Road Trip Days 8-10

Day 8: June 15

Today, we drove (and by we, I mean J). 9 hours. I slept 1 hour. We got to Arlington/Grand Prairie around 6 o'clock, checked into our hotel,

Can you guess what hotel we went to?

& immediately started to do research on where to eat nearby. We found a place online and put the address in our GPS. Yeah, apparently, we didn't have to do that. It was in the same shopping center area as our hotel. Good thing we kept that secret to ourselves; how embarrassing!

It was a buffet line of ingredients. You got to fill 2 bowls with anything you wanted. Then, 2 guys put the ingredients on a screaming hot "flat top" to "stir-fry" your food. They even had a board telling you how much of each of the provided liquids you needed to make your food hot, medium, or mild. It wasn't that bad! I just put Siracha sauce all over my stir-fry after it was cooked. =)

Then, we got in touch with our friends from college, changed clothes, and drove 40 minutes to Plano (north of Dallas) to hang out with them. Let's just say we had a good time & loved catching up. =) We left Plano at 3:15am. =(

Day 9: June 16
We woke up at 1pm. That's what happens when you get back to your hotel room at 4am. (don't tell mom!) We got dressed and walked across the parking lot to IHOP. Pancakes sounded really good after a late night with friends.

Then, we went back to the hotel to change into our Rangers shirts & headed off to the game.

Someone was excited!

We got to the game 2 hours early. Dallas Cowboy Stadium is really close by!

So we could watch batting practice & get the free shirt they were giving to the first 25k fans. Don't worry, we both got that one AND we both filled out a quick survey to get another free shirt each. =)

Our seats were in the outfield so we were able to try and catch a few balls before the game started. They only problem was that it felt like 100 degrees & we were sweating buckets within 5 minutes! Amazingly, we didn't get sunburned! The only consequence was that I got a blister on my elbow from resting it on the metal armrest for too long. Grr!

The lady sitting behind us noticed me taking pictures & offered to take some of us with home plate in the background. She said she had the same camera as me so the pictures turned out great!

The game was actually pretty good. As I predicted, once the Astros' bullpen came in, the Rangers started winning. They were down 3-0 and scored 5 runs in one inning to take the lead. The 3-run homer hit was only one section away from us!

This is the Cruz homerun swing! I was taking pictures "just in case" he hit one!

Final score!

Day 10: June 17 (Father's Day)
We got up, ate breakfast at the hotel, and started driving around 9:30. We saw 2 new license plates. Our total was 34 different state sightings, 3 were not documented, only 5 are on 18-wheelers.

How cool is this?! I made it with all the plates we saw!

We got back to Houston at 12:30, just in time to say bye to Mom as she left for Kid's Camp, hop in brother's car with him & Dad, and go to Uncle P & Aunt M's for a Father's Day BBQ.