Final Day in Texas

After a much needed relaxing night in our hotel, my final day in Texas had come. On today's agenda: EXPLORE! It was just me and Mom today, with lots of time before our flight back to Las Vegas so we planned to go explore downtown Dallas.

After some quick breakfast from Einstein's, we were ready for a full day of adventures. We began our exploring in the West End Historic District. Here we visited the Old Red Museum and most excitingly, we visited the assassination site of late president JFK in Dealey Plaza. The pictures simply tell our story for the day, so I will allow them to do the talking..

The Old School Book Depository 

The 6th floor window where the fatal shot was fired.

The 'X' in the street is when Pres. JFK was hit

 After about an hour of walking around downtown Dallas, we were D.O.N.E. done! It was so hot and super humid, we both had headaches and wanted nothing more than to just walk around an air conditioned mall. While making our way to a mall, we stumbled across an old Catholic church in the heart of the Dallas Arts District. After driving by this church, we decided that we had to go in! Of course, God works in mysterious way and a mid-day mass happened to be going on, so we stuck around for a while. This church was amazing to say the least!

the front door

After mass we had some time to kill before our flight, so we headed to what we thought was just a normal mall.. well we made yet another mistake! We ended up in the fanciest, most expensive mall EVER! Sooooo, we had lunch, window shopped and headed to the airport!

By this time, we were happy enough to just be in the air conditioning! All in all, I had an awesome experience in Texas. If I could sum up the parts of Texas that I saw it would be the "Three C's": cows, churches and cemeteries. Oh Man! Did I see a lot of cows, churches and cemeteries!

The road trip was something I would only do once in my life, but definitely worth it. And after finally being in Texas for myself, I actually understand why so many people love it there!

Road Trip to Texas - Day 3

I woke up Sunday morning extremely excited for the day! Day 3 was the last of our driving and we only had a 2 hour drive from Fort Worth to Bremond, TX - easy day, right?! Wrong. Mom was in town with us now, so I took the first available moment to jump in the car with her and not into Alex's truck. I mean come on 19 hours of alone twin time was enough!!

After 2 hours we made it to Alex's new home for the summer! Beautiful Bremond, TX has a whopping population of 929 - well actually now 930.  [If anyone is wondering it is pronounced bree - MAHND!] 

Disclaimer: I pronounced Bremond wrong in this video. I was educated on correct pronunciation later on in the day.

Alex moved into his new home for the summer - the River Rock Inn where he lives with a couple other guys who also work at the coal mine he is interning at. At this "hotel" he has his own bedroom, bathroom and shares a kitchen with the rest of the guest who live there. After a quick move in, we needed to buy him some groceries for the next couple months, but the only store in Bremond is the Family Dollar, so we had to travel another 2 hours to College Station, TX for a grocery store. We loaded into the car for our trip to the grocery store. If you're keeping track we have now driven a total of 21 hours to Bremond, now 4 more hours for a round-trip to the grocery store, with a now grand total of 25 hours. 

In the Rios family, if we are in a city where there is a Cracker Barrel, then a stop is a must; how can you not resist those biscuits!! So after some delicious biscuits, my mom really wanted to experience a "local Texas supermarket", so we were directed to "H-E-B". The saying "everything is bigger in Texas" is an understatement - this grocery store put any local supermarket in Las Vegas to shame. Anything and everything Alex needed, they had it!

Fast forward a couple hours and we were back in Bremond saying our final goodbyes.

After our goodbyes, mom and I were on our way back to Dallas. Yep, you guessed it.. 2 more hours = grand total of 27 hours. 

After what seems like FOREVER we had finally made it to our hotel in Downtown Dallas! We were staying at the Omni Hotel and after a long day of traveling we decided to just stay in and enjoy our hotel. We ordered room service, took baths in the huge bathtub and enjoyed a beautiful view. 

 One more day and my Texas adventure ends -- stay tuned!

All the love, Em

Road Trip to Texas - Day 2

7 A.M. sharp - that annoying phone alarm started ringing... snooze... 10 minutes later it went off again... snooze... another 20 minutes later we finally started to get our lazy butts out of bed and get started on the long day ahead of us. Our "brother" [he's just a friend but seems more like family] and his girlfriend were awesome hosts and already had breakfast ready for us by the time we hit our 3rd snooze alarm! We ate breakfast and started on the 10 hour journey of the day.

S/O to our great host, Alex! 

Today's journey looked a little like this:

The first stop on our journey was the gas station. Alex and I definitely had the most fun at this tiny Route 66 gas station in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You may be thinking, "why in the h-e-double hockey sticks would we have so much fun at the gas station?" Well the answer to that is: SCRATCHERS. 

And here is a little background story. Growing up, we drove to San Diego with our parents a lot to spend time with our family. Every single time we stopped in Victorville for gas and the bathroom, our dad would buy each of us Scrathers. We found so much joy in scratching the card the to see if we won any money, so Alex and I decided that we had to continue the tradition. Considering that you have to be 21 in Arizona to buy lottery tickets we couldn't play there, but once we reached New Mexico we bought those tickets in full force!

Anyways, at that first gas station in New Mexico we first started off buying $5 worth of cards, so two $2 cards and a $1 card. And we won on every one! So naturally, we went back in the gas station and traded them in for more cards instead of cash. This process repeated itself 6 times!! After wasting almost 30 minutes at the gas station, we finally decided to cash the last winning ones so that we could actually start our 10 hour drive. We now had a "pot" full of money just to play the lottery with.

