Sister Adventures: A Photographic Journey of Awesomeness

Well, the sisterly adventures of Hannah's visit to Dallas have drawn to a close; I took her to the airport tonight, said goodbye with much weeping (yeah, we were THOSE people in the airport), and just received a text saying that she's landed back in St. Louis.  And, I'm back to the world of homework and general graduate school realities.

Fun fact:  I've been officially offered the internship at the Filipino church for next year!  Two thumbs up for plans coming together!  I'm going to sign the official paperwork on Monday, and register for classes on Tuesday; between those two events, my life will be scheduled for the rest of 2011 (and partially, through May of 2012).

But more about all that later.  This post is devoted to elaborating on the events of the last few days, via the photographic documentation of our adventures.

Adventure #1: Wandering the lake by my apartment

My apartment complex has quite the lovely walking trail around a couple of lakes, and I took Hannah down to show her around, and also to witness the various wildlife, including normal suburban wildlife like overeager squirrels...

And the terrifying live Turduckens-that-must-not-be-named...

Scary waterfowl are scary.  That one started chasing us shortly after we took this picture.

Adventure #2: Tex-Mex Dinner at Chuys

Yes please.  Enchiladas with tomatillo sauce and a free nacho bar because it was still happy hour.  Mexican food doesn't get much better than that.  If you visit me in Dallas, we're going.  If you're in Dallas and you're not visiting me, you're still going.  No choice.

Adventure #3: Baking Muffins and Cupcakes

To facilitate breakfasts for Hannah's visit, I bought a couple packs of chocolate chip muffin mix, which Hannah happily volunteered to mix and distribute into paper muffin cups...unfortunately, neatness doesn't appear to be her strong suit:

We also made the world's best Pina Colada cupcakes, which involve a batter of yellow cake mix, undrained crushed pineapple, and coconut extract, with a frosting of cream cheese, vanilla pudding, and more pineapple.  They are SO SO SO delicious...but very ugly, as you can see...

As you can see, we'd already eaten a few by the time we took this picture...proving that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover (or a cupcake by its haphazard frosting job).

Adventure #4: Celebrity Home Stalking


Following in the footsteps of my friend Brandi and I on our quest to discover Nelly's house last March, Hannah and I found a list of celebrity homes in Dallas (complete with GPS coordinates), and decided to track them down.

We set off enthusiastically to our first destination: the home of ex-President George W. Bush.  We entered the neighborhood with a few trepidations of secret-service people chasing us away, but excited about the prospects which lay before us...

We turned the corner onto the street, and all of a sudden, spied an older couple strolling down the sidewalk with a dog...and started flipping out, because George W. Bush and Barbara Bush were walking towards us!  Hannah managed this paparazzi shot out the back window...

Click the picture to make it bigger

Yeah okay, so that's not really them.  BUT we legitimately thought that it was them, until we were right up upon them and realized that their faces were wrong (not to mention the woman's blonde, non-Barbara Bush-esque hair).  Still, it was absolutely hilarious, and we both agree that they REALLY looked like them from a distance!  In any case, it turns out that we were on the wrong street...we went out to the real place this morning, and were unsurprisingly met by this sight:

A gate, with lots of signs about security and restricted access, blocking our path down the street of expensive homes, including the Bush's house.  I guess we should have known that we wouldn't be able to just wander up to the door of a past president's house.  Incidentally, Hannah and I were thwarted in our ambition to track down the Jonas brothers' house, because we looked it up online beforehand and discovered that it, too, was blocked off by a gated neighborhood.  Shucks.

Luckily, Chuck Norris was more obliging, and only had a gate blocking his driveway, not the whole neighborhood.  Here's his house as we saw it...

Okay, so it's not much to look at (especially with this poor photo that was taken while I was driving, and shows more of the fence than the house).  From the road it looks rather small, and the front is in the middle of a lot of construction work.  BUT, when we turned the corner, we realized that the house went a lot deeper back than you might think.  Just check out this sky view from the website we used to find the house...

Tricky, Chuck Norris.  Very tricky...

Adventure #5: Seeing Where John F. Kennedy was Assassinated


Yes, unfortunately, besides the football, the thing that Dallas is famous for is that it is the sight where John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  Hannah and I drove down to Dealey Plaza this morning, and to be honest, it was quite a surreal experience to stand on the grassy knoll, in the spot where the Zapruder film was taken, and look out over the scene.  It was like stepping into one of the most iconic photographs in American history...

The painted "X" marks where JFK was shot

The Grassy Knoll

The Texas School Book Depository

The sixth floor of the building, where Lee Harvey Oswald shot the bullets from, is now a museum, but we didn't want to pay the steep admission charge and contented ourselves to walk around the scene.

On a less serious note, we also walked around the adjacent West End of Dallas, and saw silly things like this dinosaur on stilts:

 And then, on the way back, we swung by SMU to take Hannah's picture by the giant mesh head in front of the art museum...because you just don't pass something like that up.

And that, my friends, concludes the highlights of Hannah's visit.  Of course, there were several things that weren't documented in photographic form, but I think that this post is sufficiently lengthy, don't you?

And now, back to the reality of the daily grind.  Homework all day tomorrow...hopefully, with the renewed energy that a family visit can create :)