Trip to Granbury and the Zoo

We had a great weekend last weekend. Stephen has wanted to join the Singing Men of North Central Texas (a group of active and retired music ministers) for a long time now. He finally decided that since their next concert was in Granbury it would give him the perfect opportunity to visit Aunt Sara and Uncle William and to join the group. We drove down to Granbury on Thursday morning and met Aunt Sara for lunch at a tea room with amazing sandwiches. Stephen left to go rehearse for the day with the Singing Men while Hope, Aunt Sara and I went shopping at Walmart. We all met up for dinner with Uncle William at a new Chinese restaurant in Granbury, then we headed to the concert. The church was packed with people. Even the overflow room was packed out. We were glad that some of Sara and William's friends saved us a seat. I had to leave early because Hope was not thrilled at all about being in the nursery, but what I saw of the concert was amazing. The room was so full of energy, and it was so good to see so many people worshiping. There were over 100 Singing Men performing and they had an orchestra and handbell choir too. Hope really took to Aunt Sara and Uncle William quickly. She figured out pretty fast that they are cool people. Thanks Aunt Sara and Uncle William for taking such good care of us while we were down there!

We saw this out the window on our way to Granbury. It is called a circumhorizontal arc. It looks a lot like a rainbow, but it's not. It is a rare optical phenomenon. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

"The arc is formed as light rays enter the horizontally-oriented flat hexagon crystals through a vertical side face and exit through the horizontal bottom face. It is the 90° inclination that produces the well-separated rainbow-like colours and, if the crystal alignment is just right, makes the entire cirrus cloud appear to shine like an undulating rainbow."

It was SOOO neat to see and we got lots of cool pictures of it!

On Saturday we decided to get out a little early and head to the Dallas Zoo. We weren't sure if it would be rainy or not, but we checked the radar and felt confident that the weather would cooperate. We were wrong. It rained quite a bit, but we still managed to see most of the animals. Hope is obsessed with animals, so it was a lot of fun.

The ride home from the zoo... She was tuckered out!