Vacation!

Nope, I'm not leaving for one--I actually just got back from one! That's part of the reason why last week was food week; I was able to type up all the posts before I left and schedule them to post while I was gone. You know, so all you faithful readers had something to look at :-) 

And now I don't have to miss a beat, because since I'm caught up with all of those recipes I can dive right into talking about our vacation! Every year Darrell's family rents a house on Topsail Island in NC and his whole family--including grandparents, aunts/uncles, and cousins on his dad's side--meet up for a week of wonderfulness. I've been going for three or four years now and just love it. I don't have all the pictures uploaded yet (and I've got a crazy amount of stuff to do around the house), so I'll just give a quick review for today.

The Good:
Spending time with family. Crazy good food. Fantastic weather. Super wonderful amounts of relaxation.

The Bad:
Flying into Greensboro, NC and learning that the air conditioner is broken in the car that we have to drive to the beach (four hours each way!). My ears were ringing and my hair was a knotted mess from driving with the windows down--but at least we made it there!

The Ugly:
A massive patch of red that appeared on my upper leg on Wednesday. Turns out Darrell missed a spot when spraying on my sunscreen. Needless to say I plan to stick to lotion sunscreen instead of the spray stuff from now on so I can better control the coverage--my poor Midwestern skin can't handle the NC sun!

I do have one funny airport story that I have to share quick. We had some weather delays on the way back, so we got somewhat familiar with the people on our flight out of Greensboro into Charlotte. Well, once we finally made it to Charlotte, Darrell and I ran into some people from our flight at the restaurant we were eating at for dinner. They were flying home to Connecticut from a national track meet, and assumed we were doing the same. I was initially flattered because the mother thought I was a runner and had competed in the meet--until I made the realization that it was a high school meet, so she thereby assumed I was a high school student. Not cool. She also assumed that Darrell and I were siblings (and sadly, that I was the older of the two), but then when she saw my ring she realized we were actually engaged. Umm, wrong again. You should have seen the look on her face when we told her that we've been married for a year. Apparently (according to her) Darrell looked "quite youthful" in his baseball cap. The mother and her daughter then became fascinated with the fact that we were from South Dakota--the daughter exclaimed that she had never met someone from "that far out West" and asked if I had "like, grown up on a farm or something". The mother, who knew absolutely nothing about South Dakota, was determined to remember the capitol of Iowa when she learned that we had met at a school there (which she eventually did remember, after incorrectly guessing Boise and a few other wrong cities). The daughter just assumed that the school we had met at was the University of Iowa (because why would Iowa have any other schools?), which prompted her to go into a dialogue about how they had tried to recruit her for track. Needless to say they certainly provided some dinner entertainment, although by the end of it Darrell was starting to get annoyed by the incessant comments about how "young" we looked. And I can't say that I blame him.

Anyway, once I get a chance to go through some of our photos (Darrell managed to take well over 200!) I'll post a few more from our wonderful vacation--for now it's off to do laundry and clean all of the lingering salt smell out of our clothes!