This year for Spring Break, we visited family in North Texas briefly and otherwise had a nice time at home.

RnB with their cousins VnA, at a playground in Flower Mound, Texas.

Trip To Dallas Area

On Sunday, March 13, we drove toward Flower Mound, Texas, eating at McDonald's not far from my brother’s house before arriving. The four cousins were happy to see each other, and we adults had pleasant conversations too. The weather was very pleasant (maybe even a little on the cool side), so we stayed at the nearby park for a couple of hours, burning off a lot of childhood energy. For dinner, we ate at Mooyah in Flower Mound, and then we said our goodbyes to my brother’s family and went to our hotel. (Usually when we visit ZJVA in Flower Mound, we drive home the same day; this time we decided to make a stay out of it.)

The Homewood Suites (Plano, TS) where we stayed was beautiful and pleasant to encounter. (It was the one just off President George Bush Turnpike at Jupiter Road.) There was even a firepit outside.

Monday, after a filling (complimentary) breakfast in the hotel, we drove north to Frisco (to anyone not from Texas, or specifically Dallas, just read all these town names as “Dallas metro area”, despite what local officials might insist), to the “Stonebriar Mall At The Bridges”, which is what it’s called on Google Maps, or “Stonebriar Centre”, which is what it’s called on its website. A very nice looking indoor mall, it’s home to Kidzania, which is the reason we headed there (one of our children had brought home a coupon from somewhere). It’s a bit like a children’s museum (and about the same cost), but much more directed and purposeful. I think both children had a lot of fun.

At our hotel room’s kitchen table, I played a game of chess with my son, which I won despite some huge blunders.

We had lunch at the mall’s bountiful food court, bought books at Barnes & Noble (including a John Scalzi book that wasn’t supposed to be released until the following day), and shopped in other stores. For dinner, we met up with my brother’s family (ZJVA) at Palio's Pizza Cafe, which I’d never heard of but is apparently a chain of gourmet pizza places in the Dallas area with something like 30 locations. It was nice and all of us ate until we were stuffed (the American way!) while it rained outside. After we said goodbye to ZJVA again, M and I got some drive-thru Dunkin coffee and enjoyed a slow drive back to our hotel.

That evening, B and I played a game of chess in the hotel (I’d brought my portable rollup board and weighted pieces) — I late made a video analysis of the game for my growing YouTube channel.

We drove home the following day.

We made the entire trip on a single tank of gas — somehow we had a tailwind all the way up and all the way down — getting 24.4 miles per gallon (450.6 miles on 18.45 gallons). When we bought gas upon arriving home, prices had already begun to drop here, from a high of $3.869 just before we left (which was the most we’ve EVER paid in Killeen, and the highest price we’ve paid anywhere since 2011 when we saw $3.999/gallon in Gainesville, Texas).

During the trip, I noticed the brakes on the minivan acting up (and M had mentioned them to me a few days earlier when she drove that vehicle for the first time in a while). So a few days later, we dropped it off at NTB and replaced brake pads and rotors all around for $1,300.

Rest Of The Week

During the trip, B came down with cold/flu symptoms, and I caught basically the same thing which I didn’t notice until after we arrived home. I felt so bad by Thursday that I took a COVID test (the results of which were negative), but by then B was mostly recovered and by Sunday the worst was past for me too. (Close call, I suppose.)

A day or two later, M was feeling like Cheesecake Factory, but not the full meal — just a dessert. So we drove to Austin, to a mall we hadn’t been to since before we had children, and had dessert at the Cheesecake Factory (at Barton Creek Square), and then walked around that mall too.

New Thermostat: In November, I mentioned that our thermostat seemed to have failed so I bought a new one. Then in December, I said the old one started working again. Well, this week the old one crapped out again — it lasted 12 years which is more than some of the other cheap devices installed in this house when it was new. So the last day of our Spring Break, I spent the afternoon installing the new one, which seems to work. (Fingers crossed that there isn’t some larger issue with our HVAC system.) It also gave me an excuse to buy a multimeter — I bought an analog one — because I needed to make sure the wires behind the thermostat weren’t live. (None of our circuit breakers affect the HVAC system, so I was testing to make sure the switch built into the HVAC blower actually killed the power to those wires, and it did. Whew.)