Blue Bell

Thomas' only "off" day is Tuesday (doesn't really count as a off day since he still goes in for a few hours for treatment) but we always try to do something fun to get out of the apartment. This week we drove to Brenham, TX to visit the Blue Bell Ice Cream factory.  Thomas has always LOVED Blue Bell, and we decided the hour trip would be worth it.

After driving past 23490283580 strip malls (I've decided that Houston is one big strip mall) we then entered the wasteland of real Texas. Seriously, we even passed a few ghost towns. And we passed a few gorgeous farms/ranches and that made me happy to finally see, but I think most of them must be hidden far, far away from the interstate so that new folks like me think the typical ranch that you see in the movies about Texas simply don't exist, but strip malls do. We did allow ourselves 5 minutes to talk about missing scenic New England, then we moved on.

And of course, the Blue Bell factory was epic. They actually use local cows (it takes 60,000 cows/day to run the factory) so now I want to support only Blue Bell since they support local farmers. We took the tour along with a group of ladies who were pushing 95 years old. They were kind of mean and harassed our poor tour guide with questions. Thomas and I could barely make eye contact as we kept giggling uncontrollably about their comments. I even heard one of them say that Blue Bell should "make more sugar free desserts." Let's just say this lady had surely been eating quite a few desserts that contained sugar in the course of her lifetime and did not have much room to complain about sugar free desserts. No pun intended.

Everyone received a free cup of ice cream at the end of the tour, and the guide told us we were allowed to sample as many kinds as we wanted. I may or may not have taken this information to heart and sampled 5 kinds of ice cream. I don't know what got into me, but the samples were very small and I didn't finish my cup of ice cream, so don't fear for the health of our child. And take my advice and hurry to your grocery store to pick up a half gallon of Blue Bell Tiramisu....they only made one shipment of it and will not be making any more. It is a delight.