Texas Vacation

We just returned a few days ago from my family's yearly Texas Family Reunion. We always have such a great time, and needless to say, Jared and I were desperate for some sort of vacation, so the timing was awesome. We were able to visit with family and the boys got to play with their only cousins, which they haven't seen in 2 years, so they didn't really remember each other.
I think we rode on just about every sort of mode of transportation that week possible. We rode in a car, on an airplane, boat, jet ski, train, bus, four wheel, and EZ Go (golf cart).

This is us on our way from our grandparents to Lake Murray in Northern Texas/ Oklahoma.

Here are most of the little kiddos, minus a cousin. The girls, Annie and Chloe took a liking to both our boys, but they loved to baby Carson. They just kept loving on him, picking him up and carrying him. In the picture he doesn't seem too opposed. Oh, and the picture that was taken on the rocks, can you Scorpions? I don't know how many scorpions we killed, but several. I didn't sleep very well at nighttime scared there were little buggies in bed with us. Ugh.
Papa Nobles and Carson.

One of the days we were at the Lake, my cousin talked us into going to this drive-thru zoo called Arbuckle Wilderness. It was the craziest thing I have ever been to in the avenue of zoo's. You know how you watch those hilarious clips on America's Funniest Home videos of the people in their cars at these zoos, well I wish I would have had a video camera because we all just about peed our pants at several different times during our excursion. We had Goats practically climbing into our car, Camel's that stuck their heads into our car and stole our cups of food, drueling (?) Giraffe's that got slobber all over us, and as for the Ostrich's - well we rolled up our windows and sped on past them. We had such a great time.

As an ending to our vacation, we were just about in the midst of a tornado. We were told there was a 20% chance of storms Saturday evening. Well, I'm not totally sure who was in charge of the forecast for the day, but they probably ought to be looking for a job elsewhere going from 20% chance of RAIN to a massive thunder and lightening storm and tornadoes. I should probably preface this by saying ever since I was a little girl, I have feared that while I was in Texas there would be a tornado. Well, we saw the rain clouds start moving in and I didn't think much of it until we were at my grandparents and my uncle drove in and said we needed to turn on the news for tornado updates. I figured he had to be joking, but when I went outside across the way, sure enough the sky was that sea green color, the wind had picked up and there were funnel clouds starting to form, several of them and they were heading straight towards us. The wind started blowing so hard it was fiercely splashing water from the pool. It was a sight to be seen for me.
Thankfully, eventually the storm lessened as it passed, but we received a message about 1 am on Jared's phone that our 8:50 flight was canceled the following morning and not re-scheduled until almost 48 hours later and I love my grandparents, but I did not want to stay in Texas any longer after the storm. I wanted my own home and bed. We ended up flying into a different airport and taking a shuttle to our car an hour away. But, we are home and getting ready for Jared's parents who will be driving in tomorrow from AZ.