Weekend Activity #2 - St. Arnold's Brewing Company

We had an amazingly awesome day planned for today. The card drawn for this weekend was 

Time for our next planned event!

The magic cards tell us we are to tour the St. Arnold's Brewery and The Beer Can House. Now, I know what everyone is already thinking on this one..."How have you lived in Houston for over 2 years and never been to either of these places???" Honestly, I can't tell you. I've been on numerous brewery tours and I always like them. Plus, I am a big fan of beers, especially good craft beers.

Breakfast and Travel:

The day started out at Baby Barnaby's in Montrose. This was our 2nd or 3rd choice. We had started out going to someplace Lauren found on Yelp that was one of the top ranked diners. When Apple maps made us miss the new connection from 290 to I-10, we got re-routed. I was unaware that this diner was almost at Hobby Airport. Needless to say, as we stopped for gas, I looked up and found Baby Barnaby's.

As for breakfast, I have to report...it was REALLY good. Lauren had some Migas and I had the breakfast tacos. It was really tasty, the eggs in the taco were fresh, and the salsa, which tasted homemade, had a good amount of zing to it to match a really good flavor. The potatoes that came with it were fantastic also.

But the highlight of the visit? The people. The waiter working out side decided to hit on me a couple times (including once telling me that I look like a "young Garth Brooks". I laughed hard at that one. But also, there was a group of local ladies next to us with a pet pit bull that was cute as hell. They were all "fitness" ladies, although they looked like they were more into the fitness discussion rather then actually doing anything. There was also the "Montrose Douchebag" next to us...but I expected that. Believe it or not, I didn't mind him nearly as much. Overall, I would defiantly go back to this place.

We then proceeded to head to the St. Arnold's Brewery. This was an adventure by itself. First, we got to go past some really cool graffiti...the kind that is actually art work.

I apologize that I have to use a snapchat photo. I only had so much time to capture this and was about to make a funny snap for a friend that we were trying to get to the brewery too. However, after this, the trip went to crap. For some reason, Houston decided they would like to shut down I-45 this weekend, and everyone was trying to get through this area. However, we eventually made our way to the Brewery.

St. Arnold's Brewery:

We arrived at St. Arnold's a few minutes after 11:00AM. This worked out, as the place opens around that time. By time we made it inside (more road construction in the area), the Beer Hall was full. I was really shocked to see the number of children there for birthday parties. It legit filled up almost half the table seating. However, we paid our $10 per person admission, received our cups, and went in to begin our tour and drinking.

The problems for me personally started at this point. You see, as a part of this experiment, we knew we would be doing things we may not like. I do not like most of St. Arnold's beers. I like Hefes - light, crisp, cold. The first beer I saw was St. Arnold's Icon Series Hefe - the Amarillo Hefeweizen. It had a decent taste to start, but there was a weird aroma in it...some kind of piney/clove smell that ruined it for me.

St. Arnold's Icon Series Hefe - the Amarillo Hefeweizen

At this point, between the ruined beer, the lack of seating, and unorganized tour setup, I was done. I literarily drink root beer the rest of the time we were there. Lauren did have a couple beers and seemed to enjoy herself. She also added to my brewery t-shirt collection by getting me this shirt

I can report this shirt is one of those extremely comfortable shirts that I will enjoy wearing, even if I don't like the beer on it. But Lauren, God love her, knew I was ready to get out of there. However, I did get a couple other good pictures that I want to share. And the building itself is really cool. It is definitely an old building from who knows how many years ago. I would recommend the tour to anyone who likes brewery tours.

Downtown Houston...I love this skyline

Another view...beautiful

This is a really cool picture of the grain silos outside the brewery

Lauren is going to kill me for this...but I love that she let me take this picture

The end of the day

The day ended with some errand running that we needed to get done. So we headed out to Katy. First, we had to make a stop at Academy. Lauren wanted my help picking out her Father's Day gift for her Dad. That was exciting. He's going to love what we picked out and she got him. From there, we ended up at Men's Warehouse, finishing up the tuxedos for the wedding. Luckily that is over. But then the highlight of the night happened. We picked up her parent's dog so they could go out of town tonight too.

This means PUPPY SLEEPOVER! Lauren's parents have an English Lab named Abby that weighs about 75lbs. Needless to say, this is more than our 2 dogs combined. So, she's like a horse over here. However, I had to mention this because I wanted to use this picture. After we got home from running around and spending some time in the future in-law's pool, we got home and passed out dog biscuits.

Abby (L) and Lola (R) eating biscuits.

I thought it was too funny seeing them look like twins in the way they are eating their biscuits.

