Back from Texas

Alisha and I returned from a 2-week trip to Texas yesterday. We visited her family and friends in the area, and even travelled to Louisiana so she could spend time with friends and take a few pictures in the process.

We traveled by car so that we could visit the Canton, TX flea market near her parents' house. The flea market happens once a month and takes 2 days to fully cover. We brought our SUV so we'd have room for any fun stuff we found. We had a hollywood encounter when we spotted Victor Rjesnjansky (from "Storage Wars: Texas") setting up his booth at the Canton flea market. I didn't snap a picture because I didn't want to be rude and his booth was mostly filled with cheap stuff that I didn't want to be goaded into buying.

On the trip, we also dropped by this famous Albuquerque filming location to snap a photo op:

While on the subject of travelling through New Mexico, I must say that aside from Albuquerque I don't have a good taste for New Mexico. From the point you enter the state, the entirety of I-40 is riddled with construction zones whose sole purpose seems to be raising speeding ticket fines. The construction zones never had any workers or even construction equipment in them (just a set of cones and warning signs that fines were doubled). As soon as a construction zone would end, a "safety corridor" would begin which (once again) doubled the speeding ticket fine.

To top it off, a few years ago we were riding with my dad along this route and he was ticketed by tribal patrol officer because I was laying down in the back seat (they pulled him over because his tires touched the white line). The "officer" then proceeded to ask him if he wanted to pay the fine on the spot ... at 2am! When my dad refused, he was given a ticket with no website or phone number for contacting or disputing the charge. I write this just to warn anyone travelling through New Mexico: they want your money.

On Thanksgiving day I had a run-in with a metal box (similar in size to a dumpster) when I stopped a piece of wood fence from falling on a little girl (Alisha's second cousin) during a photo shoot. I grabbed the wood fence before it fell, but mis-stepped myself and hit the box with the bridge of my nose. Luckily I hit bone so I avoided a broken nose or chipped teeth. I had a cut across my nose, two cuts on my lip, a scrape near my left eye, and my glasses were badly bent (but not scratched):

The sad part of the story was that while Alisha and the others were looking at the damage to my nose, the wind picked up again and blew the fence section over onto the girl anyways. She came out relatively unscathed.

On the last day of our trip, I turned 37 years old as we drove from Albuquerque, NM to Sacramento, CA. It was funny, because with all of the chaos of this past year I had mentally considered myself 37 years old since the beginning of 2014. It wasn't until a few days before our trip that I was walking the hallway at work and thought "Wait a second, how old am I?". I had to do the math to figure out that I was 36 and not 37. I guess that's a sign of getting old? It was nice to have another birthday, but not age in my own mind!