Part 2: El Paso After-Christmas Birthday trip

A couple of days after Christmas, we piled in the car and headed the LONG 9 or 10 or 11 hours to El Paso (I can't even remember...it was just long). But, we were excited to go visit family and cousins and throw a SURPRISE party for Grampa Kall. He turned 75 in December, so we all got together to celebrate!

The day after our arrival, Charles had a bit of an accident. Let's just say he learned it was NOT a good idea to go for a bike ride with a dog, attached to his leash, hooked over your handle bars. Gaby (the Perry's dog) saw another dog, took off, and Charles met a brick wall. OUCH! Poor guy was really hurt. This picture is still hard to look at.



The day of the party, we tricked Grandpa into coming into the hotel where we had the dinner and dancing all set up by telling him we were all going out for Larry and Yvonne's anniversary. We needed him to drive them there. Somehow they got him down to the reception room and "surprise!!". He was very surprised to see all his friends there waiting for him...and actually quite touched. We proceeded to eat, drink and dance the night away.

Grandpa with his 11 grandchildren and two grand nephews!



Grandpa and his 5 grown children, Joe, Liz, Yvette, Steve and Larry


Time to dance!!


Joshua half-heartedly does the chicken dance.


While Steve "Gets Down"


The only Kall who wouldn't dance was Thomas. He did this all night! He was too shy to dance. Who Knew?


It was a really great party!!!

The San Antonio Kalls (Larry, Yvonne and crew) drove to El Paso in a rented RV. We thought it would be fun to take a drive up to Cloud Croft and play in some snow. The ride was fun until we got to the top of the mountain where the wind was gusting us off the side of the mountain and we had blizzard conditions. We white knuckled it to the top, let the kids out for about 10 minutes to play in the snow, then headed back down as Larry was afraid of getting stuck.

It was COLD. The wind was blowing so hard it was miserable. Just a couple of quick snowballs and everyone was done.




After making it down the mountain and saying a few prayers for making it, we thought White Sands would be more fun. Since we were "right around the corner" we headed over so the kids could play in the dunes.





It was deceptively cold and pretty windy, so even though the kids wanted to slide down the dunes, nobody lasted long. We loaded back up in the RV and headed back to...snow in El Paso!!