Austin's first snow day in who knows how many years

Feb. 4, the entire city of Austin took a snow day off, including us.

Dinosaurs and our first family vacation

In February, we took Julian and Avery on our first family vacation and learned more about traveling as a family of four than we did about the dinosaurs whose fossils we had traveled to see.

Glen Rose, just southwest of Fort Worth, is a super fun place to bring kids. Dinosaur fossils have been found in a creek bed near the city, and the whole place has gone a little dino-crazy, which makes for a fun weekend getaway.

We stayed at a cabin whose primary feature was a hot tub and a nearby fishing pond, where Ian caught his first fish in a very long time. He's been carrying around a rod, reel and tackle on the past few trips, but he hadn't caught anything until this trip.

Look at those curls!

 

One of the most interesting parts of this dinosaur park is the giant sculptures that greet you at the entrance. The two dinosaurs are a tyrannosaur and a brontosaur, because back when the sculptures were created, scientists didn't know as much about dinosaurs and they thought that the tracks near Glen Rose were from these animals. Come to find out, not only are the tracks made by entirely different animals, the T-rex and the brontosaur lived 40 million years apart. 40 million years. That's a long freaking time.

They decided to leave the sculptures as a reminder that science is always changing and we're always learning more.

So what did we learn, that didn't have to do with dinosaurs? That sleeping in a hotel with a 4-year-old and a 5-month-old is not fun for anyone. That not even dinosaur footprints in the bottom of a riverbed will convince a cranky Julian to get out of the car. That we can travel for 3 hours in a tightly packed car without a meltdown.

(The trusty Corolla, still going strong after all these years. We're pushing 190,000 miles, and knock on wood, we'll make it to 200,000 without incident.)

It was a challenging trip, but fun nonetheless. We needed a break from Austin, especially ahead of SXSW. I covered the technology festival for the paper and got to enjoy some of the music part with Ian. It's always a crazy busy time of year, and honestly, I think it takes Austinites a month to recover.

What have we been doing in the meantime? Chickens! (Post coming soon.)