Lacey and Erica's vacation photo album // McKinney - Dallas - Norman // September 2022

Lacey and I have been friends for over 20 years now but we have never travelled together (that I can remember... Lacey - any thoughts on this?) As mentioned in yesterday's post, we were absolutely determined to see My Chemical Romance on their reunion tour. ❤ Since the concert was in Dallas, TX, I decided to make a little girls' trip out of it and spend 2 days away. Not only was this our first time travelling together, but it was also our first time travelling without husbands and dogs... and we had a blast! Lacey, if you're reading this, I'm proposing an annual road-trip with just the two of us!! 😄

How cute is Lacey's dog, Priscilla??! Too damn cute!!

We have crochet nights a few times each month at my house where we choose a project and work on it together. 🧶 I had no desire to drive around Dallas so my plan was to take us to a yarn shop, buy a bunch of supplies, and crochet all day at the hotel until it was time for the concert. I did a quick Google search before our trip and found the highest rated yarn shop in the area. It was McKinney Knittery in McKinney, TX. We got to Historic Downtown McKinney around lunch time. Downtown was adorable with lots of tiny boutiques and restaurants, ample parking and little to no traffic. AKA heaven!!! 😍

We had lunch at Cadillac Pizza Pub before shopping. We both got their lunch special which was a personal pizza and small salad, and we celebrated our safe arrival into Texas with cocktails (any reason to have a drink with lunch, right? 😆 LOL) The pizza was really good and my caprese salad was delicious. 

Time to shop!! McKinney Knittery is a gigantic yarn shop. Half of it is specialty yarn of all types and colors, and the other half of the store is fabric!!💓 My two favorite things!! 💓I didn't like the fabric as much as I thought I would. It was mostly traditional quilting cotton. The designs were cute but they didn't have the more modern contemporary prints that I prefer. The yarn, on the other hand, was spectacular!! I have never seen so much yarn! Of course we wanted to buy it all but, we stuck to the supplies we needed for the two projects we picked out (a skull granny square pencil pouch and a Japanese knot bag). I still ended up with five skeins and a bunch of other goodies. Funny story: we saw Moon Drake yarn at the shop. The owner of Moon Drake is an independent yarn entrepreneur in Oklahoma and former acquaintance of ours... and her yarn was highest priced in the entire shop, but I wouldn't have considered it the best colored or quality! 😆😶🙊

One thing that I despise about specialty yarn is that it always comes in hanks. It's a fancy way to display the colors of the yarn but it makes it so hard to unravel into a usable ball. The extremely friendly employees at the knittery offered to roll our yarn into balls for us with their little spinning machine. While we were waiting for them to do that, we wandered over to the next boutique, Ettiene Market. It is a handmade soap and kitchen accessories store. It smelled amazing!!

After we had our fill of shopping, we headed to the hotel. Lacey booked us a room at the Lorenzo hotel. It was the coolest place!! It is an art themed hotel with random paintings, sculptures and installation art scattered all over the place (inside and outside of the building!) The best exhibit was a small white room at the corner on the first floor. The entire room was collaged in a multitude of white objects. It was all 3-D and had color changing lights. 😎📷 Perfect photo opp!! 

The Lorenzo hotel is famous because it is where Tina Turner went when she finally had enough and left her abusive husband, Ike. They were originally staying at the Hilton, which was across the highway downtown. They got in yet another massive fight and Tina Turner said that was the last straw. She snuck out of the Hilton, ran across the highway, and took refuge at the Lorenzo (it was called something else at the time.) The hotel is very proud of its history and has Tina Turner memorabilia displayed throughout. 

I wanted to see all the little art galleries that the hotel had, so we walked around (bags in tow) for a bit before settling into our room. I also wanted to do some poolside crocheting since I saw online that the Lorenzo has one of Dallas's best pools, but it was too hot. 🌞 So we just hung out in our super chic room and crocheted only one skull (out of the 4 we need for our bag, and we didn't even start our second project... I always think I have so much more time than I really do). Then it was time to see My Chemical Romance in concert. ❤💀💓 It was SO GOOD!!! 

