Happy Thanksgiving!! I hope you all are enjoying family time and eating some delicious home cooked meals. We’ll be eating at my parents’ this evening. Today’s post goes back to our short little trip to Granbury, TX.
My birthday and my mom’s birthday are very close. I was born 5 days before her birthday. Usually we celebrate by having a nice family dinner on the Saturday between our birthdays. Well this year my sister who lives in San Diego surprised us by flying in and spent the whole weekend with us. She, Mr. A and my other sister planned the whole weekend behind our backs! Well since this was a surprise my mom had decided she wanted to go to Granbury, which is about an hour and half away from Dallas, where there is a man-made beach. With the timing and such we couldn’t go, but I thought it sounded fun and Jensen has never been to a beach. So I planned for us to go down during the Columbus Day weekend. We packed in a lot of activities in two days.
First we drove to Granbury Beach. We told Ian in the morning we were going to go to the beach, which made him excited. Well we missed a few key highway exits so it took us almost 2 hours to get there. By the time we got in to town Ian got antsy and started saying things like “where is the beach?” “why are we still in the van” and my personal favorite “it’s taking too long”. He actually says that last phrase a lot especially around dinner. It goes like this:
Ian: I’m hungry
Me: I’m making dinner
Ian: It’s taking tooo longggg (queue falling on floor and writhing around like he’s dying)
Anyways, we got to the beach and it’s small and super windy, the kids don’t care, we stake claim to a table and the kids start playing in the sand. The sand is super soft so no castle building, but dumping sand in the dump truck and pouring it out was a favorite. After this we went to downtown Granbury and grab some lunch at The Fillin’ Station, the decor is all car related and the menu items are cleverly named after car brands. The food is mainly sandwiches and they have house made chips. After eating lunch we walk around the square to waste some time since we couldn’t check into where we were staying until 3.
The kids got bored quickly of just walking around and they were tired, so we headed over to The Hideaway Ranch & Retreat. We arrived early and the kids were asleep in the car, so Mr. A and I walked around and took some pictures of the main area.
After we got the keys to our cabin, we drove over there to drop off our luggage and take a look around, the kids were still sleeping. After about 30 minutes or so the kids started waking up, so we made Ian use the restroom and made the decision to head back out to Dinosaur World since it was still pretty early in the day.
This is a pretty cool place for kids that like dinos, as you can see from the pictures they have life size dinosaurs. You walk along a path and see all sorts of dinosaurs and each one has a plaque with it’s name on it and a small description about the dinosaur. There is a large play area with picnic tables and playground. There’s an indoor section that has animated dinosaurs, the kids didn’t like that part. The kids ticket included digging for fossils. Ian really enjoyed sifting through the sand and finding random teeth and shells. We got there a little late around 3:45 and they close at 5 so we rushed through each activity. I would say 2-3 hrs is plenty of time to spend here.
Afterwards we stopped by a grocery store so I could pick up some food items to cook dinner back at the cabin. Our gourmet dinner consisted of macaroni and cheese from a box with hot dogs. I also bought some apples and bananas because the owner said we could feed the pigs and goats the cores and peels. There are a total of 10 cabins on the property and we stayed in the Cimarron cabin. It has one bedroom, a living area with kitchen and a bathroom.
We got back to the cabin and Mr. A went off to take pictures of the horses in the pasture nearby.
When he came back he tells me that we’ll be having extra guests for dinner as the horses followed him back to the cabin!! They seemed hungry, so we ended up feeding the few apples I had just bought to these horses 🙂 Ian was a little weary of these horses, they were big! I don’t think he was expecting the horses to come right up to the railing like they did.
After dinner we all took showers and waited for the sun to set so we could sit out and look at the stars. Living in the Dallas Metroplex one doesn’t see many stars. I’m so glad that I chose to stay in a cabin instead of a hotel because the view of these stars was absolutely breath taking. We got to see the milky way with our own eyes and shooting stars. I swear I saw two of them. And now ever since our trip Jensen has been obsessed with the moon, every time he sees it he yells “MOON!!”.
Stay tuned for the next day of our quick trip.
