiving with temperatures in the 80s.

Paul is getting into the season spirit.



We did manage to wade through all the beautiful flowers and find Kelly a Christmas tree.  Kelly mentioned that we use to wade through snow to cut our tree….now we’re in shorts and t-shirts at Lowes…..lol.

We wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see y’all back real soon. Have a great day!