One of my greatest fears is the terrible traffic in/around the Dallas metro area. 🚘🚘🚘 Luckily, our drive both days wasn't too bad but I knew that traffic in the evening around the American Airlines arena would be hell. To avoid this, we got an Uber to and from the concert. I was telling Lacey how much I love Uber and how Wes & I use it on all our vacations and we've had the best experience with great drivers. Then both of the drivers Lacey and I got were awful!! 😑 To be fair, there were a lot of road closures around the arena and post-concert traffic was insane with cars & pedestrians everywhere, and no one was paying attention to what they were doing. Despite all that, we made it safely back to the hotel for a restful night's sleep.

The next morning we took one last stroll around the hotel's galleries and then headed out to breakfast. ☕ We went to the Maple Leaf Diner. It is an authentically Canadian restaurant. 🍁I have never tried Canadian food and was excited to have it. Both Lacey and I were pretty underwhelmed. We ordered poutine (which my pen pal in Canada pointed out is NOT breakfast food) and hollandaise. I've only ever had cheese curds fried so that's what I expected in the poutine. Instead, they were naked curds that were mostly melted into the bland gravy. I thought my meal was bland overall, but the Canadian bacon was tasty. We had a little time after breakfast, so we headed to Buc-ee's. I needed to get gas anyway.

We went to the Fred Jones art museum on The University of Oklahoma campus on our way home. Despite being an alumni, I haven't retuned to OU in probably 15+ years. So much has changed!! Namely the parking, as in there is none now! We had to park in the paid parking garage; their ticking booth was out of order so we had to download and attempt to use their impossible app. 😣 Anyway, Lacey used to work at the art museum but hasn't been back since she quit. It would have been nice to explore the entire museum but we were short on time and came solely for the Synesthesia exhibit. 

We wore our matching Boredwalk t-shirts!

The Synesthesia exhibit imagined how colors would be if we could use our other senses to perceive them. The aim was to answer the following - what does pink smell like, what does green sound like, what does purple feel like, etc. The exhibit was only one room but it was amazing!!! Most likely one of the hippest rooms we've been in. 😎 The room was divided into yellow, green, blue, purple and pink. Each section was interactive and we were encouraged to walk though everything while touching it.

I really liked the blue section which mimicked underwater coral. Each of the corals were sewn from a different type of fabric. 🧵 But, my favorite was one part of the pink section. It was a tall silo that was made from crochet. The outside had all sorts of crocheted flowers and doilies glued onto it. 💮🧶🌸Once you walked into it and looked up, the ceiling was a kaleidoscope and also had more crocheted items dangling down. Lacey also really liked the pink section but her favorite part of it was the mushroom. 

The silo already looks pretty rad from the outside, but then you walk in and it's this explosion of pink crochet!! I literally gasped! The lighting in the pictures isn't great so you can't really tell how joyful and vibrant the pinks are.

Since I am not an artist or a critic, I'll stop trying to describe our experience to you and just fill the remainder of this post with pictures I took at Synthesia. The Fred Jones art museum is free (parking is only $3) so if you're in the Norman area, you should totally go see this exhibit. It was a delightful end to me & Lacey's trip. I love vacationing with Wes but I had an equally fun time on my mini-vacation with Lacey. It was great to travel with someone who has 100% the same interests as I do. We didn't have to compromise since we both were excited to do the same activities and we were both shared the same vibes. Lacey, my dear, we MUST do this again!! 😀

Lacey & Erica go see My Chemical Romance in concert... twice!!!

