Bigger in Texas?

Here we are in Texas looking for an apartment. (Ellie is back in Iowa with Mandy's family.) We've all heard that everything is bigger in Texas, so I thought I'd give a run down of how that claim stacks up to what we've seen.

Bigger in Texas: Apartment Options We looked at several apartment options and even considered renting a house for a while. We have narrowed it down to a couple options and are planning to make a decision before we head back from Texas.

Not Bigger in Texas: Hotel Bathroom Doors The bathroom door in our hotel room is no more than two feet wide ... literally.

Bigger in Texas: Restaurants We ate at a really popular Mexican restaurant called Joe T. Garcia's. The inside of the restaurant was huge! (Except for an archway we had to go through that was about 2 1/2 feet wide and about 6 feet 2 inches high.) Then we found out that the outside of the restaurant was even bigger, it took up an entire city block! After we took our seats our waiter pointed out that George Lopez was sitting outside!

Not Bigger in Texas: Restaurant Menus Mandy and I ordered the same thing at Joe T. Garcia's. Coincidence? Not really, there was a 50/50 chance of that happening since there were only two items on the menu. (Not kidding.) Cheese Enchiladas or Fajitas. Okay, to be fair you could have the fajitas with chicken, steak, or both. Hey, that just doubled the options! The food was good though. They had complementary chips and very good salsa. Our meal came with excellent rice, amazing guacamole, tacos, nachos, and some corn tortillas. Not sure what the corn tortillas were for. It was an experience.

Bigger in Texas: Raindrops We drove through a fierce rainstorm late this afternoon. The rain drops were huge. In fact, some of them were hail stones. (Don't worry, it's a rental car.) To make matters worse some of the roads didn't drain the water off well at all.

Bigger in Texas: Odd Behavior The thunderstorm led to one of the more unusual sights we've seen in Texas. People who didn't want to drive through the rain/hail would stop along the side of the road under overpasses. They would pull to both the left and right side's of the road and even between the roadway and the merge lane of on ramps if it fell underneath an overpass. One overpass was so crowded that it was slowing down traffic for a 1/4 mile. We have never seen such things.

So it looks to be about 50/50 as to whether things really are bigger in Texas. Maybe we'll have to keep you posted about the relative size of things in our new home state.