New Ornaments - 2017

When I travel, the only souvenir I buy are Christmas ornaments. (And maybe some other cute thing for my gallery wall.)

Then each year as I'm decorating my Christmas tree, I can reflect on all the fun travels I've had over the years. This year I got a new tree from Target. It's 5.5ft, but I ran out of branches to hang ornaments on, so I think I'll need to get a bigger one in the future! Or maybe just not travel anywhere in the future?

This year, I added quite a few new ornaments. I tried to put them in chronological order, but that didn't work out. So instead, you just get them randomly.

Here is my tree:

I love it so much! I'm biased, but I think it's the prettiest tree ever.

In December I went to Disneyland in California and we did the "Walk in Walt's Footsteps" tour around the park. At the end we got a button for our lanyards (which I don't have cause I'm not a regular), but it's way too heavy for a lanyard and I'm never going to actually wear it as a pin, so I made it an ornament!

I found these really cute ornaments at Michael's on clearance (70% off) a few weeks before Christmas and I loved how they looked vintagy  but tied all of my colors together. And because one of the 12 in the box was broken, I got an additional 15% off!

 

Last year on my drive home from Charleston on New Year's Day.....the super long drive.....I stopped in an antique store somewhere around Rock Hill, SC and got six vintage ornaments. Pictured below is the yellow one, but there's also green and blue. The white stripes are actually white glitter! Love.

In February when Mom and I visited Charleston, we went to see the Angel Oak tree. I had tried to find it back in December, but was unsuccessful. It was a really cool tree and I got this ornament to commemorate our visit. 

When I visited my godsons last weekend to take them their Christmas gifts, the oldest one gave me two ornaments he and his mom made out of salt dough. One was a Block O and one was a snowflake. I love these! :)

When Cara and I visited Texas in June, our first stop in the Lone Star State was the George W. Bush Presidential Library. They didn't have a 2017 ornament yet, so I just ordered this one earlier in December and got it in time for Christmas. President Bush painted this ornament. (Well, the original picture was painted by him.)

While in Dallas we also visited the home of the Ewing family - Southfork Ranch! It was awesome and Cara and I geeked out in all of our Ewing love glory.

My godsons got me this ornament with a picture from the little one's baptism this fall. He got me one last year, too, so I hope we can start an annual ornament exchange!

In July I went to Florida for Alicia's bachelorette party. We stopped in Auburn, Alabama on our way back to Atlanta and I got this ornament. It came in a package of two, but I do not need two ornaments on my tree from that SEC team.

Back in May some of my students went on a study abroad trip to England and one of the girls brought this ornament back for me because she knew I collected ornaments. 

While Molly and I were in California we went to a variety of places on our last day and one of them was the Santa Monica Pier.

On our last day in Texas back in June, we went to the LBJ Presidental Library. For students, it was only $3 to get in! Bargain shopping!

To commemorate my trip to Disneyland, I got this Mickey ornament of Sleeping Beauty's castle.

I cleaned out a bunch of stuff in my bedroom at my parents house while I was home for Christmas/New Years and found this ornament that my grandma painted in 1992! How cute is this? She used to paint all of the time, so I'm glad that I have this. 

 

That's all my ornaments from 2017! One that I didn't add, because I just wasn't ready yet, was something for my grandpa. I know what I want it to be, but just haven't made it happen yet! Maybe for 2018!

My ornaments from other years:
Christmas 2015
Christmas 2013
Christmas 2012

(Apparently I missed a few years!)

Nerd Trip: Day 3 and 4

Six months later, I'll update you on the rest of my Texas trip!

Day 4:
Breakfast at iHop
Dr. Pepper Museum
Drive to Austin
Austin shopping
Texas State Capital
Dinner at The Hula Hut
House Bars

We stayed all night in Waco and our plan was to do the Dr. Pepper Museum and then head to Austin. The DPM didn't open until noon, so we did brunch at IHOP. We had to wait a while, but it was fine. I'm also like 95% sure that the man we saw on Fixer Upper the day before was there at IHOP! He was this adorable WWII vet and we made eye contact several times and he spoke to us as we left the restaurant. I so badly wanted to ask if he was who I thought he was, but I didn't.

I also had a little breakdown at IHOP (sorry Cara!) because we were talking about Dr. Pepper and I was thinking about how it was my favorite pop, and my Papaw's favorite. And then how he would also bring boxes of pop to the house when we were younger. Always a mixture - grape pop, Dr. Pepper, Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, Mt. Dew, Crush. Basically he bought whatever was on sale at Kroger that week and he had a stash in his garage. And I thought of the coolers he'd bring to the fair - also a mix - in the cooler that was broken and wouldn't stay closed, but because he put a dowel rod in the hole where the button was, it worked. We even bought him a new cooler and he continued to use the old one! Gosh, I miss him so much.

