Saturday Day Trip part 1

Saturday morning happened to be the date for our long awaited trip to Dallas to see the Dallas Summer Musical presentation of "The Lion King."

Lucky for me, the babies were all tuckered out from their jaunt to the Revel and they slept all night long.

Bregon and I planned to wake up at the crack-o-dawn and leave by 7a.m. to try and land one of those coveted valet parking spots at the Texas State Fair.

I woke up at 6a.m. as planned, however Bregon wasn't quite as attentive to his alarm clock as I had been.

I must have gone upstairs three times before he FINALLY was able to drag himself out of bed at 6:45. Somehow, the babies stayed asleep.

Somehow I managed to get us both out of the house with everything we could possibly need for our day trip- directions to the fair (just in case,) show tickets, opera glasses, several changes of clothes each, spare socks and shoes, plenty of money in anticipation of fair prices, and even directions and coupons for several area haunted houses that we might hit if we had the time after the fair.

We hit the road as dawn was breaking and found that we were making fabulous time considering the traffic!

I didn't even flinch as this super-huge deer (really more of a stag) bounded across the highway just before Longview.

We actually made it to Dallas in fairly good time, only for it to start raining on the outskirts of town. It looked awfully grey in spite of weather men who had promised that it was going to stay sunny out!

As we pulled off of the interstate and headed towards the fair grounds, I realized that there was more than just the usual fair traffic.

Apparently, it was football game day and EVERYONE had come wearing their orange and white and were wearing their cowboy boots with their skirts and shorts to show their game-day spirit.

It took us about 30 minutes to even get near a gated entrance and when it was our turn to pay for parking, we were advised that the valet parking had sold out an hour ago (they weren't even supposed to open up until 10 which was the odd part.)

We ended up having to park on the entire opposite end of the site from the Music Hall back along the fence-line.

It turned out to be okay, though, because the gondola entrance happened to be right in front of the entry-gate so it was easy to find and remember!

As the rain started to pick up, we jumped in line to buy food and ride tickets (no pay-one-price option, either!)

We were able to catch a few rides before the heavy rains came and the lightening shut them down.

Because of the heavy rains, we opted for the indoor exhibits where we sampled chocolates and candied nuts and looked at the butter sculptures and sand sculptures.

When lunch time came, we started trying to find something to eat, only to discover that Texas has taken that whole "Throw it into the fryer" fad a little too far!

There were fried broccoli bites, fried avocado, fried strawberries, fried mash potato, fried ribs, fried peach cobbler (on a stick,) fried oreos & nutter butters, the usual fried snickers & milky way, fried cappuccino, and fried cookie dough.

There really wasn't much that wasn't fried. We somehow ended up inside the air conditioned food pavilion along with what seemed like hundreds of crazed football fans all singing fight songs and cheering and such.

We found it awfully hard to move around and even harder to find somewhere to eat our food (once we found something that wasn't all that fried!)

Somehow we survived lunch time with the football fans, even though Bregon was a bit intimidated by the sheer number of them and their over-zealousness!

It was finally time to head to the Music Hall for the show. We did at least TRY to make ourselves presentable, but it isn't all that easy when one is soaked from head to toe!