If You Love Pines

...like I love pines, then you would love the drive along IH-10 from Texas to Florida. Especially the stretch from Louisiana through the Florida panhandle - such lovely trees line the highway. I love it and so does Mark. It is so different from driving in Texas, where one can see the horizon. Different kind of beauty I have learned to appreciate.

B&B Bathroom in a Room

 
I was thinking of a good buddy and our travels for work and this came to mind - looks okay, doesn't it? EXCEPT that there was no wall separately the bath from the rest of the room. It was weird. And then I thought, well, that's okay I guess. No wall is okay. A little weird to use the bathroom with no walls - felt like I was outside for some reason. But then the next morning I turned the water on and the shower head was YUCKY! I didn't know I'd have such an aversion to a dirty shower head but I did. This was at the Hampton Lake B&B in FL. It was too odd for me. The next trip to that site, I stayed in Gainesville and drove the 20-30 minutes to the plant. :-)

Springhill Suites - Rosenberg, Tx

Have you tried a Springhill Suites Hotel lately? We just did a couple of weekends ago in Rosenberg, Texas. We really liked it! The decor was really refreshing, and not because it was a new building. I loved the blues and the splash of orange. And the room was really nice. I like the furnishings - all comfortable and modern. I felt like I was in an IKEA catalog. Really. Free internet service that was stable and fast. That's hard to find nowadays, sadly, even with our home service of Time Warner. Booo.

Honey & the TSA

This is a repost from our bee blog but since it fits the topic, I know you won't mind since it means I actually posted here! :-)

Have you ever found yourself wondering if honey travels well? I do a bit of travel for my training job with the steel making company and I like to take a bit of home with me whenever I can in order to reduce homesickness. I typically take one squeeze bottle with me and every single time I have honey in the suitcase (since you can’t carry it on unfortunately), my suitcase gets inspected and they leave me a personal note to let me know. Isn’t that awesome? This time, I made them work for it. I packed two glass jars for a friend to save her some shipping cost and added in six 1-pound squeeze bottles (coworkers wanted to sample them). I individually seal each jar in a Ziploc bag so any leaks could be contained. I would love to know what those TSA people think when they open my suitcase. I also count this as good and free advertising since it puts our name in front of at least one new person. Maybe more if they tell a coworker, “Yea, look at this crazy lady carrying eight pounds of honey around…” You never know.

Harrrisonburg, Virginia

Well, the first picture is not yet Harrisonburg. It was my view for a while as I waited and waited in Denver on the tarmac. But thankfully Denver was not as bad as Atlanta so at least I didn't have to spend the night at the airport. Yay Denver! They had a ton of de-icing trucks out there - very impressive. Traveling out of San Antonio and flying east (or west also, most of the time) is typically an all day or most of the day event because we have to connect somewhere along the way. This time, I chose Denver because I didn't want to go north to Chicago since the blizzard was blowing that way soon. Denver did a great job getting us landed, loaded and off the ground again without it taking hours. Still, I was an hour later getting to Dulles than planned but oh well.



Once I got to Dulles, I got in the car and drove about two hours to Virginia and since it was dark and I had a splitting headache, I can't tell you much except for thank goodness for GPS units. For the most part, they get me where I need to go. The Marriott Residence Inn in Harrisonburg is fabulous! Worth the drive and made me glad I chose it over the Hampton even though I have more reward points with HHonors. LOVED the kitchenette and ate in most of the week, which made it feel less like I was away from home (sort of). There's a Kroger nearby so I was set for dining in and I brought our Gretchen Bee Ranch candles - felt very cozy. The staff of Residence Inn was also awesome so I highly recommend this hotel. I go back next week so guess where I'll be staying. :-) And check out this service below - I didn't use it but I thought it was very cool that it was available. Neat!

Beekeepers in the Hill Country

Recently we went to a conference in Kerrville and stayed at the conference hotel because it has convention center facilities. The environment and scenery were very nice and the bathroom looked fairly recently renovated...but sadly the rest of the hotel did not. As long as the bathrooms are clean, we're good. Still, we think they could draw in huge crowds in the hill country setting if they updated the rest of their hotel.

Traveling IH35 to Pearsall, Tx

Here are some interesting things I saw as we traveled from Seguin to Pearsall, Texas, in order to pick up some bee supplies from a 4th-generation beekeeper there (Youngblood Honey) - it's so lovely there! Here's a shot of the land behind the Youngblood property.



We took IH10 from Seguin to SA, then caught the 410 loop to miss some commuting traffic. Then we caught IH35 from there and headed south.

We couldn't decide if this was a Volkswagen or not. Saw this in Pearsall.



And during our long wait on the highway due to a major, fatal accident :-(, we saw these two things -