Month: July 2021

Houston is great, I have visited the family here before but usually for weddings so we really hadn’t explored the city before. Now, of course, it’s the middle of covid- so we didn’t do a ton of exploring now either. As we were leaving Florida it was a hot spot for covid (and for a lot of the pandemic really ), and as we got to Houston it became a hot spot. I know I’m not the only one by far, but I felt like we couldn’t escape it no matter how hard we tried. But we took advantage of our time in Houston to do some (safe) exploring.

I’m a bit of a germ freak, which has been made worse by studying diseases and covid-19, so everywhere we went we wore masks, used hand sanitzer, kept our distance- got what we needed and got out!

One thing we missed in China is donuts. They have Dunkin Donuts here in some train stations in Shanghai, but they don’t taste quite the same and you can’t get most of the best flavors. So when we got to Houston, we were looking for something low risk to get us all out of the house and Mark found that there is a Voodoo Donuts branch in Houston. For those unfamilar, Voodoo donuts is a famous donut shop in Portland, Oregon and I’ve seen it on lots of food network shows and always wanted to try it. Their most famous donut is a voodoo doll, covered in chocolate, with raspberry filling and a pretzel “needle” sticking in the heart.

Mark likes Maple bars, just plain maple bars- nothing fancy, and voodoo donuts had him covered on that too.

We went a few times and Alex and I usually got different things, one for me was the Homer- pictured below. Raised donut with strawberry frosting and sprinkles. I usually don’t like strawberry frostings, but this one was very good- good enough that I got it multiple times, it was also bigger than your average donut.

Inside the store while you were waiting in a socially distanced line, there was merchandise lined up. It was a bit pricey so I didn’t get any (especially with the donuts costing a bit more, but still worth it).

I was actually surprised they weren’t more busy- there was never more than a group or two in front of us, although the drivethrough would get backed up. It is also in kind of an out of the way part of town so maybe the location (or you know, the raging pandemic) kept people from coming in.

We always sat in the car with our donuts to eat (or brought the extras home for later). It’s clear there were areas to sit inside and out during normal non-pandemic times.

One thing that we got to do was visit my Aunt Jeanne at her office at University of Texas Health Science Center. Since it was the summer, she wasn’t teaching, but still had to go in and get work done. She showed Alex the garden, she (and I believe her students) plant and maintain an outdoor garden with lots of cool and yummy vegetables and fruits that they then use to teach nutrition and how to cook with these vegetables to the students and the communties.

Alex here is looking at a baby watermelon that was just starting to grow. He got to pick and try a pepper, which we thought was a jalapeno… but it was not, it was something much spicier like a habanero that wasn’t ripe yet. After that, his desire to try things from the garden was a little tempered.

One other super cool thing we got to do with Aunt Jeanne was see her good friend, Mr. Sims. He is a state of the art simulator that helps students work on noticing symptoms and signs of dietary diseases in a hospital setting. He can be modified with wigs, skin patches, different teeth, programmed with different pulses and breathing patterns, overall just a really cool learning tool.

Here Aunt Jeanne is showing Alex where and how to find Mr. Sims pulse.

Maybe Alex will grow up to be a doctor, he certainly thought this was a great time listening for heartbeats and checking pulses.

I’d like to think Aunt Jeanne has as much fun as Alex did- his joy in these kinds of things is contagious and it’s hard not to get swept up with him. My favorite part with Mr. Sims was when Alex started trying on all his wigs.

Above is Alex’s impression of a 70 year old man

I think he looks good in grey!

In the blond wig, I think Alex looks a lot like me as a kid- he is considerably less thrilled about the blond wig than the grey one though.

Mullet wig for the win! It’s funny to see this picture a year after it was taken (because I am almost always about a year behind on the blog) because he has grown so much since then, these shorts and shirt barely fit him now, and I think he’s up two shoe sizes since then.

It was so wonderful getting to spend time with my aunt, (and uncle and cousins) because of moving around and just the general hustle and bustle of life- I don’t get to see them as often as I’d like. Shoutout to the newest cousin on that side, Teddy, who unfortunately I didn’t get to meet yet because he was born after we came back to China– but is the most adorable kid and I can’t wait to meet!

After 5 months of hospitality from one set of my parents, we felt like we had overstayed our welcome… especially since we realistically still didn’t have an exit strategy to get back to China. One idea had been to stay with my other set of parents, but my mom and stepdad were getting their house ready to sell (and despite their insisitence that it wouldn’t impact them, it would have) and Mark’s parents couldn’t accomodate us either and then my amazing Aunt came to the rescue. She had a condo in Houston, Texas that was unoccupied and we could use it until we could head home.

So we rented a van, packed up the surprising amount of stuff we managed to accumulate in 5 months (including a not horde-y amount of toilet paper, but not un horde-y either) and drove to Houston. For those of you not familar with the geography of the American Southeast…Florida goes on forever. We drove for 9 hours and we were still in Florida. My goal had been to make it through Florida and stop across the state lines the first day, unfortunately due to traffic and really terrible storms- we only made it to Pennsacola, Fl before having to call it for the night.

We stopped and had Texas Roadhouse for dinner and we were honestly disappointed, the Texas Roadhouse in Shanghai is much better than what we had in Florida. Alex made the comment that “you have to go all the way to Shanghai to get authentic Texas roadhouse!” They were out of baked potatoes, and something else that we wanted, the chili came out cold… and they were super swamped so the servers were running around with no time. After that it was over to the hotel and a rest before getting up and moving on through Mississippi and Louisiana. If we had more time, and the situation was different I would have liked to do more exploring in both of those- I’ve never been to either before.

Honestly, I love a roadtrip, it’s one of my favorite ways to travel and see the country while you go. Mark is less of a road warrior, and Alex is enjoying it less and less as he gets older, but it still makes me happy.

As much as I enjoy roadtrips, the anxiety about stopping in hotels, restaurants, and gas stations along the way was definitely a downer. I had hand sanitizer that we used constantly, plus wipes, and still washing our hands whenever available. It was geniunely such a bizarre experience that I didn’t even do our traditional things of taking pictures at welcome to the state signs- I thought the more we isolated in the car the less likely we were to be exposed to someone with covid.

Mark found podcasts to listen to the whole way, so we listened to a lot of Radio Lab, and another one called Lore. Those were my favorite of the ones he picked and the ones I don’t mind spending hours listening too, although I’m more of a blare music type of driver. We learned about tick bites and meat allergies, ranked voting in Ireland, and all kinds of mythology on monsters.

The storms followed us all the way to Houston, so we had bad weather and slow going the whole way. The rain was so intense that it took us an extra couple of hours to get out of Florida and a fairly terrifying drive on bridge overpass roads through Mississippi.

In addition, we had a scare or two about covid- namely that we had to drive through New Orleans on our way, and Texas annouced they were going to block anyone who had been in New Orleans from entering. So instead of stopping for dinner there, we ate fast food in the car, which no one enjoyed. All in all, while it wasn’t the family roadtrip from the movies, we made it in one peice and when we got there, my Aunts were there to meet us and help us move in the condo. It was so good to see them, my cousin’s wedding was the last thing we did right before moving to China, and I hadn’t been able to see them since then.

I know I’ve said this before and will again, but we are so lucky to have such wonderful family and friends who were willing to help us out in a very weird time in our lives.