I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a very long time, and now it’s almost time – first flight leaves in 17 hours. I’m currently still working for another 7 hours or so, so by the time I’ll get home it is going to be a very short night after a quick shower.
I’ll be happy if I’ve slept 5 hours.

Along for the ride will be my wife Kelly and my two daughters. Mister Kitty will stay home and guard the house.

First things first: with the horrible floodings (thoughts go out to the people impacted by this – I can only imagine as a father dropping off your child, kissing goodbyes with a hug, and never seeing them again – it sends a shiver down my spine… ugh) in mind, I reached out to a few people in the area through somebody I know and our trip shouldn’t be impacted a lot (unless there’s more heavy rain).

I booked the airfare a full 11 months ahead, right when the flights became available. I saw €750 RT per person for an open jaw flight (we’ll fly into Austin but depart from Houston), which is a good price. I booked and never looked back on that part.

One thing I will note is that I kept rebooking hotels and rental cars. Sometimes every week. Prices didn’t come down, they crashed down in the last 6 weeks or so. I’m not even paying $500 for a medium 7 Passenger SUV for 12 nights, and that’s including the one way drop fee. Hotels are very cheap, to the point where parking will almost be as much as my nightly hotel rate at one place. Couple that to the USD that lost about 12% in value recently (compared to the Euro), and it will actually be a cheap trip. Well, at least for lodging and the rental car/fuel.

We’ll be on our way to the airport by 5 am~ish, departing from my ‘home’ airport of Brussels.

Flying into Amsterdam on KLM, where we have a 3 hour transfer (which, for me, is the perfect transfer time as I do NOT like short connections) before our KLM 787-10 departs to Austin. It should be a 10 and a half hour flight, arriving at 4 pm in Austin.

After picking up the rental, we’re staying 4 nights in Austin. We will be staying in the Hampton Inn & Suites Downtown Austin, for only $480 including all taxes and fees for the 4 nights. Parking is valet only and $70/night. Ouch.
It’s only a 3-star hotel, which is one star below what I would usually do, but it’s recently renovated and gets good reviews, so I booked it.

I’ll take you along as we have some fun things planned.

On the 14th, around sunrise, we will leave for a ~500 mile drive to Big Bend National Park where will we will stay 2 nights. I booked an A-frame at Stardust Big Bend, which looks fabulous.

This is a certified ‘dark’ area on the planet and should make for some interesting star gazing at night.

The one full day we are there, I planned on exploring a few things in Big Bend National Park. This is arguably the part of our trip that might be impacted most – there are areas that are flooded and I don’t know how soon the water will be receding. I reached out and they said there’s a good chance at least some of the things will reopen by then (the park actually is open as of right now but with a lot of ‘alerts/closures’).

Otherwise, games, food, Netflix and drinking beers on the patio sounds good.

The next morning we’ll be hitting the road early again, to go to San Antonio for 2 nights. I have booked the recently opened Intercontinental San Antonio Riverwalk, and have – again – some fun things planned.

Final stop will be Houston for four nights.

Here, we’ll stay at The Chifley Houston (Curio collection by Hilton) near the Galleria (and not too far from River Oaks).

Without going into detail, but the thing I’m looking forward to to most is the Houston Space Center – one of the things I booked ahead to be sure to have tickets.
SO looking forward to that!

About time to go to the U.S. again – it’s been 6 months after all since my trip to Vegas in January.

Yes, we know it’ll be hot and humid.