Category: Trips

William and I are headed to Cleveland for Christmas. We are at the airport, but already have a 2 hour weather delay.  It appears that several of the Continental flights are on a 2 hour delay.  William and I should have learned out lesson 2 years ago when we tried to go to Jacksonville via Continental, but our flight got canceled and we had to abort the whole trip.  We should have listened to William’s mom and booked American.  Fortunately, today’s flight is a direct flight to Cleveland, so we should be ok, but I think we are giving up on Continental (although we had a bad experience with American on our honeymoon).  No airline is perfect I guess (although I have had very good experiences on Frontier Airlines to Denver thus far with the exception of 1 delay).  While in Cleveland, we will also be celebrating my mom’s 60th birthday!! (she is not bashful about her age). I am sure we will have lots of pictures to post after the weekend.
We wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!

I’ve added more photos to the set from Thanksgiving. These include us putting Christmas decorations.

Kyllan and I spent Thanksgiving in Dallas. My parents and her sister’s family joined us for dinner on Thursday. Here is a link to some photos.

My parents recently took  a trip to South Africa. Below are some comments my mom made about the trip. I was hoping to link to some photos of the trip, but my father hasn’t bothered to upload them yet. I am going to stay on him. Maybe we will see some soon.

We [Bill and Betty] returned from South Africa last week [now three weeks ago] on Monday, October 27th from an eleven day trip.  It was a wonderful trip.  We went with a delegation representing Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity.  We visited Johannesburg, Sun City (which is a resort city), and Cape Town.  Our trip included a visit to an elementary school and an orphanage.  The group took school supplies to the school and made monetary contributions to the orphanage.  This was the second trip to South Africa for Bill and me.  We were happy to see the growth there since our visit in 2001.  New buildings were going up everywhere and there were lots of street expansions.  Bill had a chance to play golf in Cape Town.  We visited a winery and brought back two bottles of wine.   We visited four museums that explained different aspects of struggles and endurance by the people before and during apartheid.  We saw lively and colorful entertainment and enjoyed several authentic South African meals.  We visited Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent most of his prison time.  We went to the top of Table Mountain and  enjoyed the spectacular view.Our tour included a botanical garden, and the group even took a safari.  We celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary in South Africa.  It was a day we will always remember, it ended with a candle light steak dinner with our group.  There were champagne toasts and  dancing.  Some members of our group arranged for the pianist to play two love songs just for us.  People in South Africa were very excited about our then up coming election.  I know they celebrated on November 4th with the rest of the world.

This past weekend, Kim, Drew and I went to Cleveland to visit the fam, and more importanly… see the new kitchen!! It was sad we had not seen it in person yet, so we finally got to bask in the wonderfulness of it. Drew had such a good time that he wanted to “stay in Cleveland until Christmas.” I think he enjoyed being around his cousins. We were only there a short time, but we got to see almost all of the fam, except my aunt and uncle who were out of town. We also got to meet the newest addition to the family, Tristan (my cousin Terrance’s youngest daughter), who is soooo adorable. We got the chance to see my mom’s new school building as well, which is MUCH improved from the previous building. Being in the cold weather reminded me why I like Texas so much, but it was nice to see the fall foliage.  To see all the pictures from the weekend, click here to visit my Flickr page.