Is 14 hours really long enough?

Well we managed to sneak in a partial day off this week.

We haven't had a day off since Christmas. So the plan was to get out of town for the night and part of the next day.

We left Houston and got to Aaron's house in Surfside at 11pm. Time for us to crack open a beer and Aaron and I walked down to the beach. How heavenly -- the beach was only across the street and two houses away. We stayed down there for a little while, but it was really windy and really cold.

Aaron settled us down in one of the guest rooms and that was it for that day.





Paul and I got up around 9am and Aaron was already long gone for work. The plan was to meet for lunch with Aaron. We had some time to kill, so we went down to the end of Aaron's street and there was a park with the LONGEST jetty I had ever seen. We walked all the way down to the end of it, snapped a few pics, and then walked all the way back.







We still had a little time before lunch, so we drove over to the neighboring beach town of Freeport. There we found an old Ace hardware general store. Unfortunately we only had 5 minutes to explore -- so it's another field trip planned to fully investigate this store.

We met Aaron at Pirate's Alley Cafe -- the only beachside restaurant in Surfside. So we sat, ate fish and chips, and looked out the window at the spectacular view in front of us.





Aaron had an extended lunch, so we went into Clute and found the free sea aquarium. The bad thing.....it was closed on Monday. The wetlands area was open so we took our time walking through it and looked for alligators. Didn't see any.



But the time had come to head back to Houston, the Restaurant Depot, and a big pile of stuff on my desk that had to get done. We thanked our host for letting us stay and really having a great time with him (albeit short). Our plan is to head down that way again and do some more exploring.

Oh boy.....can't wait for the next vacation -- maybe we can double it to 28 hours!