The DPM was underwhelming (theme of Waco). There was no tour, just an old house that was a "museum". It was as if I'd printed out facts on my computer and then hung them on my walls with a collection of Dr. Pepper memoriabilia every now and then. Thankfully we got a student discount! The best part of the visit was getting a homemade Dr. Pepper from the soda jerk. It was made with syrup and it was delicious. It tasted a little flat cause it didn't have all of the carbonation, but great.

This was for you Papaw!

We drove to Austin and got checked into our "hotel." The Guild, as it was called, is an apartment complex that rents out some of its fully furnished rooms as hotels. We just stayed there one night, but if we were staying there for multiple days, it would have been awesome. 

We went and walked around at their version of the Short North and went into a handful of shops to look around, including the YETI and Kendra Scott flagship stores. I also made Cara swing by the Texas capital building to grab a few pic and ended up talking her into going inside, which was AMAZING!

Ann Richards - I met her one time at our county Democrat Party dinner.

Did you know that the first female governor for the State of Texas was in 1933! Turns out, her husband was accused of not being a good governor and someone she ran in his place, so he could still be governor without being the one in the position.

Ferguson - are we related?

The rotunda! It was beautiful.

The state seal on the floor.

During the two years I was in Junior League, Cara and I were friends with Jess, who joined at the same time as us. Jess and her hubs moved back to Austin a few years ago and we were able to catch up with her for dinner at the Hula Hut. The service wasn't great, but the company and views were gorgeous!!

Following dinner we went to this street of bars that looked like cute little houses from the outside, then on the inside each of them had a theme. It was called Rainey Street. We were super tired and had not planned on staying out late, plus, it was a Sunday night. So we just walked in a bunch of them to be nosey and then headed back to our cool little apartment we were renting for the night. It was a fully furnished apartment and we wished we would have been able to stay there for multiple nights. And the shampoo they had in the shower dispenser - I don't remember what kind it was, but it was minty and our scalps tingled for hours!

Day 5:
University of Texas - Austin
LBJ Museum
Lunch at The Shady Grove
Waiting at the Airport for hours



Early on Monday morning, we returned our rental car and got an uber ride from a nice man who told us he started driving uber to "save his marriage." He had recently retired and his wife told him he needed to find something to get him out of the house! ha.


He dropped us off at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum. It was so cool. I admitially didn't know much about LBJ before visiting his museum, but now I realize how much he did during his presidency that are important things in today's society - seat belt laws, civil rights, clean air, vocational education, food stamps, housing, childhood nutrition, GI bill, age discrimination, school breakfasts and so much more!

His museum was so cool. It was multiple levels and not as interactive as others, because it was built in the 70's, so no computers, etc. It was very visual though. One exhibit I liked were these old pay phones that you could listen to a variety of phone conversations he had had. He recorded all phone conversations. I listed to the phone call he made to Rose Kennedy after JFK was shot, one a few weeks later to Jackie Kennedy, and so on. We also got to see the Oval Office of his presidency, but we couldn't go in to it, just look from afar.

The outside of the building.

The inside. Those are four levels of his archives.

He was a close talker, so here we are chatting.

I love this quote.

LBJ's oval office.

Bird's office.

Us with LBJ.

After we left the museum, and took a bunch of pics of the water fountain, we walked thru the University of Texas - Austin and then went to lunch at this place called The Shady Grove. It had been one of our options the night before and we had driven by it earlier. It was basically an outdoor restaurant where all of the tables were under a grove of trees. It was beautiful and I'm sure at night it's a lot of fun because they had a stage and a dance/bar area too!

Not my picture, but one of the place a night.

I always take a picture with the "O" in front of other stadiums.

It was during lunch that we found out our flight had been cancelled and we were going to be put on a later flight, which would then make us miss our connection. So we hurried to the airport after lunch to try to get on an even earlier flight. It didn't work. And we ended up being at the airport for days. Just kidding, it was really just a few extra hours. But for real, it was probably 5 hours. But they did give us some chips and baby cups of water.


We did in fact miss our connection in Atlanta and arrived around 1:15am. By the time we exited the plan, walked to the service counter, rebooked a flight for the next morning (7am), got a hotel for the night, walked to the hotel shuttle, waited on the shuttle, rode the shuttle to the hotel, waited to check in, checked in and went to bed, it was almost 3am. We had to be on the shuttle to go back to the airport at 4:45am. (All the annoyed faces.)


We finally got home the next morning and drove to Ripley. I took a shower (and maybe a nap?) and headed back to Columbus!


It was a great little adventure to Texas!