Texas T

No, not “Texas Tea”, as in oil, but Texas T as in Thanksgiving. This year’s Lone Star Rally included a special surprise for our family – Thanksgiving. As we experienced the rally and honored Mazha while we were in Galveston, we also took the opportunity to celebrate being together as a family at the beginning of November.

The past three years of the rally have been interesting. Three years ago we got a blizzard in PA that canceled Halloween and almost postponed our trip to Texas, last year we had hurricane Sandy that did postpone Halloween and impeded our travel (shortened our stay to just the weekend), and this year there was, what seemed to have been, a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Okay, maybe not that bad, but enough where we were home-bound for a day with the TV sirens going off. No worries... we ended up playing 6 hours of dominoes and watching the water rise outside of our window. We called it bonding.

With our usual activities taking place on The Strand, Kensington also experienced her first haunted house at the old Mayfield Manor, the former home of Dr. Horace Mayfield, once a respected doctor, upcoming community leader, and son of a prominent physician in Galveston. It’s an 1867 building that served as a morgue after the 1900 Storm – still the deadliest storm in U.S. history having killed an estimated 8,000 Galveston residents. When we entered, Chris told them not to hold back. She insisted that she go through it and loves the thrill of being scared and while we tried to warn her, she’s didn’t want to be babied. So we went through (with a flashlight) and she laughed most of the way through it. When we were done, she wanted to go through it again. It wasn’t worth the admission for the first trip, and we we’re going to even attempt it a second time.

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Kensi loved the fact that our beach house was 50 yards away from the ocean. Within a minute, her little feet could be hitting the sand. Besides swimming, burying her feet in the mud and chasing after seagulls, she loved flying her kite with Fazha. Unfortunately, after about 2 minutes of piloting the craft solo, she let go of the string and the kite went soaring up in the air. I tried chasing it and stepping on the spool, even running through the brush and dunes to catch it. I had no luck. There was a huge gust of wind that carried it away. When all hope was lost, I found the spool that went over some power lines and found that the kite had actually landed on the deck of a vacation home. While I shimmied my way up the deck the best that I could, there was no way that I could get it. Cousin Chase also tried working his magic so K-Grace could have her “shark-attack” kite back. Then Daddy came to the rescue when he drove the truck up to the deck and I was able to climb on the rooftop of the cab and un-snag the sails.

We also made our annual trip on the ferry to feed the seagulls. With Chris, Simone and Jordan off at the spa, a group of us (loaves of bread in tow) stepped onto the ship and noticed that K’s throwing skills greatly improved over last year. Mighty impressive. Watch out Dorothy “Dottie” Kamenshek, this girl may actually beat your record.

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