We were excited to return to the U.S, the first return trip for Mike and the girls, to spend some quality time with family and friends. Our social schedule was jam packed the first week in SugarLand and Houston. Andy and Kaya came in from Austin, Uncle Hoyt and Aunt Teresa came in from Arkansas, and my best friends from high school all came into Houston (with kids this time!).
The morning after landing, we met Kristiane, Rissa, Jess, and Scott at the Houston Zoo. It was fun to see the kids all running around together at the same place that we used to skip school together (only once mom!). Crowd favorites were the sea lions and seals (classic), giraffes, and penguins.
The Amazon Girl's Girls 💚
Matching cousins! We got some really good cousin time with K in her element at Nana CCs...
...and at Meow Wolf Houston. My brother Andy is a big fan of Meow Wolf, and he has made it a point to visit each one as they open across the country. We loved the one in Santa Fe that we visited together on December vacation a few years back so I was excited to check out the Houston one with Andy, who knows a lot about the backstory and reads up on the process behind each Meow Wolf. My favorite part of the Houston Meow Wolf was a galactic honkey tonk bar with a Dolly themed character. There was a steady stream of original country music playing, interrupted every few minutes by the lights going off, deafening heavy metal playing, and positive affirmations in glow in the dark paint written on the walls like, "Tell your mom you love her!"
Scott! It had been way too long since I've seen him, and it was so nice to see him and walk through the aisles of HEB together. We hung out at Kristiane's house, ate delicious take out from Aga's, and met up at a neighborhood pool the next day while the girls spent some quality time with Nana CC. I don't have any photo evidence, but Kris and I went to see the broadway show "Parade." I dearly miss theater down here, so it filled my soul to see a show (especially with Kris), even a deeply depressing one.
To celebrate Opa's 78th birthday (!!), we went to see a musical review show of 1960s and 70s music. Like a proper old person, he fell asleep during the only harder rock song of the show, a Led Zeppelin cover. Highlights of our time in SugarLand included multiple bike-rides a day (Kaya learned to ride and came with us), hours of reading and playing, delicious food (stone fruits! berries! queso!), haircuts for everyone, puzzles and games, and meeting awesome new family members (Aunt Theresa, Uncle Hoyt's wife).
After a week in Houston, we drove to Austin to see friends and check in on the house. Jenna and Tal were so kind to let us stay at their house, since Mike needed to go back and forth to our house to manage some repairs from the storm in the spring and oversee the building of a new shed (the last one was crushed by a tree).
Biking and Barton night swim Rumspringa with Tina and Marisa!
Austin highlights: libraries, friends, biking, public pools, parks, Rumspringas, and more friends.
Even though our school down in Costa Rica has an incredible librarian and a growing library, one of the things we miss the most is access to free books and the magic of libraries. So this summer we spent many an hour biking to Austin libraries and reading. It makes my heart happy that S still deeply loves to read, especially after persevering through a few tough years of daily dyslexia reading fluency practice at home and school.
Another highlight of our time in Austin: meeting up with our old Kealing coworkers and friends. We're loving our positions down here, but the coworker relationships can't compare to 18 years of shared trauma bonding!
We also really miss camping and the dry mountains of the American West, so the plan after Austin was to head to New Mexico for a week of camping and adventure. We landed at Kiran and Slider's in Santa Fe, and they hosted us for a few awesome days of drum sessions and rain dances with Revi, trail runs (or walks in my case) and bike rides, and a trip to the ABQ kids museum. We didn't get as much time with Linds and Trav's crew this time unfortunately.
One of our goals was to take the girls on their first backpacking trip. We wanted it to be an easy and beautiful hike so they weren't put off of backpacking forever, so we asked around and did some research and landed on leaving from the Holy Ghost Campground Group Site in the Santa Fe National Forest.
After a beautiful night at the campground, we headed out on the trail. We knew P wouldn't be able to carry much, especially with her oversized backpack that didn't fit around her waste, so we loaded her up with clothes and her sleeping bag. About a quarter of a mile in, we had removed everything from her bag but her sleeping bag.
Sisters on the trail.
