No Basement in The Alamo

This weekend found us in San Antonio at our Company picnic. We packed everyone from the image below (Jess, Steve, Me, Tica, Ricardo, Sylvia, & Gerardo) into the StolpeMobile at 9:30 in the morning and headed out.

At most companies this would have been a very boring affair, but not with NI. They rented out the entire Six Flags in San Antonio for employees and their friends/family only. The cost was $5 per employee and included the rides, lunch, and all the fountain drinks you could down in an 8 hour period.

To say it was awesome would be a gross understatement – especially when you take into account the longest line I waited in for any ride was 15 minutes and that was only because I insisted on riding in the very front. (I wanted to see the “super drop” on the Superman roller coaster from the front.) Here’s a picture of Tica with the "super drop" in the background.

It was really fun knowing pretty much everyone at the park, drinking way too much PowerAde and Diet Coke while riding 12 roller coasters in less than 6 hours! Though it's sad that I’ll never be able to go to another amusement park again because now I have experienced life without lines and can never go back to the drudgery of waiting.

Finally, no trip to San Antonio would be complete without stopping by The Alamo. We headed there after the park, found there to be no basement, and finished off the evening at a Mexican restaurant on the River Walk.

Just Say No to Hurricanes

So, by now, I'll assume you've heard that hurricane Ike WAS going to hit Austin, but missed us completely. I guess that's OK considering the damage it caused to the other places it hit, but Tica and I were really looking forward to the rain. Plus, if it hit us, that would have been the second time Tica was hit by Ike since she met up with him while she was in the DR last week.

So since there was no hurricane to deal with I decided to work on the side yard a bit more. Last week I rented a bob cat and my friend Steve and I dug up about 40 200 - 300 pound boulders to level out the wash area next to the side of my house. Here's a photo of the work. I'm still planning on putting a little more top soil on the dirt area you see in the picture and planting some grass seed. Tica's still not convinced that the grass seed will work - even after seeing Mom's success with it.

After the yard work, we had some friends over to the house for some arepas - a very delicious Venezuelan dish that one of our friends from work made. They were amazing! I was going to include a photo of them, but they were eaten way too quickly for any photography.

We also took the time to visit the Oasis restaurant on Lake Travis. It's a pretty cool spot that sits up on some cliffs above the lake and provides some amazing views of the sunset. In fact, you could say that it is the #1 restaurant to view sunsets in Austin.

We still had the remenants of Ike hanging around, so we didn't get to see too much of the sunset, but it was still very pretty.