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We drove and drove and drove for 11 hours total on Friday, October 3rd. We straight shot it from New Orleans to San Antonio, Texas. We stopped in San Antonio for dinner at Sushi Zushi, one of the best sushi places we have been to, for Jason’s birthday dinner. We had spicy edamame, tempura veggies, and two delicious rolls. We were definitely the most underdressed in the entire restaurant, but we didn’t care, after all we are two homeless roadtrippers.
After dinner, we made our way down to the San Antonio River Walk. This is such a beautiful thing to experience. We felt like we were in some place in Italy with the gondola like boats floating by and the beautiful lights and restaurants lining the river. (We only had the cell phone for pictures here, since we left the camera chord in Alexandria, so we don’t have many pictures from this, but you should look up the River Walk to see what it looked like!) After walking up and down the River Walk, we made our way back to the car and drove the next three hours to Dylan and Emily’s. We hadn’t seen Emily and Dylan in just over six months so we were so excited to see them!
As we arrived to Laughlin Air Force Base, we got stopped at the front entrance by two guards. It was very official and we had to wait at the front until Dylan and Emily met us up there to finalize everything. Once we got into their lovely home, we thought that it was going to be bedtime and chat and catch up in the morning from how tired we were, but once we walked through the doors we got a second wind… 1:30am was no going to bed for us. They surprised Jason with his favorite cake, carrot cake, and sang happy birthday. We stayed up to 3:30 or 4:00 chatting and reminiscing.
We woke up in the morning around 10 and decided that that day was going to be a jet skiing kinda day. Dylan and Emily hadn’t been out in a while and we only have been on jet skis a couple times in our lives, so we were all really excited to get out there. At this lake, there are some pretty epic rock jumping cliffs. One unfortunate thing about this weekend was that the water level of the lake was substantially higher than months previous. Where the jumping rocks were, the jump was only about 15 feet. The reason for this is because there had been some torrential rain falling, which caused the level of the water to raise about 10 feet! Although the rocks weren’t as high, they were still extremely fun to jump off of. Riding on the sea-doo, though, was probably one of the most fun activities we have had on our whole trip. After a day at the lake, we came back to the house and went to an air force BBQ dinner that was sponsored by one of the local restaurants in Del Rio. They had some of the best BBQ ever. We are so glad that we were able to have such a perfect meal. After the BBQ, we all went downtown to check out their new town. We went to a couple stores and ended exploring the town with a drink from Starbucks. Upon arriving back to the house, the evening consisted of more conversations and updating of the blog.
The next morning Dylan needed to go into one of the air force buildings to prepare for a briefing on Monday, so while he did that, the three of us stayed back at the house and cooked a nice breakfast. Towards the end of Dylan’s prep, we went and visited him. He quickly finished up with all that he needed to do and he showed us around the building and let us try on his flight suit!
Later in the afternoon, we decided that we had to go back to the lake one last time and ride around for a few hours! Again, we had such a wonderful time sea-dooing and jumping off the rocks. Hanging out with friends we hadn’t seen in so long when we used to hang out with three to four times a week was so much fun! We picked up right where we left off when they left for Dylan’s placement.
After coming back to the house, we all made dinner together. We had tri-tip, twice baked potatoes, and veggies. Then later that evening, Emily made some great cookies. We were up early the next morning, said our sad goodbyes and hit the road to head to Big Bend National Park. The whole drive to Big Bend we were just thinking about wanting to turn back around and hang out with Dylan and Emily more. We started missing them the second we got on the road and haven’t stopped missing them since!
