gswarfield

Jess always says that we have nothing to blog about, but that is certainly not true. This past Tuesday we officially became Texas residents. Last saturday we took our cars to get them inspected, which, in the county we live in, there is a safety inspection and also a emissions inspection. Then we found out where we were suppose to register our cars at was closed on the weekends. So Jess took a day off of work Tuesday, thinking it would probably be a half day or something…. welllllll that was wrong thinking. I tried to keep my expectation very low for a day that you have to go to the DMV. Well here in Texas, we actually had to go to the county tax office to get our cars registered and get plates. Well if you are a new resident you get to have a $90 new resident tax as well. But the $355 dollars later we have our cars registered in the state of texas and we received our plates for our cars. Side note, Texas is phasing in new license plates. Well I think the newer ones do not look as masculin at the older ones, and I was hoping for some old ones. Well just did her paper work and received a set of the new license plates. Then I finished my paper work and BAM I received the older license plates!!! AWESOME!!!

There is a sweet picture of the “Rally Racer” as my friend from college use to call it. The funny part about this truck is that I bought it from my brother-in-law that lived in Texas. I registered it in Arkansas but never took the inspection sticker off the windshield until this past Saturday. Now it is full circle and the ol’ Rally Racer is in its home state. Well the county tax office was surprisingly quick and easy. Then we went to the DPS (Department of Public Safety). This is the place you get your license. Well we tried to walk in the door but there was a line zig zagged all the way till the door. So after waiting for 3.5 hours and paying more money, we received our 8 by 11 sheets of paper that were our temperary license until then came in the mail after like 3-6 weeks. An 8 by 11 sheet of paper!!!! I guess everything is bigger in Texas. So you have to carry an 8×11 sheet of paper with you where every you go. In the long run it doesn’t matter because we are finally Texan residents. Since we are Texans, we can now start to officially say “Y’all”, “fixen to”, “coke (even though you might be getting a mountain dew it is still the general ‘coke'”, and all the rest of the southern slang. We can start calling people from the north..”Yanks” haha . Well I might be back with a picture of Jessica’s license plate. OHH!! I almost forgot about the best part of our day. The church we have been going to has a young marrieds group. Well one of the young marrieds works at state farm insurance. Well a long story short we are saving a lot of money on our insurance!!!!! Thanks Cody.

So dan met up with me in Nashville. Then we were both on the same
flight to Cleveland. Dan brought his netbook and thought ” why not get
a dandy game of unreal tournament in before we land. ” here is a
ictire of it.

So I arrived at the airport around 6:30. My flight leaves at 8. I'm
really early, but iwould rather be early than rushed. I saw one guy he
didn't want to be uncool so he wasn't running, but he was speed
walking and I think it looked worse.

Well my flight for Ohio leave around 8:00am from Austin, TX. I have a stop in Nashville where I’ll actually be meeting up and getting on the same flight as Dan to Cleveland. I added a map at the top of the blog temporarily. I have an application on my iPhone that gets my location via GPS or a triangulation of cell phone towers, and then sends it to a website which then puts a lovely dot on a google map for you. Here is a link ( http://map.phireant.com/ ) for the Map (which is pretty much the same thing at the top of this blog). So this application has to be running on my iPhone in order for the location to be sent. Well obviously I’m going to have to use my phone for other things, so the location will not be exact. But you will get a general idea of where our convoy is located. I’m going to be trying to blog this trip out, but I’m unsure how well I’ll do because of other things going on and also I’ll be driving one of the 3 26-foot penske trucks.

So the Young Married’s Group at our church does a really nice job of planning activities that we can do together. This was another one of those activities. We met everyone at Gruene, Tx.

This was the name of the Restaurant that we ate at with the whole group. It was built on the side of a hill that over looked two of the different rivers that you could choose to float down. It supposedly is one of the most famous areas to eat in this town. It had multiple different buildings like a barn, and other pieces that had been added on. It had a very fun vibe, and our server was great!

We happen to come when there was a festival going on, so there were lots of people in this little town. Grant and I arrived earlier than most of the other people so we looked at the flea market stuff and the antique stores. As you can see, this is a historic village, so it was fun see the dance hall, the old grocery store, etc.

After this we went to the Gruene River Co. Where we rented Tubes, lotioned up, some more than others, and were driven to the drop off point where we as a group went into the water and slowly floated down the river. We decided to go on the Comal River since it was a shorter ride than the Guadalupe River. We hit two water chutes that made us go to parts of the river that had more currents. We had a lot of fun relaxing, talking, and getting to know people better.

Grant and I were surprised how clean this river was due to the fact that this is college activity sometimes where drinking is allowed on the river. (which seems dumb because of how fast you could drowned, but oh well.) There were actually police men in small boats that handed out tickets to people who littered. One of the guys in the group Paul, found a turtle and carried it for part of the trip which was also fun.