 

My Chemical Romance announced a reunion tour back in 2019. ❤ The closest they'd come to Oklahoma was Dallas, TX. Only a short drive away! Lacey and I knew we had to go. Lacey waited by her laptop hours before tickets went on sale in hopes of getting a pair... and we did!! They were the worst overpriced seats; the nosebleed section of the gigantic arena, BUT we got tickets!!! 😁 Then the concert was postponed in 2020... and again 2021. I was afraid that they'd just cancel and refund everyone. But then they announced the tour will be starting in 2022 with new dates. And guess what?? One of the newly added dates, the first date of the North American tour actually, would be in Oklahoma City at the Paycom arena. Oh boy were we excited!!! So excited that I bought us matching shirts and painted the band's logo on the back. ❤❤❤❤ Lacey once again waited hours by her laptop, counting down the minutes until tickets went on sale. She got us really good seats at a reasonable price. YAY! It was official, time to grab our eye liner because we'd be seeing our favorite emo band in concert twice!

The opening band at the OKC concert was Dilly Dally, a terrible band that no one liked. Lacey said they were okay but she is just very generous. It was a group of women who screamed sounds and pretended they knew how to play their instruments. The second act was Coheed and Cambria. Wes loves them and was jealous I'd be getting to see them. I vaguely remembered hearing them on the radio in the mid-2000s but didn't know any of their songs. Turns out, they're amazing!! 🎸The lead singer had a ton of rad guitar solos. They also had a spinning thing on the drum set that projected lasers!

After a VERY long wait accompanied by what sounded like a low-flying helicopter, but was supposed to be "the swarm", My Chemical Romance finally came on. 🎤They sounded exactly as I remembered from our college emo days. They were loud, manic, and passionate. I have never felt such a sense of community at a concert before. I know music speaks to a lot of people but I, personally, have never really felt a deep visiceral connection to a set of lyrics. Well, that changed at the concert. I felt all the feels! I truly felt a sense of oneness as we all sang along. 🎶 It was so extremely powerful hearing an entire arena singing "we'll carry on," and declaring that we are "awake and unafraid." 💀 It was definitely an experience I will never forget. Their set was mostly songs from the Danger Days album, which was a little odd since most of the hits were off of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade. It was their first show so the sound could have been better but I didn't notice until Lacey & I were talking about it on the way home. If I had one complaint, it would be that the lead singer relied too much on the distortion machine, but he did tell us that he was having vocal problems that evening.

A month later, Lacey and I were in the American Airlines arena in Dallas, TX for show number two. We didn't get any merchandise at the OKC show because the line was miles long and the t-shirt designs frankly weren't that cool. 😕 We decided that we should buy something from the Dallas concert since we've been to two shows (what kind of fans would we be without t-shirts?) We decided to skip the opening bands to get dinner from the concession stands and wait it out in the extremely long merch line. I wanted a shirt with the tour dates on it but the only design I liked didn't have tour dates. 😑 The Paycom arena had some neat balloon and chalk art for the band (that we sadly didn't see until on Instagram the next day) so we decided to walk around the American Airlines arena in search of art. There was none. We made it back to our seats to see the last few songs of the second act, Midtown. They were decent. 

My Chemical Romance came on and played a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SHOW than the one we saw in Oklahoma City. They played almost twice as many songs and mostly from the Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade albums. The set list seemed to have an order to it. It felt like they were testing out songs to play at the OKC show and were much more refined, and less chaotic this time around. They sounded 100x times better! I guess they had plenty of practice between August 20th and September 28th. The best part was that the lead singer let go of his reliance on the distortion machine. The tradeoff was that this concert felt more robotic and as if the band was at work. The OKC show felt more intimate because they'd stop every few songs and talk to us or the lead singer would tell a personal story. The Dallas show was all business, song after song with no breaks. It didn't have the same energy or sense of community as the OKC show did. I still felt moved as we all sung along but it was a different vibe. It was so strange to see the same band play two entirely different shows on the same tour, and only one month apart. I'm not sure which experience I enjoyed more. Now that Lacey and I have seen AFI and My Chemical Romance, we just need to see The Used and we'll have the trifecta of emo under our belts.

