ATX Via College Station, TX - WHOOP!

My parents graciously watched Michael (took some arm twisting...NOT) while Brian and I ran away to Austin for Brent/Tracy's long awaited wedding!

We had a super fantastic time reliving old memories!  It was a much needed vacation that we enjoyed immensely!

First up - a trip to College Station

{insert college station exit image here}

We drove by our old stomping grounds, Zachry, only to find a brand new building in its place.  We couldn't believe they totally renovated Zachry.  Then we drove another 50 yards, and Zachry appeared BEHIND the new building.

WHEW.  Room 119A, where we met, was still in tact.  We wandered around the old building and couldn't believe how we did not notice how "old" it was when we were there.  I guess that would have involved us looking up from our books, calculators, and engineering paper.  Or had something else to compare it to!

Well, we took a picture of us outside of it in remembrance of many hours spent there:

{insert pic of us outside of Zachry }

We then wandered to the "something to compare it to" building, which is the new Jack E. Brown Engineering building.  Most of the 6-7 floor building is used for Chemical Engineering purposes.  It even has a CLEAN ROOM!  WOW!  I was pretty excited about that.  For those who do not know, a clean room is what they call the manufacturing/fabrication facilities of memory.  Multiple layers of filters above the ceiling and below the floors keep particles from contaminating the wafers, which kill the memory chips.

After wandering around the campus, I thought it was so funny that as a college student, I felt like it was SUCH A LONG walk from one place to another.  As a grown up now, the campus isn't as big as I remember it in my memory.  AND the sidewalk next to the Chemistry building is A LOT cleaner than it used to be!  :)

We then had lunch at Freebirds and came back to a rental car which wouldn't start.

Many phone calls later, we were going to have to wait 3 hours for a tow truck to switch out our rental car for us.

Luckily, Brian tried the car again, and it started.  So we drove to Austin Bergstrom (my favorite airport by the way) and switched out our car.

For the record, AVOID DOLLAR RENTAL CARS at all cost!  While their customer service representative was very helpful in the event of our malfunction, the 2nd rental they gave us reeked of smoke.  They also promised it would be clean and ready to go when we got to ABI.  They also promised we wouldn't have to wait a long time at the kiosk. But it took us nearly 40 minutes to switch out our car.

Might I also add that Chantelle, who helped us with exchanging our vehicle out, was mighty lucky that I had a pretty craptastic and stressful week.  Right before my vacation, I had to have to this talk to myself:  "Phuong, just because things don't work out how you would like them to work out, does not mean you get to be disrespectful and take it out on innocent bystanders."

So by the time our rental car didn't start, I had already hashed things out with my lab (although I was nicer to them because I need to have a good relationship with them), the UPS customer service people. and Armstrong Cable at 10:00pm the night before my departure.  Chantelle escaped the stressed out me.

I can say all this because my blog is locked to the public.  In case you are wondering why - I have a photography business.  You google my name, and my personal blog pops up.  I'd like to keep my personal life personal.  Thus, I locked my blog.

ATX coming up next!