I'm not sure what the next adventure we will have will be. We haven't picked a new card yet. And I know at the end of the month, I will be going out of town. So there may not be doing any new cards this month. However, I will still try to update what our adventures are without card direction.

1st Activity? "Dinner and a Movie"

It was kind of perfect. We did our first drawing the night we had made the cards. We worked under the assumption that if it was something we could do on Sunday (today), we would. If not, it would be next weekend's event.

So when we drew the card yesterday evening, after an hour of so of building our little "game", we picked Dinner and a Movie. This was Lauren's suggestion in the card bin. After some negotiations, we decided that it wouldn't be a traditional date night, so we could do an early movie Sunday.

Our flick to pick? The new action movie "San Andreas", staring Dwayne Johnson, Carla Guigino, and Alexandra Daddario. If somehow you have not seen this, I highly recommend you get out to the theater and see it. It was fantastic in the AMC Prime theater, with the Real 3D showing.  The sound system and chairs in these theaters are SO worth the viewing.

This movie was a lot better than I thought it was going to be. The action was going to be awesome, I knew going in. The Rock plays a search and rescue helicopter pilot who lives in LA and has to save his family when major earthquakes take out LA and San Francisco. Alexandra Daddario is his only living daughter, and she is SMOKING hot, btw (sorry Lauren, I told you that in the theater too).

Overall, it really was a very good flick. It kept my interest and made me even have some feels in the middle of the movie. Lauren has said she enjoyed it also. We both were glad we went to the Prime showing too.

After the movie, we had our "dinner" at Fuzzy's Tacos in Vintage Park. We both are big fans of this taco shop. They are either #1 or #2 in my personal rankings for Fish Tacos in Houston. I love this place, and our kitchen cupboard with a half dozen "souvenir" cups show this to be true.

So after some delicious fish tacos, along with latin potatoes and cilantro lime rice, it was time to head home. But no trip to Vintage Park is complete without a stop by the cigar shop for some specials for me.

Until next weekend, have a wonderful week. Next weekend's trip will be very special...as it include 2 stops that rank on any beer drinker in Houston's "to-do list", even thought I somehow have not done either in 2 years of living here. It's time to change that!

What is "Meals Up The Belt"

Hello and welcome. My name is Mike Meals (-M). My fiancee and I live in the Houston Metro, near Houston's Sam Houston Tollway, affectionately known to us as The Beltway or The Belt. We currently are in the Jersey Village / Cypress area of Houston. We both are in the 29-35 year age demographic and are successful professionals in our chosen fields. So when I say Meals Up (as in Wheels Up), that's where the name comes from.

The problem with all of this? We are not living ITL (In The Loop), but we are not fully ready to be suburbanites either. As we have been preparing for the wedding this September, we made a terrible discovery...we were becoming the suburbanites anyway. Far too often, we found ourselves staying at home for the entire weekend, as we prepared wedding plans and worked to make the house as livable and comfortable as possible. Which is a great thing to do, unless you are under the age of 80 and want to experience the things Houston and Texas both have to offer people our age.

This started last night. I challenged my fiancee (her name is Lauren, by the way) to help come up with activities that we could do to make the weekends have more exciting things discovered than a sale at HEB. How did we do this? We pulled 72 note cards from Target and a couple bins. We then went through all the lists we could find online and attempted to find activities that we would want to do. Many of them were things that we wanted to do but had not, things we had put off after talking about, or things that we knew would take each other out of our comfort zones and cause us to grow and enjoy life.

Basic Rules? Sure, we have some. 1st, there are 4 wild cards in the basket. Why 4? There were 4 black note cards and we had no marker that would write on them. This means that whoever draws this card has total freedom in picking a weekend activity. We have decided that when we select something, it must be completed within 30 days. We have decided that we each get 2 vetos...allowing us to make a pick be picked again. They must be used wisely though, as there are some things the other is not going to like. We also have 3 baskets. One contains the undone activities. One contains the completed activities. The third is our "would do again/must reschedule activities".  This is for things that we liked or want to do but can not, based on things like the time of year. It's really hard to catch an Astros game during February. Also, we can not do less than 2 card selections each month. We have to make sure we get through these cards. Lastly, as of now, we have agreed that planned activities with friends or family can overrule these selections. So when we go float a river in July, we can use that instead of picking a card.

But before we end this post, here is a little about each of us. I am 33 and originally from Ohio. She is a native Texan from right here in the Houston Metro. I will not disclose her age, but it's about 4 years less than mine lol. We met over 5 years ago and have been together for almost 2 1/2 years. I've lived in Texas for 2 of those years. Before this, I was in Florida near Orlando. She's been here her entire life, hold a couple years near Kansas City.

So stay tuned. We will be posting as these things take place. We have already picked this weekend's activity, and one for next weekend too.