Wes & Erica's Vacation Photo Album - San Francisco, CA (Chinatown) - August 2022

One part of our vacation that Wes & I were equally excited for was San Francisco's Chinatown. We were both anticipating all the delicious food (although I didn't get to eat as much as I had hoped to), and I was pumped for all the shopping. We left the hotel early to get a full day of sightseeing in and realized as soon as the Uber dropped us off that Chinatown's sleepy shops don't open until 10am. 😑 We wandered around and window shopped for about an hour. We went into the visitor's center as soon as it opened to get a map and picked out all the things we wanted to see and do.

We spent most of our time just walking around and looking at all the murals. There were so many!! I also loved all of the decorations on the buildings. We got a little turned around, so I think we walked around the same blocks over & over again. LOL It got busy pretty quickly and we were soon surrounded by a ton of other tourists, as well as locals. It was so weird hearing snippets of everyone's conversations in Cantonese. I used to speak it fluently, but I'm embarrassed to admit that I've forgotten about 50% of it (even though it's technically my native tongue) 😅

We went into a handful of souvenir shops; got something for our house, my mom & stepdad, and that was the extent of our buying. I really wanted a pair of jellies, but the shop didn't have them in my size. 😞 And I'm not completely sure they were for sale; they didn't have a price tag and they were the only pair sitting on a shelf of slippers. I also wanted a zodiac stuffed animal of a Rat (1984, baby!! 🐀) but I couldn't think of a place to put it, so I passed on it as well. Travelling with just one carry-on bag (and no checked luggage) is not conducive to souvenir shopping. Wes isn't a shopper and I quickly discovered that all of the shops sell almost the exact same thing, so we didn't buy much. I think it was more fun to just walk around and look at everything. 

There were a handful of things we wanted to see while we were in Chinatown. One was the Tin How Temple. I thought it was a tourist attraction that you could go into, but it's only open to members. It did look very nice on the outside, though.

After "visiting" the temple, we switched gears and headed for the St. Mary's Cathedral. ⛪ We got in at the tail end of midday mass. I'm glad we didn't barge in at the middle of mass or during communion. Wes isn't religious, and while I was raised Catholic, I don't practice anymore. We stayed toward the back while the priest finished up and then the church opened up to visitors. 

The Cathedral was the first in the Chinatown area and it's endured some natural disasters. You can tell from the inside that it definitely is old and has been through some rough patches. There was damage to the ceiling and some stained-glass windows. But it is a beautiful church. 

We were so lucky with timing the whole day. We got seated & served at the dim sum restaurant just before the lunch rush started, we got to the cathedral right as mass was ending, and we beat the line at the fortune cookie factory. I don't think we waited in line for anything. 👍

I normally don't like fortune cookies and give them to Athena & Zephyr when we get Chinese take-out, but the fresh ones from the fortune cookie factory were so good! 🥠 The fortune cookie factory was at the end of a very narrow alley. We walked by a few times and kept missing the turn into Ross alley. Ross alley is one of the notable ones in Chinatown (I think just because it's old). The factory was tiny! It had a gift shop at the front, the employees working on display in the back, then you make a U-turn and get a free fortune cookie on your way out. It was one of my favorite things we saw all day even though the "tour" took less than 5-minutes. LOL

I saw a Chinese American heritage museum on the directory at the visitor's center and added that to our list of places to visit. I also saw a bunch of signs for a Bruce Lee exhibit. For some reason I didn't put the two together until we got into the museum. The first exhibit (unrelated to Bruce Lee) was a textile exhibit. The dresses are made from shopping bags and some other materials--don't remember what and I also forgot the artist's intent. 🤷 I expected there to be some historical exhibits, but the rest of the museum was dedicated to the Bruce Lee exhibition. 

I am aware of the cultural phenomenon and significance of Bruce Lee, but I haven't seen any of his movies all the way through, and I didn't know much about him as a person. It was cool to read up on him and see all the movie memorabilia. The exhibit also had some of his original artwork and writings. Wes likes Bruce Lee's movies and seemed to enjoy the museum. 

