Sunday morning was, as most people know, Father’s Day – both in the US and at home in the UK. Mother’s day never falls on the same day, but Father’s day is always doubled up – I feel that this will cheat Colin out of having two fathers days in the future, as I fully expect to celebrate both ‘versions’ of Mother’s day when we become parents 😉 LOL!
Anyways, we got up early and tried to call our respective fathers to chat to them on their special days. Col’s was out to dinner, but I managed to get a hold of mine and have a nice long chat to him.
When we’d done, my sister came on the phone and told me that the family dog (ok, so he’s my little brother’s dog, but he’s the family dog) Hugo, was sick, so sick in fact, that he was in the hospital on a drip/IV and had been given around a 40% chance of survival. Of course she was crying, which meant I cried and all the while Col was outside changing a bulb in the Griffon ahead of our journey to Dallas and had no idea why he came in to find me sniffling!
We left for Dallas, not only when we’d agreed we wanted to leave by, but early – EARLY?! US?!
No way!!!
Actually, as it turned out, it was ‘no way’, as we forgot our suncream, sunglasses and hats so had to do an ‘about turn’, head home and pick up those vital parts of our packing!
Our *actual* take-off, was about 10 minutes behind when we wanted to leave, which, for us, is still early! haha!!
En route, we stopped off at Red Robin in Spring to have lunch, it was PACKED (we kept forgetting that it was Father’s day!) but it was yummy all the same!
Somehow, during the long drive, we managed to miss the exit for Buc-ees – and, if you’ve ever driven to Dallas, you’ll know that exits are few and far between, so it’d have taken a half hour just to u-turn and come back to it, adding an hour to the trip – something we weren’t prepared to do. ‘We’ll gettum on the way back’.
We arrived in Dallas around 4.15pm, we checked in, unpacked, ate our Double Tree cookies – if you haven’t stayed in a Double Tree, it’s normally worth it for the cookies alone! LOL! Today, however, the cookies were somewhat overcooked – but however!
After unpacking and getting ourselves settled in the room, we decided to head outside for a little while. We sunbathed and swam before I hit the gym for a short workout. It was short, only 15 minutes actually, but, given that I’d not done any exercise in upwards of 8months, any exercise is better than none!
For dinner, we headed to a place that I’d picked up a voucher for, Samosa’s – a wee Indian place.
Upon ordering our food, we were told by the owner that as it was Father’s day, it was one of the 4 days in the year that we were not allowed to use our coupon – which was ok with us, the place wasn’t expensive to begin with so we’d have paid for it (during our meal, he came over and said cause we were in Dallas for only a short trip that he’d accept our voucher – on the DL.
As it turned out, Samosa’s was the nicest Indian food we’ve had this side of the Atlantic! Still not ‘home’ standard, but it was pretty darn good! We started with Chicken Pakora – a dish that I’d never tried until Nina’s James had it one night when we were in the Indian Ocean (even typing those words is drawing heaving sobs from my chest!) to accompany the pakora, we ordered some potato and onion fritters – assuming it was like onion bahji’s or something. It was similar, just not as much spice in the batter as you’d normally expect, but both were tasty and the portions were huge!
For our mains, Col ordered Chicken Tikka Masala (I’ve been let down too many times in Indian restaurants here to order it again) and I chose a green Thai chicken curry, both came with rice and naan, both had large servings and mine at least, was delicious – Col had asked for a ‘mild’ CTM and it certainly was NOT mild, but, once you scraped every ounce of the sauce off the chicken, it tasted pretty good lol!
Dessert – yes, we were pigs, we had three courses, we wanted to try the dessert samosas. The guy told us that he could mix all four flavours for us and give us one of each, chocolate, white chocolate, cheesecake and apple – these come with a dollop of ice cream and a rather unnecessary squirted tower of squirty cream.
The samosas were tasty, though I was so full, I could barely shove in a taste of each of them before I exploded all over the walls of the restaurant! LOL!
After dinner, we were both too full to move, so it was an evening of Man -v- Food and other food and travel related TV shows before bed!