Awesome Avenue to Austin City Limits!

The fun continued with the Law family on Awesome Avenue (such an appropriate address for this family) in Salado, Texas!

We made pizza one night which was fun and  delicious!

Our generous hosts Scott and Jessica took us out for a delicious barbecue meal -

can you see how huge those ribs are?!!! About a pound each!

                 

It was a cool place in an old brick building.

"Divine Swine" is just one of the delicious sauces!

The plates are just a big piece of butcher paper - the kids love that!

This was an old meat/sausage grinder. From there we drove into Austin for some fun shopping on Congress Street. There were still a lot of people in town after the holidays!

A clever name for a costume shop!

A popular landmark in Austin.

The handmade boots at this store were beautiful - 

But not quite in our missionary budget!

Cute Mimi got some for her birthday before heading back to college in Logan.

We had to top it off with some delicious ice cream at Amy's - 

and some photos. I love my missionary companion so much - what a fun day!

Before dropping these guys at the airport we stopped for lunch at the historic Barton House in the little town of Salado. I sure love these sisters of mine - I wish we could have had Wendy and Noel there too!

We had so much fun with these guys!

This is a photo of the Barton Family and the story below tells about the history of the home.

Dr. Barton had an office and surgery upstairs and the family lived downstairs. It is a beautiful home with 24 inch thick walls and was built in 1866. There was a limestone sink built into one wall with out door drainage  - it sounds like they were lucky to have him in the Wild West of Texas. His wife was an advocate for literacy - what a couple.

The food was delicious too! After we dropped Anne, Veryl and Bonnie at the airport in Texas, we rushed back to Houston to the temple for another Faith Meets Family night. It broke a record for the number of recently baptized church members participating --at 53! We didn't leave the temple until almost 9:30 that night, so we were too tired to document the event with photos!

On Sunday afternoon we took a long walk to the edges of Lake Houston.

The weather was perfect in the low 70's!

You know Christmas is really over when you see a dumpster overflowing with Christmas trees!

On the way to the temple we stopped - not at "A Hippy Dive Bar," but at

Latter-Day Books and Gifts located right next door to get some supplies for our first day of teaching Sunday school to the 16 and 17 year olds at church.

We gave them each a copy of the Book of Mormon and gave them the challenge to carry it with them.

We pasted a copy of these questions that we got from "Don't Miss This" to the inside front cover - 

"What would happen if we treated our Book of Mormon like we treat our cell phones?" 

We saw this sign in the window of a Thai restaurant near us - we found it funny but we also now can feel empathy for this person, since we are always making a lot of mistakes while trying to learn Spanish!

We recently got a batch of cards from the Zitting kids and then we got more letters and drawings from Kim, Braden and Lincoln today - have we mentioned how much we love mail form home?

Now it is back to reality and back to our mission schedule. This week we have health councils with five of the ten missions in our area, and the phone calls and photos of strange bug bites, and mysterious rashes are coming in again. We love serving here and hope that we are able to make a difference for these AWESOME missionaries!