memorial day weekend

We had a great time spending the long weekend with my parents and Jordan. It had almost been two months since we'd been back to Houston so it was nice to get out of Austin for a bit. The whole weekend was spent eating out, watching movies, shopping, and enjoying one another's company. We also brought our truck and helped Jordan move out of his apartment, which meant that it was a bit of a bumpy ride for us to and from Houston. Haha I like the truck, but the Honda Fit is so much smoother! 

If you haven't heard, Texas has been having some pretty serious thunderstorms and flooding for the past month or so. It's been really annoying because you can feel summer is coming and you want to enjoy the warm weather, but you can't because it's ALWAYS raining. And there really is no end in sight to it either. They've predicted a very rainy summer for us here in Texas. 

So as we were getting ready to head back to Austin Monday evening, we knew that we would probably end up driving through some rain. But about halfway through the drive, we both started getting weather warnings on our phones saying "Extreme weather: Tornado warning until 7:15 pm. Take cover immediately." Scary!! It hadn't started raining yet, but we could see we were heading towards some very ominous dark clouds. We were both pretty nervous and thought about pulling over several times, but ultimately Zach decided it would be best to just drive through it and get it over with--especially because we were heading in the opposite direction the storm was moving in. So we drove on and then the rains started. It was honestly some of the worst rain I've ever driven through. We had to drive really slowly and eventually decided to pull over for a bit. After about 35 minutes, we were through the storm and, boy, were we relieved! We feel really lucky that we didn't end up in a worse situation because we later found out there had been severe flooding in Austin due to that same storm and it did even more damage later that night when it eventually hit Houston. 

But the craziness didn't end there! When we were about 30 minutes from home, the traffic came to a complete stop. There were lots of police cars up ahead and we were unable to move forward more than a few feet for over an hour!!! It was crazy! And we were so ready to get home! We figured there had been a pretty bad accident for the traffic to have been that slow. But when we finally started moving and got past where all the cops had been, we realized a river had flooded over the road and nobody could have gotten through. So a trip that should have taken 3 hours, ended up taking over 5. Yuck.

Even though that was kind of a crappy way to end our Memorial Day weekend, it sure was interesting. And we're so grateful we were able to make it home safely back to Austin.

We love our country and we are grateful for all of the many men and women who have sacrificed their lives to defend it. May we never take their serve for granted.