2 Backpacks, 2 Bikes, a Van and a plan..: Family Visit

After a great couple of days in Galveston, Andre & I settled back into the van on late Sunday morning and headed northwest toward the Houston area for a visit with Andre’s sister Anne and her husband Ray. It was our first visit to their Richmond, Texas home and our first look at the rapidly-expanding suburbs that ring the city of Houston, currently the 4^th largest city in the United States by population.

Over the course of our stay, we drove through a number of towns and cities including Richmond, Sugar Land (home of the Imperial Sugar Company), Rosenberg and others, and the evidence that the entire area was booming was undeniable. New highways were under construction, retail and housing developments were being expanded and new luxury home communities were under construction and heavily advertised on bill boards.

We didn’t get into downtown Houston during this visit (we’ll save that for another time), but it was clear from news coverage that the ongoing growth and population boom was proving challenging for traffic patterns and lengthening daily commutes for drivers in the ring of suburban communities. Andre & I noted that in the more than two months we’d been traveling through the northeast, southeast, south and coastal gulf regions, this was the first time we’d seen this level of growth activity. Quite a change from the struggling economy of our home state of Rhode Island as well.

We enjoyed two days of wonderful hospitality with Anne and Ray and thoroughly enjoyed their beautiful backyard and hot tub, breakfasts and lunches on the patio and dinner out at a great local pizza place on our last night there. We spent many hours talking and laughing as we caught up with family events, both ours and theirs, and reminisced about childhoods, weddings, and past times in Rhode Island (before Anne and Ray became Texas transplants). Here is a photo of Andre and his older sister Anne.

Thanks for a great stay, Anne & Ray !!

On Tuesday morning we said good-bye and headed out, bound for parts west (the Shiner Brewery and eventually San Antonio). Snapped this photo showing the 70 mph speed limit that we would enjoy all the way to San Antonio (theoretically, anyway – we still drive the van slower than that to conserve gas!).