We finished up Chinatown a few hours before our dinner reservation so we Uber'd to Japantown. 🎎 Our Uber was a Tesla, which I'm sure is completely normal but I was impressed. LOL It's probably the hippest vehicle I've ridden in. I didn't know how to use the door handles, so our driver had to roll down the window and instruct me. 😅 San Francisco is as hilly as everyone says it is and traffic was madness, so I am so glad we decided to Uber and walk everywhere instead of renting a car. Anyway, Japantown is basically two malls with a pavilion in the middle. One of the malls has a majority of the shops and the other mall has a majority of the restaurants (and the MUCH cleaner restrooms). We mostly wanted to go to Japantown for the Kinokuniya bookstore. It is the first one in the States. We always go to the one in Carrollton, TX. This one is supposed to be way bigger with a ton more stuff but I wasn't impressed. Probably because I don't read manga or play video games. LOL Wes liked it and bought 2 video game art books. I like the store for its cute stationary and kitschy stuff, which it didn't have as much as I had hoped it would. We walked all around the malls and went into quite a few shops. One was Amiko...an authorized tokidoki retailer. Oh my freakin' gawd!!! 😲😁😍 I was in heaven. I wanted to buy it all, but I exercised self-control and only bought my traditional souvenir of a Unicorno figurine. 

I know the Guo Pei fashion exhibit at the art museum should be my favorite day in San Francisco since that is the reason why I booked this vacation, but I think my favorite day was our day in Chinatown. It was so neat to just walk around and see everything. My favorite parts of Chinatown were the fortune cookie factory, the mural of the Manchurian warriors, our meal at 8 tables, and Amiko boutique (okay, that was in Japantown). Wes said our day in Chinatown was awesome and I suspect it was his favorite part of our vacation as well. And here is a random picture of our hotel (right in the most "beautiful part of San Francisco" as our first Uber driver sarcastically told us), because I have nowhere else to put it in this blog. 😅

Wes & Erica's Vacation Photo Album - San Francisco, CA (Legion of Honor Museum) - August 2022

I follow a bunch of designers on Instagram because I love fashion.👗 I am not a fashionable person and I'm not a consumer of anything in the high-end fashion world, but I do greatly enjoy looking at it. One of the designers I follow is Guo Pei. Earlier this year, she posted that several of her collections will be on display for a temporary exhibition called Fantasy Couture at the Legion of Honor Museum. Right then and there, I knew we'd be travelling to San Francisco to see it. 

The Legion of Honor Museum is modeled after its namesake in France. It is located in the center of Lincoln Park and is a gigantic museum!! I think we spent over three hours there. Luckily, we got in early because it got insanely busy around lunch time. We had planned to have lunch at the museum café, but the line was out the door and down the hallway. Its website stated that everyone was to purchase a timed ticket in advance, but I don't think they followed that rule because the museum felt like it was above capacity. 

Fair warning - I took at least one picture of every single dress that was on display, so this blog post will be 90% photo album---which you've probably already noticed. If you don't like dresses, turn back now! 👗 There were other works of art throughout the museum. Only the basement was dedicated to Fantasy Couture. A ton of paintings were housed on the main, second and (maybe) third floors -- I honestly don't remember how many floors it had. LOL 😅 But, there were MORE DRESSES scattered throughout the museum to accent the other artworks. I found it hard to appreciate the other pieces because my attention was immediately drawn to the gowns. 

One thing that I really appreciated about Guo Pei's dresses is that I understood them. I looked at the dress, then read the description with the artist's intent, and I could comprehend her vision. They weren't too pretentious, philosophical, or political. That's not to say that I thought her dresses were simple, because they definitely weren't. I don't like when designers are too artistic; their garments don't make sense, and the viewer won't "get it" unless they're as enlightened as the designer is. I also don't like the opposite of that when designers try to have an ultra-woke message, and it seems like they're just pandering. I felt neither of those intentions when I was at the Fantasy Couture exhibit.  

Another thing that I really liked about the exhibit is that the dresses looked like real wearable dresses. I like avant-garde stuff, too, but I want my clothes to mostly resemble regular silhouettes. Although I could never add all the intricate detailing and handiwork to any of my dresses, if I wanted to sew one that looked somewhat like what I saw at the museum, I probably could find a pattern for it.