After a couple of hours of driving through New Mexico, we had FINALLY reached Texas!!

Even Alex decided that we needed to stop and take a picture with the Texas sign!

We had finally reached where we were most excited for!! For about 10 minutes I was soooo excited to be in Texas, but that definitely faded after I saw absolutely nothing around me.. 

We even saw a tractor driving down the highway.. my stereotypes of Texas were confirmed by this sighting.

Before we left on our trip, I had told some people that I was bringing my selfie stick along to document our trip.. and I wasn't lying. However, I ran into a major problem. The selfie stick was deader than a door nail and no charger at the gas station would charge it. I was really, really, really disappointed but I made it work. So I made my selfie stick and already crack iphone 6 into a makeshift GoPro.

And this was the finished product..

The 18 rubber bands were on and the time had come.. while we were driving around 80mph I braced myself, said a little prayer, rolled down the window.. and stuck it out the window and these were the results.

After I did this and was going through all of the pictures and videos of the trip, I realized that I just filmed us in the truck, but no scenery... I know, I know, dumb!!

Anyways,

Besides miles and miles of cows and grass there wasn't too much excitement in day 2 of our road trip. We of course stopped at multiple gas stations to buy Scrathers and lottery tickets, stopped for lunch and Starbucks and that is it! Around 7 pm we had finally made it to our hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, where we were staying the night. Also, that night our mom flew into Fort Worth and joined us for the rest of our journey. It wasn't too eventful of a day, but it was really cool to see a different part of our country.

Well, that concludes day 2 - stay tuned for day 3! 

All the love, Em

Road Trip to Texas - Day 1

Okay people, it's time to play catch up!

Between working two jobs, working out with a trainer 4x a week, spending lots of time with family, attending youth group and attempting to maintain a social life, this summer hasn't left me with a lot of time to blog about my various adventures. However with all of that being said, I did get the opportunity this summer to take my first ever road trip!

On Friday, June 5th, my twin brother, Alex, and I embarked on a journey from Las Vegas, NV to Bremond, Texas. Alex was lucky enough to receive a mining engineering intern position at a coal mine in Bremond and in my opinion, I was even luckier to get to join him on 3 of the 4 day drive!

First of all, meet Alex. Like I said before, Alex is my twin brother who attends the University of Nevada, Reno. His passion is engineering and is currently studying Mining Engineering. He obviously has the brains in the family [which he loves to brag about] and I am super proud of him and all he has accomplished!

ANYWAYS,

On day 1 of our trip, we drove 8 hours from Vegas to Albuquerque, New Mexico. In this leg of the trip, we drove through Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. I was so surprised that there was a change in scenery almost every hour!

Technically, the first state we drove through was Nevada for about 45 minutes, buuttt nothing new there! 

So we begin with Arizona:

 First, all that was around was desert... and absolutely nothing else. 

After about two hours of driving in AZ we hit a major scenery change -  TREES!

This video was taken while driving through Flagstaff before we hit a HUGE rainstorm.

After lunch we continued driving through Arizona and came across a town called Winslow, Arizona. Does that sound familiar to anyone?! If you're an "oldies junkie," or in my case you live with "oldies junkies" than you guessed it! The Eagles mentioned this little town in their 1977 song "Take It Easy". Since Alex was in full control of this road trip he thought it would be cool to take a little pit stop and find that Corner in Winslow, Arizona. 

P.S. If you aren't an oldies junkie the lyrics go a little like this:

"Well, I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona
and such a fine sigh to see
It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed For slowin' down to take a look at me"

You can't really tell from these pictures, but oh man did it pour! By the time we got out of the car, snapped a few pictures, and ran back, we were soaked!! We continued to drive in this crazy storm where we could barely see the road in front of us, but it eventually stopped and God graced us with this beautiful and full rainbow.

As we continued on our journey, we had finally reached New Mexico! I was most excited for this part of the day because I had never been to New Mexico. [Number 1 thing to do on my Bucket List is to visit all 50 states and I got to cross off 2 in this trip!!]  New Mexico had such a different scenery than I had ever seen. The mountains were beautiful, but unfortunately it started to get dark and our LONG 8 hours was finally coming to an end!!

We were lucky enough to stay with our "brother", have something other than fast food and a nice place to stay. :) 

Stay tuned tomorrow for Day 2 of my Road Trip to Texas!

All the Love, Em

From Grand Canyon University to the Grand Canyon

After a long week of work and school, Tina and I decided that we just needed a day trip out of town. to get away from everything. A day to relax, have long talks and of course our favorite: EXPLORE! We both wanted to go somewhere we had never been and we decide what better place to go than The Grand Canyon. So our adventurous selves packed some snacks, grabbed our selfie stick and was on the road for another ADVENTURE! However, we didn't exactly check the weather before we left... I mean every time I've ever seen a picture of the Grand Canyon there was never snow, so we when we pulled up and it was snowing, surprised and freezing was an understatement. But of course Tina and I can never take the easy road so we wrapped up in some extra blankets and clothes we found in the back of my car and were on our way.

Some hot coffee was a MUST in order to keep the warm thoughts going!

Our selfie stick came in soooo handy!!

Every adventure of ours is not complete without stopping at a random diner in a small town to have french fries with ranch. This ritual was complete in Williams, AZ right on Historic Route 66. 

Our next adventure starts March 14th! We will be taking on San Diego, CA for an entire week! 

SPRING BREAK HERE WE COME!!!

All the Love, Em