Vacation Time

Hey everyone! Hope summer is treating you well. :) It may seem like we have been really busy since I am a bit behind on my blogging. Never fear, the next two weeks I should be all caught up! Last summer we took the best road trip. If you missed that, you can read about it starting HERE. This year, we went back to Nebraska for a friend's wedding, see friends and family, and get out of the heat for a little while. 

We found out the first day we left the power went out in our neighborhood. It was out for 18 hours!! Then they turned it back on, and it went out again on Saturday afternoon. I guess it was a great time for us to be away. So while we could have been there stuck in the heat, we were out having fun!

We spent the first weekend at the lake. It was very busy due to the fourth of July, but we managed to get a little jet skiing in.

We caught the fireworks at the lake on the third. I thought we looked a little redneck...What do you think?

We had a great view of the fireworks!

The next day on the fourth, Matt was ready to get in on the spirit!

We headed back up to the lake to watch the Dog Parade. Yes, it is as awesome as it sounds! My parents are building a new cabin so we had to clean up the driveway a bit before we could put our chairs out to watch. 

Matt was super excited, and also possibly embarrassed I posted these pictures.

So this is the 16th year of the dog parade I believe. Don't worry, I documented most of the parade for your viewing.

So cute!! Lots of kids and animals. 

We headed back to Bertrand and finally purchased our fireworks. We love snaps!

We then immediately went home to shoot off our fireworks. We each got our own box of snaps! haha, we are pretty fun! :)

We headed into town to watch the fireworks for the fourth. Again we had a great view.

We spent the next few days doing various things. Matt helped Nolan on the farm. We were able to go see quite a few friends and family. So sorry if we missed you! We also headed back to the lake for more fun. It was much less busy during the middle of the week.

Matt chose to sit lay in the front of the boat when we went out for a ride.

They did a little wake boarding,

and skiing.

My mom was out for a bike ride while we were on the boat.

We came back to light up our last firework, the lantern.

Unfortunately, the wind was blowing about 50 miles per hour so this was all the further it got before it ripped into pieces...

I also went out to help Nolan work.

And we helped him haul some pipe.

We were the best pipe hauling crew ever! Well at least the most entertaining for sure.

We spent the last few days of our trip at my friend, Angela's wedding. I will document more of that in my next post. Talk to you again soon! :)

Pacific Northwest Vakay Day 1

Well friends, here it is-today I start my journey of telling you our amazing road trip story. It was incredible. I think I should keep my thesaurus close by because I need multiple synonyms for words like: beautiful, amazing, and fun. But I am not going to do that so feel free to insert your own synonyms when you reach those frequently used words!

Day zero: I call this day zero because this was an extra day not totally planned into our trip. I came back from my amazing trip home, made some snacks, packed my bags and we hit the road. 

We got a pretty early start and were able to stay the night in California between LA and San Francisco. 

Day one: I must say, we did not get off to the best start. We had some extra time and thought we should go for breakfast at Denny's to get a good start to our road trip. We were seated almost immediately. We ordered our drinks and food as soon as we could. After about 40 minutes of waiting, we were getting a little antsy. We knew we had some extra time since we started out so early the day before. We finally found someone, not our waitress, that we could ask to check on our food. No answer...Fifteen minutes later we had mustered up the courage to tell the manager we were leaving. After a few minutes we found him and told him we had to leave. We had not been in a time crunch but were now indeed in a time crunch since we had waited over an hour to get our food. Good news-I got my orange juice for free!! We still are not sure if they had even started making our food or if it had been sitting under heat lamps for 30+ minutes. Also, maybe our waitress decided to quit after she took our order?? Not sure, but I did see a huge bug roaming around during our wait so it was probably best we did not eat there. Instead we drove through Burger King and still had to wait about 20 minutes to get our food. It was not our greatest start, but you know when they say things can only go up from here-it was true. We got to Napa 

and headed to our first winery-Silverado Vineyards. 

How gorgeous is this view?!? It was so beautiful!!!

I would definitely recommend this vineyard. It was very relaxed, but the servers were very helpful!

Then we headed to the Beringer vineyard. It is the oldest continuously operating vineyard in the Napa valley.

Since it was the 4th of July Matt thought I needed to show my patriotism. This is what we found-

Then we took a tour of the vineyard. Where we learned some very interesting facts, 

saw some really cool things, 

and were taught the appropriate way to sample wine.

Following the tour we took our own tour around the property. 

It was so beautiful!

Then we headed north. One cool thing about a road trip is you never know what you are going to see. A nice surprise, we got to see Mount Shasta. It seemed so tall standing on its own.

Sorry, the pictures are really blurry-we were driving.

That night we made it to Oregon and were able to cross off a new state for us on day one! Hope you enjoyed my first look-back onto our trip. Stay tuned for more :) 

For Day 2 click HERE.

For Day 3 click HERE.

For Day 4 click HERE.

For Day 5 click HERE.

For Day 6 click HERE.

For Day 7 click HERE.

For Day 8 click HERE.

For Day 9 click HERE.