The more labor intensive dresses had labels that showed how many hours it took to make each dress. Some were up into the tens of thousands of hours!! The labels also showed the materials used. Guo Pei worked mostly with silk and exclusively Swarovski crystals. 

My favorite of her collections is Garden of the Soul. I loved the vibrant colors of the floral motifs. Each dress had so much detail. 😍 There was the dress itself, but if you looked underneath the skirt or inside the sleeves, there would be more crystals and flowers!! I also liked the wigs. Shoes and accessories were an important part of each of her ensembles. One of the placards stated that she liked dressing women in insane shoes with impossible heels to show off how strong her women (models) are. 

My second favorite of her collections is Alternate Universe. Her pieces imagined a world where the animals took over and she advised us to be gentle to all creatures because we never know what will happen after reincarnation. I was astounded by the dresses at the exhibit so I watched the runway show for this collection when I got home. I wasn't as impressed with them when they walked. I think it is because I didn't see all the details and the dresses mostly looked heavy and static on the runway. On the other hand, a collection that wasn't a favorite of mine at the museum, Elysium, walked magnificently down the runway at its show.

One of the dresses had several dolls/puppets sewn in. Each one of her ateliers made one to add to the dress. I thought that was a nice gesture since so many of her dresses are done by hand. I was completely mesmerized by the detailing in her designs. So much so that I was doing the "you're in someone's way so you move left and they move left, and the dance continues for a while" thing without knowing it. The woman who's way I was in glared at me and said some nasty remark before I noticed I was in her way. 😬 LOL I was just trying to get to the next dress! 

Wes's favorite collection is Himalaya. It was a summer collection but the fabric made me think of winter. I guess the colors were summer. Wes said it would be too obvious as a winter collection. The dresses were made from old Japanese silk scarves. She noticed the strange patterns that the embroidery made on the back of the scarf so she used inside-out scarves in her designs. 

I don't remember the name of it, but she had a collection inspired by nighttime in Paris. It was so shocking to see the black dresses. 😮 Everything up until then was either gold or colorful. The back of one of the gowns had a silhouetted scene (like a shadow puppet show) embroidered onto it. It is the bottom right picture in the collage below.

I love everything about the pants in the bottom row of the above picture. 😍 I actually majorly adore both of the outfits on the bottom row. It's weird looking at my pictures again as I type this because I was in a daze the entire time at the museum; I don't even remember taking some of the pictures. It felt like a dream being surrounded by all of the dresses.

I felt so alive and inspired while walking through this exhibit. I told myself that after this experience, I would learn how to sketch (a very far fetched idea ... a toddler draws better than I do, but you get crazy thoughts while you're immersed in something you love, right?) so I could start designing some of my own dresses. As of now, 2 months after our vacation, I haven't drawn a single thing, haven't designed a pattern, and have only sewn a few subpar dresses. 😕 I need to get my motivation back in order!! Wes bought the gallery art book for me -- best souvenir ever but a encyclopedia-sized book is NOT the best gift when you're travelling with only carry-on luggage -- so I probably just need to look through it again to get my brain going.

The last collection in the exhibit was one that she dedicated to her youngest daughter. She designed it while pregnant, and imagined what her daughter would do if her Barbie's came to life. Her models (above) dress a zillion times nicer than my Barbie's ever did! 

After floating through the Fantasy Couture exhibit, we still had time to see the rest of the museum. I took a picture of each painting that I noticed a dog in. There was a mummy on display, which was cool. I really like mummies and artifacts.

We went to the museum on a Thursday and flew out early Friday morning. I still had visions of dresses dancing through my head when I noticed a tiny fashion exhibit at the San Francisco airport! It showed fabric and dresses made from pineapple leaves. Apparently, artists use the hairs on the leaves to weave fabric. How amazing!! 🍍 I am so glad that I got to see the Fantasy Couture exhibit. It is the third fashion exhibit I've seen and I think it is my favorite so far!