Happy New Year! We rang in 2017 with cousins on their farm in Nebraska. We aimed for playing cards all night! Well, we nearly did. Loren and I went to bed after 2:30 am, the latest we have stayed up on a New Year’s Eve for several years now. It was a very fun evening!
It was so good to be with these precious people again. Our weekend visit included going along to do a few farm chores…
to Loren playing basketball and throwing the baseball with one cousin and his teens. It also included time to play with the dogs, attend church, visit other family farmhouses, and, play more cards.
We were lucky in that the Nebraska winter was mild, until after we left! So driving to and from the farm was easy. Our next drive day took us from Nebraska, through Kansas and Oklahoma, to Texas, and we were again lucky with the winter weather for driving.
Starting in Fort Worth, we had a lovely dinner visit with more cousins. It was too short a time, yet most memorable, and for that I am thankful. That is my Mom, second from the left as an attendant in the wedding photo, and, the photo of four generations including my great-grandmother looks so very similar to another one that was taken of her, my grandmother, my Mom, and me. These are only some of the four generation relationships that my great-grandmother was a part of during her 100 years of life.
The Arctic cold snap that was predicted in Nebraska arrived in Texas too. Karen told us that they had been wearing shorts the day before, but for now it has turned bone chilling cold. In Dallas, Loren and I went to see the George W. Bush Presidential Center located at Southern Methodist University. It was very cold here too, nothing like Loren had envisioned of Texas.
The next day, in the city called College Station we toured the George H.W. Bush Presidential Museum at Texas A&M University. It was still very cold.
Now we are in Austin and have seen the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library at the University of Texas. As LBJ was in office when we were both quite young, Loren and I learned a lot about what life in the world was like during his Presidency.
Still in Austin we have taken a Bikram Yoga class, and plan to do so on each of the next few days. It is also cold here, but, the yoga studio staff assured us, even if the weather is predicted to be bad, it is always good weather on Sundays in Austin. We will see…
In the meantime, Loren and I wish you a wonderful, happy, healthy, healing year, 2017!
