Wildflowers

    Texas may be hot, but it sure does have the prettiest wildflowers! While we were at Connor's therapy appointment this week, Olivia and I were going to see the horses across the dirt road and we saw these beautiful flowers. I had to grab my camera to snap a picture and I am so glad I did.

Exploring

    One of Connor and Olivia's favorite things to do is play outside. We have an open field in front of our house that they love to explore. There are wild flowers, bugs, dirt... everything a kid would want!

 Connor picked me these beautiful flowers today.

Croatia Day 2: Slunj, Caves of Barac, and Rastoke

    Our second day in Croatia was pretty relaxed. While we were planning our day the previous night we realized the two places we wanted to visit were a 2 hour drive from our hotel. Since we had driven so much the first day and were driving to Slovenia the next day, we decided to skip them and just take it easy. We slept in until about 7:45, when Connor woke us up.

 The outside of our cute hotel. The owners lived on the first two floors and we {along with two other families} stayed on the third floor. Our apartment was spacious and included a private kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom, and bedroom. Way bigger than we needed, but the price was really good.

Croatia Day 1: Plitvice National Park

   This past Labor Day weekend Aaron, Connor, and I took a road trip to Croatia and Slovania. There was a lot of driving and so much traffic that we ran into, but we had such a great time exploring these two beautiful countries. 

   Our first day was Friday {9/2}. We woke up and left the house at 7, 30 minutes later then we planned. Not horrible, but still later than we hoped. The drive was only supposed to take us 5 1/2 hours, but ended up taking us 8 hours because of multiple unplanned stops and the GPS getting us lost. It was really the GPS's fault because we kept loosing signal on our phones and anytime we came out of a tunnel it would go crazy and take forever to reconnect. It made us so mad, and when we eventually got it to work, it took us the longest route possible.

    If the drive wasn't bad enough, just getting the money needed for parking proved to be a challenge. We didn't take any euros out before our trip because we planned on using our Italian debit card to pull the local currency {Kuna} out from their ATM's, but they didn't have any on site. We either had to walk to their hotel {we weren't sure where it was and it would cause is to backtrack once we got it} or find some in my car. We chose to find money in my car because it was closer. Aaron went and came back with 3 euros thinking it would be exchanged for enough Kuna, but I read a sign that had the amount needed for parking and told him it wasn't enough. So then I went to my car while Aaron and Connor stayed back and luckily found us enough. After 45 minutes of figuring all that out, we finally were able to go to the park.

    Plitvice National Park is a UNESCO world heritage site and the largest and oldest national park in Croatia. What makes it so beautiful are the 16 interconnected lakes that create waterfalls throughout the park. The color of the lakes changes often based on the minerals and organisms present in the water and the direction of sunlight. There are multiple paths to follow, but since we arrived later in the day we stuck to path H {one of he shortest paths}. A shuttle dropped us off at the beginning of the H path and we followed the wooden path downward towards the entrance we parked closest to.

 The start of our "nature walk." Connor kept telling us he loved going on a nature walk and he had never been on one before.

Sunflowers

    Last night my good friend Kelsey took me on a little surprise trip to a sunflower field she stumbled upon during the week. She's been teaching me about photography, so she knew I would looooove to take pics of the sunset over this beautiful field full of sunflowers. We got there just in time, I'm talking minutes, before the sun quickly disappeared behind the mountains.