family dallas trip: day 1.

it's only taken me a month, but i'm finally getting around to posting about the family trip we took to dallas at the end of summer.  haley has never been out of the state of oklahoma, except to visit our aunt who used to live in arkansas. 

haley has stayed pretty busy babysitting for the loves and the leaches this summer, and my travel schedule at work has picked up quite a bit. still, we knew we wanted to get her out of town for a bit, even if we couldn't go for an entire week.

july 25th was a thursday.  haley spent the day babysitting for the loves in barlesville.  we picked her up right after work and headed to the tulsa airport to pick up a rental car.  travis and i had taken the next day off work, so we were going to have a three-day weekend.  instead of using one of those days for driving, we had decided we would drive down on thursday night so we would have all day friday and saturday for activities and part of the day sunday before heading home.  the rental car took a little bit longer to get than we had originally anticipated.  with the plan i have, we can usually get out, pick a car from the aisle, and head on out ... but the tulsa airport was beebopping-showstopping, so we had to wait for one to be cleaned and available.  i grabbed the car and haley and travis headed out ahead of me.  we got to the house and travis and i quickly packed, said good bye to the boys (my mom and sierra helped watch them at the house while we were gone - and then took them to tahlequah and muskogee later in the weekend), loaded up the car, and away we went. 

the drive to dalls from tulsa isn't really all that bad.  we had spotify to keep us company, and i created a fun playlist for our dallas trip.  sometimes almost always, when we get in the car, haley puts in headphones, so i tried to make sure it was a fun mix of songs we would all like.  i even included some one direction songs.

when we drove through durant, haley could see flashing lights in the distance.  she asked what was glowing in the sky.  it kind of cracked me up, because what was glowing in the sky was actually the casino.  (ignore the terrible quality of this picture).

when we got into dallas, we actually hit traffic.  haley was outraged.  what the heck? seriously? traffic at this time?? we explained that texas does all their road construction at night.  the trip definitely wasn't bad, but the last forty-five minutes of the trip i was definitely counting down the minutes until i could crawl into a nice cozy bed.

i wanted to stay at the omni dallas (the hotel that plays in the opening credits of dallas, the show), but they were completely full. so we stayed at the omni mandalay hotel instead. (also in dallas).

now, there are a few perks that come with travel as frequent as mine.  i had earned three free nights with omni because i've stayed with them so much, so our hotel room for the weekend was completely covered -- and we were able to upgrade to a suite for no additional cost.  (yay for free suites for a whole weekend!)

when we finally got to our hotel at a little after midnight this was waiting for us. 

we didn't spend too much time enjoying it, though, because we were all completely wiped out.  we quickly found our pajamas and toothbrushes and started getting ready for bed.

while i was changing, travis tried to make up the sofa bed for haley.  turned out there was no bed in the sofa.  we looked and looked, but there was definitely not a bed ... and there was no other furniture in the room that turned into a bed.  i felt terrible.  haley said she didn't mind sleeping on the couch, so we promised we would get it fixed in the morning, and all headed to dreamland.