ROAD TRIP!!!

Hi all!

I have been BUSY! Oh me oh my. Dan and I just got back from a longer than expected road trip this week. Originally the plan was to go to Albuquerque to visit a close family friend, Dan (who actually married us!) and then head up to Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon.

Dan and I decided that after we spent some time in New Mexico, we should go to Austin, Texas. A handful of years ago, Dan went to Austin for a work conference and loved it. He's been talking about taking me there ever since and I figured, hey! We'll be so close, why not just drive there? From there the plan was to go to Dallas, Oklahoma City, and then over to Four Corners, Bryce Canyon, then to the Grand Canyon and back.

But, that's not what happened.

Once in New Mexico, I started looking into our trip and noticed how close New Orleans is to Austin. That's somewhere I've been wanting to go for as long as I can remember. Dan was on board and now our trip expanded! From there we were going to include Jackson, Memphis, and Little Rock and make our way back to Oklahoma City and the rest.

Ah, but wait! We weren't finished yet. Jackson is only two hours from Birmingham!! And Birmingham is only two hours from Atlanta! And shoot, Atlanta is the beginning of Sherman's March to the Sea (remember I'm a history nut!), which would take us to Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean!!

If we're going to be on the coast, we may as well go to the Carolinas. I have a very good friend who moved to North Carolina, and I'd been talking about going to visit her for years. This was the perfect chance!

But wait! There's still more! Charlotte is so close to Virginia! And they're having a Civil War reenactment in the north! And jeez, if we do that we're a stone's throw from Washington D.C.!!! Dan, you've never been, this is a huge opportunity! We can check out the CAPITAL OF OUR NATION! Oh ya, *cough, cough* and Bethesda is like right there.

If we go to D.C. we can then go through Tennessee and see where Jack Daniels is made! Check out Memphis and then head back.

So, that's basically how our planning played out. Sporadic and very last minute. I'm so ready to start planning the next road trip, or not planning, whichever.

Thanks to the wonderfulness of amazing app'dom which is Airbnb and Yelp, we survived, thrived and had a blast! We also brought camping gear which we used 6 nights. We would have camped more, but there were some serious thunder storms for a decent portion of our trip and trying to make dinner while soaked to the bone over a fire that will barely stay lit is not fun. Well, actually it was a ton of fun, but probably wouldn't have been the second time around.

I am also now obsessed with the National Park Service. Just sayin'.

Be prepared (and hopefully excited!). In the next few weeks I'll be posting lots of picture and blogs about our adventures. Hopefully, I will be able to get through my piles of photos at a decent pace, but we will see.

So without further ado, here is our trip!