Texas Tumbleweed

Staying at La Torretta Lake Resort & Spa in Montgomery TX is like writing on this blog: no visitors.

Here is my review for TripAdvisor.

Sure, I could have gone on about how inconvenienced the dude serving us at the 19th hole was to have to fetch my mom's tea from the next building over (i.e., a minute walk that should have been transparent to us, his few guests), not to mention the fact that her tea never arrived until we were leaving almost an hour later, and what a buffoon the dude was in general (and he was training the new hire?!)  but I erred on the side of just simply narrating a few of the mishaps.

It was such a wonderful trip overall, I thought, why wax on about one ill-fated lunch?

But I did forget to mention one thing: the fact that the kids could jump over the side of infinity pool to the larger pool below.

"Please, can we??"

"Sure, but wait until Grannie isn't around."

Ghost Town

After last year's nightmare travel to/from the Barbados, we almost didn't go on vacation this year but then we spotted a SniqueAway deal on a fabulous hotel in Texas, La Torretta, and jumped on it. I honestly can't bear the thought of not going away somewhere. I crave adventure. Life's too short, right? Fun. Relaxation. Sunshine. Family. Love. (Very grateful.)

The best part of this trip, aside from the relative proximity of flying to Houston vs. Barbados (via Queens), was that we bookended our fabulous resort stay with a trip to NASA/Houston Space Center on the front-end and the Houston Aquarium, Chocolate Bar, the Shops at Rice University and a wonderful dinner at Prego with our beautiful granddaughter/niece/cousin Leigh on the back-end. What else? We went to the Montgomery County Fair (great for people watching -- Texans are really not like New Yorkers at all) and we bought the hubby a real cowboy hat at Cavender's where we learned (no joke) all about the importance of beaver in the hat body (i.e., where the higher the "X" value, the greater the percentage of beaver in the felt). Who knew? Answer: Willie Nelson, probably.

Since I'm such a sucker for providing feedback, I hope that my TripAdvisor review will be posted soon. In the meantime, I'll leave you with the song that I have been singing since we arrived at our hotel that was bizarrely barren of all tourists. We had the pool, water slides, lazy river, hot tubs, restaurants, and more -- all to ourselves. Eerie. And awesome.

Staycation

There. I used it. Staycation. Thanks to JetBlue, I never want to leave my yard again. Instead, this spring break, we're hanging out with our two new friends: Tiger and Milky (as clearly named by little boys).

Very sad to "replace" Stinky so soon but everyone, bar none, told us it's the best way for kids to heal. So we're healing and bonding and, hopefully, falling in love.