the simple life...

...that pretty much sums up my weekend. well, at least the first half of the weekend. I got the chance to reunite with some of my closest friends from college known as "the mamas". not all the mamas were there but it was still a great time. we stayed at a cabin in sun river for three days. while our drive there took over five hours on thursday night due to a bad accident on I-5, we had a fantastic weekend. the snow started falling friday morning but let up just in time for our surprise. my friend jess and i surprised the others with a professional photography shoot. blink photography met the six of us as the old mill mall in bend and spent about 90 minutes following us around taking pictures. it was so fun, i can't wait to see how they turn out.

we had great food, wine and a nice fire all weekend. we debriefed on our lives over the past year (literally) and talked about everything from multi-colored christmas lights to legalizing marijuana. we're all fairly opinionated (can you hear my sarcasm there?!) so our conversations are always interesting. we know one another well enough to call each other our when we've crossed the line or are just being too dramatic, it's great. this vacation was one of the best we've done. no schedules and not a heck of a lot to do but relax. it was nice not having the pressure of doing different activity's and trying to figure out who was going with who etc.

the most eventful part of the weekend, other than our 90's dance party, was the drive home. we heard all weekend that the flipping storm of the century would drop on saturday night but we were prepared to drive in the snow....or so we thought. two of our friends had to drive up in separate cars and meet us thursday night so we had a total of four cars. we decided to caravan over willamette pass to make sure we all made it to eugene at the very least. we cruised over the pass with a few stops for chains and then went our separate ways in eugene. jess, ashley and i cruised up I-5 on dry pavement until we hit Albany. at 5:30 PM we hit albany and didn't move more than a few inches for two hours. it was insane. jess and ash had to go to the bathroom so they were about to hop the side barrier when a female truck driver invited them to use her port-a-potty in her semi. they jumped at the chance, i mean who hasn't thought about what that would be like? they said it had nice wood paneling and was much more spacious than they expected. haha...oh goodness.

we heard chains were required in ptown and we didn't have any (didn't need them over the pass) so we decided to stay overnight in salem with our friend michelle and sort everything out in the morning. my poor friend ashley was bummed not to make it to portland because she had to eventually get back to seattle but we had a great time. we went sledding with michelle, her fiance and his buddies. i loved every minute of it because i let go of all the circumstances which were out of my control. we were there for the night so i tried my best to soak up even more time with these awesome people. we left around 10 this morning and made it back into ptown by 11:30, it was quite the adventure. took literally 24 hours to get home.

i realize this is mostly useless information to you but, if you've ever met any of my friends, it's pretty classic of us and a fun snow day '08 story. here are some pics from the weekend, i'll post more later on facebook.

our back drop for the drive home was amazing....


off the back deck of the sun river house...

i love my friends and was so blessed to have a weekend with some of them. i'm thankful that i'm constantly surrounded with fun, intelligent, whitty, challenging and beautiful friends.

maybe one of these days i'll write a more substantive post that doesn't involve me...

peaceandlove