Dec 1, 2019
The weather finally turned good and we woke up to a beautiful perfect sunny day. While most of the rest of the country including California was dealing with unseasonable snowstorms (even closed Hwy 5 over the grapevine near LA!) it was sunny and 72 degrees in Houston. We took advantage of the weather by going to a small neighborhood park in Houston called Donovan Park. This was a very nice neighborhood park with a wooden fort structure and even a wooden train to play on. Being a very nice Thanksgiving holiday Sunday the park was full of kids which was fine with us and Olivia quickly found a number of friends to play with. We had a nice picnic lunch right in the park while Olivia played. Holly had a nice walk around the neighborhood while I stayed to watch Olivia. All in all a beautiful day.
We spent a few hours at the park and as we left we decided to go check out some tattoo parlors. For a long time now Holly had been wanting to get a tattoo to cover up a vaccination scar she had gotten when she was a child. Holly wanted to get the tattoo done before we left the US because she figured that a US tattoo parlor was more hygienic. The plan was to check out a few tattoo places and then return to the one she liked best in a couple days. We stopped at one tattoo parlor but Holly didn’t like it. Then we went to the Flying Squid Tattoo parlor and Holly struck up connection with Mel and Holly suddenly decided she wanted to get the tattoo immediately. Normally I would urge Holly to think about it more but she had been wanted to get the tattoo for literally years and since Mel was only going to charge $80 and Holly had that determined gleam in her eye I kept quiet and figured she might as well get it done.
A couple hours later and it was all done and it was time for dinner. We went to the closest Ranch 99 but by that time it was almost 7 and the steam tray selection was old and limited. However this Supermarket had a small food court with several option. We ended up getting some beef stew noodles, rice and marinated pork and some Hot and Sour soup. The soup was disappointing but I must say the noodles were good and the rice and pork was excellent.
After dinner we drove to another Cracker Barrel and turned in for the night.