Just what we needed . . .

After a horribly hot and very busy day last Friday we ran out to a new campground by the lake and were thrilled to find it had a private beach! My friend and I left the kids with the Dads and took our inner tubes and went down to the beach where we floated and chatted --for 2 hours--under a full moon, it was divine all the stress of the day melted away. We were both wound tight when we first dipped in and couldn't believe the difference after a while. Of course, they finally came looking for us and our peaceful time ended quickly...

Local Knowledge

I always have a craving to go somewhere I have never been before, but I am also basically a chicken. So whenever the "wanderlust" strikes, I venture to a new place that is home to a friend or family member. Luckily my family and friends have chosen some pretty awesome places to call home.

Thanks to a dear friend (and hopefully someday) relative we just returned from an amazing vacation, she was a great guide and had lots of needed local knowledge. Thanks Rebecca! And thanks to her Dad who guided us down the Nantahala River.

Thanks also to Jon and Laura for great tours of San Francisco; thanks to Stephanie for a blast in Boston; thanks to Paul and Sonia for the highlights of Phoenix; thanks to Wendy for my NYC get-away and Karla for a tropical paradise vacation I will never forget. Thanks to Darlene for planning our trip to Ireland that came complete with a local priest as our tour guide! Julie and Dani were tour guides supreme making reservations in spectacular places in Spain.

Coming soon will be a great guided tour of my Dad's alma mater University of Notre Dame!

Weddings: An Education

We attended my sister-in-laws wedding last weekend. We had a nice time, it was good to see family, some that we hadn't seen in more than 3 years. The special thing about it? I realized it was the first wedding Chris had ever attended, there hasn't been a wedding in our combined families in 10 years!

The whole thing was fascinating to him, for the rest of us veteran wedding-goers, everything was very traditional, no suprises, so it was nice to see it for the first time through his eyes.

First he got a dance lesson with mom to a slow song, "hand on my hip, other hand up, step side to side" complete with a disapproving look from his cool teen-age brother. By the end of the night , he had the Electric Slide, Macarena and Jitterbug under his belt, he was loving it, the grand finale was YMCA that everybody even the Dads joined in on, which the boys will ever forget.