Dear Friends and Family,
Well, we may have to come up with a new name for our annual letter and video since 2025 may have been our last Spring Forward depending on what Congress decides.
TRAVEL:
Our video starts with Travel this year, a fun Fall trip to the Northern California Bay Area for a US Olympic & Paralympic Foundation meeting. We enjoyed hiking, seaside dining, cable cars, and visiting friends in the Bay Area including Tricia spending a day with college roommate Beth (shown later in the Friends & Family photo section of this annual video).
From there, we go back to last summer in Denmark and the mountains including Colorado and Wyoming, and Carmel, CA (earlier this Spring) with a highlight catching our friendly acquaintance Bernadette Peters (a Tony-winning Broadway legend) in solo concert performance in Vail Valley (Alan met her on a small group business trip to India almost 20 years ago, and then we hosted a small reception for her in Houston after a concert in November 2019).
We added another country to our list of travels this year, stopping off in Denmark on our way back from the Olympics last summer where we met up with our nephew Jack who was doing a Baylor study abroad. We enjoyed Copenhagen, a beautiful city with great summer weather, great food, and historical sites with lots of jewels and guns?!. In Wyoming we saw Bears, Moose and Elk from just a few yards away with the Grand Tetons in the background. Just before Thanksgiving, we followed the Baylor Men’s Basketball team to the Bahamas for a tournament where they won on a last second shot in double overtime against Top 10 ranked St. John’s.
Alan visited his 7th and final continent, Antarctica, in January 2025 with Lyle Nicholson whom we have known since childhood days in St. Louis (and is married to Kelley who Alan attended grades K to 12 with, and all of us attended the same church when we were little kids). “It was like landing on the moon,” and included ice sled zooming, ice cave spelunking, ice lake repelling, and ice bar “chillin”. Rather than going by boat out of Argentina, they traveled by airplane to Cape Town before flying to and landing in Antarctica a few hundred miles inland. While in Cape Town (where they had visited before as part of a longer scuba diving and safari trip), they visited local scenes and hiked Table Mountain on the challenging rock path.
Earlier this Spring we went to our first “biker” festival in Florida (we keep a large scooter and small motorcycle there) on one of our frequent visits to our condo in Ormond Beach (north Daytona). Alan agreed to serve on the local condo board for a partial term to help the board navigate new Florida condo maintenance reserve rules due to the 2021 Surfside condo collapse.
ENTERTAINMENT:
The soundtrack from this year’s video features the Rolling Stones, Beyonce and Cyndi Lauper, all of whom we saw in concert in addition to the Black Crowes, Christopher Cross, Gary Clark, Jr., and a marvelous Houston Symphony Christmas Pops. The Beyonce clips are from the “Beyonce Bowl” where she organized a football field sized halftime show at a Houston Texans game on Christmas Day that included local marching bands and guest artists.
This year’s video features the Baylor homecoming parade from last Fall (the oldest and largest continuous college homecoming parade in America) and some more men’s basketball photos including with nephew Jack who frequently worked on the Baylor Vision and later ESPN video crews for nationally televised games. Alan also became a brief social media sensation within Baylor nation based on his efforts to distract opposing team free throw shooters from our seats on the baseline by the basket with sparkly gold pom poms and distracting smack talk – rumor has it that other team free throw shooting is several percentage points below average when we’re at the game (and late in the season the opposing coaches were even complaining to the refs).
We attended the first phase of the Paris Olympics as part of the Olympic Trustee program. Photos with athletes include Tara Davis-Woodhall married to Special Olympian Hunter Woodall (both earned gold medals in Paris and a precious viral moment, link) and later in the video, Team USA’s gold medal men’s basketball coach Steve Kerr with Alan and women’s Tokyo summer gold medal sprinter Kendall Ellis with Tricia. One big surprise was at opening ceremony (where we sat riverside on a boat at the end) when at the last minute, Oscar winner Jessica Chastain and her husband and two kids were seated next to us. It was raining, and when the Paris Olympic officials offered her a small cabana nearby, they kindly invited us to join them. It was our first time in Paris in 20 years, and we enjoyed fine dining, historic sites, and world class athletics.
FRIENDS & FAMILY:
This starts with a short tribute by Chinquapin Prep School (where Tricia volunteered for 12 years before retirement and Alan has served on the board for over 20 years) featuring one former student (Yasmin Rojas) we helped attend Baylor. Following are pictures with Yasmin, best friend and longtime bible study teacher Professor Randy Wilson (seen later boating with Alan), Liz and Franklin Myers who helped us help Yasmin (Liz was a student of Alan’s at Baylor when he taught and she volunteered at Chinquapin), our new rescue adopted kitties Lix and Lux (short for “Lickety-split” and “Luxardo Cherry”, Alan’s favorite fruit) who are very animated and a lot of fun!, followed by our friend Katie Prichard’s graduation with her MBA which she accomplished while holding down a tough job (working for Alan!) and raising two young boys, future college quarterback Jackson Salters the son of Alan’s business partner Ambreen (and husband Steven, and you briefly saw sister Sydney surfing during a lunar eclipse) who is expected to see a lot of playing time as a Carnegie-Mellon Tartan this fall, friends Kelley and Lyle Nicholson with us in Ormond Beach for Kelley’s birthday, several pictures with Tricia’s family including niece Vivian (now 19), sister Amy and mother Carolyn, Houston Astros fun with friend Kelly Anderson and niece Vivian, Tricia with Alan’s brother David and his wife Amy, more photos of nephew Jack videoing and with Vivian eating Mexican food, and on the football field with us before a game, and holiday and Mardi Gras photos with Tricia and her family, concluding with a few shots of Houston’s winter snow storm!
We hope you had some good times with friends and family this year as well, and please keep in touch and say hello if you’re in Houston or Florida’s North Central Coast, or maybe we’ll meet you “on the road” somewhere?
Tricia & Alan
Tricia: tricia.ratliff@comcast.net and 713.705.7422.
Alan:aratliff@stoneturn.com and 832.435.3535,
