Brenham Getaway

Over the summer, Jason and I celebrated our 15th anniversary. We talked about taking an overnight trip somewhere together but wanted to wait until after Adley was weaned. Then life got busy with school and weekend soccer games... Finally in November, we had an opportunity to take our belated overnight anniversary trip. We are so very grateful to our siblings for watching our kiddos so that this trip could be possible! We ended up taking a very low-key, relaxing trip to Brenham, TX, which is just over an hour from us. Jason made reservations at a cozy bed and breakfast.

We knew that we were truly on vacation (sans kids!) when we spent close to 2 hours sitting at the breakfast table, taking with the B&B owners and fellow guests.

We arrived close to lunchtime, so we found a cute local eatery that had been recommended to us by a friend from church. This little diner is best known for its pies, so of course we had to end our meal with a slice! Everything was quite tasty.

You can never have too much dessert, right?? Our next stop was the Blue Bell Creamery, which is what Brenham is most known for. We absolutely love Blue Bell ice cream (one of the best parts about moving to Texas!), so we were excited to see where the popular dessert was produced. The factory no longer gives tours of its facility, but we were able to visit the observation deck and look out over the production area. An employee was standing outside the viewing windows primarily to answer visitors' questions. We talked to the guy for quite some time, especially about some of our favorite flavors. The creamery sells huge scoops of ice cream in a small cafe area for only $1, so of course we took advantage of that on our way out. What a yummy stop!

For the rest of that evening and during much of the following day, we spent time geocaching in the area. We found about a dozen geocaches in all. It's always so enjoyable to see how creatively people will hide the caches. Some of them are quite tricky! My favorite of the weekend was this little faux birdhouse that actually had a secret compartment that popped out to reveal the geocache log. Jason gets all the credit for discovering that one!

 Not too far from Brenham is Lake Somerville State Park, so we visited there as well. We were excited to spend some peaceful time outdoors and do a little hiking (which is basically just trail-walking here in Texas!).  The morning was wonderfully sunny with just enough chill in the breeze to make it perfect for walking. The state park area would've been much prettier at a different time of the year, I'm sure, but we still loved our outdoors time.

Meanwhile.... as we were enjoying our time away, our kids hardly missed us! Kim and Matt kept the crew of 6 cousins busy with all kinds of fun activities-- baking their choice of dessert,

watching movies and playing games,

reading stories,

having fun at the high school where Uncle Matt works,

constructing planes out of pool noodles,

riding bikes down to the donut shop (what an adventurous plan with 6 kids!!),

and doing some drawing activities.

We heard that Adley was a wonderful helper in the kitchen too! ;)

I'm pretty sure our kids enjoyed their overnight stay with cousins almost as much as we enjoyed our time away! Thanks so much again, Uncle Matt and Aunt Kim!

After returning back home with our kids, we gave Cody and Jaden these souvenir mugs from Blue Bell. We have for quite some time eaten our ice cream out of mugs (a fun little tradition we picked up from some MT friends), so this was a perfect gift for our little ice-cream lovers. Cody and Jaden were so excited to eat the same flavor of ice cream that was displayed on their mugs.

We were definitely spoiled in our time away-- lots of time for uninterrupted conversation as well as time for a couple of board games together. We are thankful for this special getaway and for the 15 wonderful years of marriage that God has given us!