One of the only people we ran into on the trail was a kind photographer who asked us if she could make a photo of all us. You can't tell in this photo, but the wildflowers were popping everywhere and it was beautiful.
After about 2 miles with lots of snack stops, poop stops, and lunch stops, we found an incredible little site right next to a frigid clear stream and waterfall.
Within minutes, the clothes were off and the day moons rose. This is our tent site next to the stream. For the rest of the day we made nature art, frolicked in the stream, cooked dinner, enjoyed a fire, and went to bed late since the sun wasn't setting until around 9:00. We're so used to it being dark at 6:00 everyday that the sun was an adjustment.
Since we were hoping to ease in, we only stayed out one night. The next day we ate breakfast and hiked back out the same way we came in.
Mike and the girls huddling for warmth. It wasn't as cold as it looks, but P wanted to get full use of all the clothes she brought and so put them all on.
Breakfast under a Ponderosa pine. The best!
After we got back to the car we drove back to Sarah and Kiran's to pick up our bikes and then headed straight for the Jemez Mountains, one of our favorite places. We booked a campsite at Fenton Lake State Park hoping that there would be running water for showers, but no such luck!
So we did our old trusty baby wipe bath with a hot water rinse; much needed as P shows here.
The next morning we ate a delicious breakfast and then drove to San Antonio hot springs. We biked from the parking lot to the hot springs to cut down on the hiking distance.
San Antonio hot springs were amazing, with 6-7 different pools of different temperatures cascading down the side of the mountain and built up with rocks.
The view wasn't bad either.
After the hot springs, we drove to Valle Caldera National Monument. On the drive in we saw 3-4 coyotes hunting prairie dogs. We also spotted the giant herd of elk that frequently graze in the caldera, and then went on a short bike ride down one of the dirt roads.
S practiced a lot of dirt road driving this summer; the Cactus Killer equally excited and terrified her.
On the drive from Jemez Springs back to ABQ, there are so many cool places to stop. Natural hot springs, geothermal features like Soda Dam (above), and ranger info stations.
We drove straight to my friends Mo's house in ABQ (famous from such blog posts as "Girls Gone to the Gila") , and got one awesome but too short day and night hanging with them, eating delicious food (from their garden), and getting a preview of the capital improvements they are making to "our house". Right now, ABQ and New Mexico is on our short list of places in the U.S. that we might want to live in, and they make it pretty damn tempting!
But we were very eager to return to Houston to get more family time with the cousins and Nana, so we drove straight through the day and night to get back to Spring. The next few days were full of cousin fun, arts and crafts, shopping, packing suitcases and bikes, and taking care of things we can't (or are hard to) take care of in Costa Rica.
This is probably the last time S will fit in the Jeep...the end of an era.
We went to a delicious Indian food restaurant near Nana after she bought them matching dresses.
Dave and Ellie are always so welcoming with their space, so we took full advantage of the cousin's pool.
Another trip to Sloomoo with the older cousins!
Back home in Costa Rica, with all of our bikes. Game changer!
It was hard to say goodbye, but it helped ease the blow that both my parents and Mike's family were planning on coming down during the upcoming December break. Still, the hardest part of living in Costa Rica is being so far from family and friends so I was nervously anticipating the return.
Would we want to return to Costa Rica, or would we want to stay in the U.S? Would we struggle with readjusting like we did when we moved here, since we'd been in the States for so long?
It turns out that while everyone was very sad about leaving family and friends again, we were all excited to get back to our life in Costa Rica. S wanted to return to La Paz and couldn't wait for school to start again and see her friends. P had a tougher transition back since her bestie moved back to the States without warning and she didn't get to say goodbye, but she was excited to get back to the beauty and nature. Mike and I were eager to get back to redouble our efforts to learn Spanish, teach new subjects and grade levels at La Paz, explore this beautiful part of the world, and continue building relationships with the lovely people we're meeting.
It definitely felt like there was a shift when we returned. The permanent vacation that we felt we were on last year settled into something more resembling a more sedentary life. When we say "back home in Texas" now, the girls correct us. Not sure for how long, but for the foreseeable future, they are right.
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