Texas in April

I spent a few days with my parents in the last week…celebrating my mom’s birthday and attending my first ever NBA game to watch the Atlanta Hawks destroy the Houston Rockets during the last game of the regular season with my brother, Craig, and his family. Unexpected surprise was that Hakeem Olajuwon was in the house. That made the Rockets’ loss a bit more palatable. I took my time getting to my parents’ house driving down there from Omaha. I took the road less travelled and hit several country gravel roads because they just looked inviting off the highway. I usually have pretty good luck on these roads. I can go as fast or as slow as I like and take my time looking around and stopping for photos. These off-the-highway excursions didn’t disappoint. I even found an intact animal skull amongst the blue bonnets on the side of a country road that I put in a gallon zip lock bag and brought home to Lily. Yep…no hair bows for that girl….an animal skull is more her cup of tea. Her high school science teacher helped her figure out that it was a pig skull and he thought it was “quite a find!”. At least someone thinks I am cool. I showed it to my nephew, Alex, and he was not as impressed. He couldn’t believe I touched it, let alone picked it up to bring it back with me. Lily and Rich have been soaking and cleaning it so Lily can do something with it…yet to be decided. One of the days I was in Houston, I packed up my mom and dad into my car and took them on an outing to go find some Texas wildflowers. Bluebonnets were on my bucket list to photograph, and they bloomed really late this year, so I was able to get them at their peak. There were also fields of Indian Paintbrush (orange flowers), coreopsis (the yellow flowers – also called tickseed), and a pretty light pink flower called evening primrose. I also found a beautiful bunch of lavender wisteria. That was gorgeous and smelled so good…but attracted a lot of bees! My parents had only really seen the bluebonnets on the side of the road in patches over the last 8 years of them living in Texas. I did some research on good places to go and we found huge fields full of flowers. It was a nice drive and beautiful scenery. Another photo bucket list item checked off! So my next few posts will all be photo dumps mainly….so be patient with me.