Howdy folks! 🤠🌻
I’m currently heading home to Atlanta after spending a wonderful weekend in Houston, Texas with my college friends.
We’ve been making an effort to see each other in person since we graduated, and our travels have taken us to the cities we all have moved to, including Chicago, Seattle, New York, and now, H-Town.
Houston is a viiiibe. What a funky, colorful mix of Hispanic, Asian, grungy, and country cool. While we only had a weekend to spend together, we hit as many of the local haunts as we could.
Southern Yankee and City Orchard were both fun, jovial dives with great service and cocktails.
Houston has an impressive fusion culture, and we went to a Portuguese-Indian restaurant called da Gama (which I can only assume is similar to Goan cuisine) with delicacies like pani puri filled with crab, coconut curry (with the butteriest naan I’ve ever had), and pizza covered in spinach and paneer. Amazing!
For BBQ, we had amazing brisket and beef rib (the BBQ had a bit of a Mexican flair, with pickled jalapeños and radishes) at The Pit Room in Montrose, with gorgeous mac n’ cheese and green beans. Would recommend!
We had good times at Ramen Tatsu-Ya and Local Foods Market too, concluding that Houston has incredible food and super great people (among them, my incredibly smart and talented friend Alix, who is getting her PhD in electrical engineering and neuroscience 🤯).
Would love to come back here to spend a week simply eating all the food…and adjusting my waistband.
🎶 What I’ve Been Listening To
On another country note, Miranda Lambert’s new album “Postcards from Texas” has dropped! Classic themes of no-good cowboys, scenes of the Southwest, and plays on words like “alimony” instead of “Alamo” abound.
Next week I’d love to do a whole list of country music for people who don’t like country (even if you can’t stand the accents!)
✨ Thoughts I’ve Been Thinking
One fateful, freezing December night in Germany, I missed my flight from Frankfurt to Atlanta.
It was a long story, but because the next flight would be at 10 AM the next morning, I made the decision to spend the night in the Frankfurt airport instead of getting a hotel. All justifications were around cost.
I don’t want to spend all that extra money! I’ll save so much money by staying at the airport!
However, not only is spending the night in the airport not the safest thing, they also keep the lights on all night (re: sleep is impossible), and I had to carry around 4 bottles of Duty-Free Riesling to and fro from the bathroom because I didn’t have enough room in my luggage.
There was no sleep.
By the time it was time to drag myself to the gate, I was absolutely exhausted, and while I probably saved 300 Euros and a trip out and back to the airport, it still cost me a sliver of my soul.
At the gate the next morning, I felt gross, irritable, paranoid, and impatient, and by the time I got home to Atlanta, I wished I had spent 300 Euros on a hotel stay just to not feel that terrible.
After that day, I vowed to myself that I would never sleep in an airport ever again.
As I type this, I am currently in an airport hotel in Houston, about to go take a shower and slip into the sheets before my alarm goes off at 4 AM for the Atlanta flight tomorrow.
It took a conscious choice to spend the $159 on a hotel stay and $13.41 on a Lyft to an airport hotel, because I almost spent the night at the airport again (standby privileges as an ex-employee of an airline certainly has its pros and cons).
Again, the culprit is the illusion of scarcity.
Friends, if you’re reading this, the greatest dialogue between you and I is the continuous, conscious choice of abundance being the only reality. How can you continually choose You 2.0?
How can you, even in moments of temptation and fear, decide to choose faith and abundance?
$159 on a hotel room and $13.41 on a Lyft may not feel like a big deal now… but abundance compounds.
And I hope that you will be sharing soon how this abundant decision led you to the next serendipitous occurrence, and then the next.
Despite your fear.
I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, consciously choosing faith and love.
See you all on Tuesday.
Much love,
Renée
Houston sounds great! Always wanted to get to Texas and now want to even more! Need to roadtrip out that way next year I think. Sounds like such a cool mix of cultural influences and especially good food!
Also totally agree with always playing to 'you 2.0' (or I like to think of it as my higher self vs lower self). So worth it in the end - great point!
I love this! My husband and I flew to Cuba a few years ago. Initially, we thought we'd sleep in the airport in Miami (we got in at 11 pm and were flying out at 6...) I don't know what we were thinking when we made this plan... we couldn't go to our gate, so were in the common area, where - you're spot on- the lights were on full blast, all night. It was freezing and felt creepy/unsafe. We decided to spend $220 to sleep at the airport hotel and it was the best (I repeat, best) travel decision we ever made. I still have the lil lotion bottle from the hotel, which I call my $220 lotion. :)