A Lil Sunshine
Incase you are thinking that spring will never get here, this blog post is to prove if you go south far enough you will find spring!
We enjoyed our sunny trip down south visiting family, friends, and making new ones along the way. Our first stop was in Mesa, Arizona to see my Aunt and Uncle. We had a great time with them relaxing and enjoying the sun! We drove out to my folk's land to see the shipping container and cactus. We also went to the Queen Creek Olive Mill. Hands down best place EVER! I was like a kid in a candy shop! flavored olive oils, and balsamic vinegars, Italian inspired food, imported pasta, fresh roasted coffee! It was brilliant! Kevin and I also joined in on the tour there to learn about how extra virgin olive oil is made!
Next stop was Dallas, Texas! We flew in at 2 am and decided apparently that the dead of night is a great time to drive around Dallas! There was road construction all over and it took us awhile to find a hotel room! We finally found one at 4 am.... The next day we found the best restaurant EVER! If you are ever there check out the Smoky Rose! After that we visited the Botanical gardens across the road! We wish we could have had more time there but we needed to get on the road to get to Texarkana!
The main purpose of our trip was to go to Texarkana to attend Zack and Hanna (Austin) Hull's Wedding! Zack is a good friend of ours and was best man in our wedding! We were very happy to go and support Zack in Texas, Kevin was his best man. We enjoyed meeting people down there and Hanna's family. There are lots of really great folks down there!
After the wedding we headed out for Waco, Texas! We were so excited to see the Silos and Magnolia Market! Turns out it was spring break down there... YIKES! It was completely insane! Lines longer than Disney Land! That is not our sort of thing so we sat down enjoyed the sunshine and people watched and we figured out what we wanted to do, because we were not going to stand in line for 2 hours just to look at stuff in a store, no matter how pretty it may be! So instead we waited for the food trucks to open hehe! Then we jumped in the Magnolia Bakery line with our mac n cheese for an hour! The bakery was beautiful and worth the hour wait!
Waco, Texas is also home to Dr. Pepper! So we checked out their museum. It is a pretty cool place full of ephemera and antique Dr. Pepper merchandise. They had a really great exhibit about the World Fairs. I particularly liked the menu from the sandwich tent from the Seattle World Fair. There was some very interesting sandwich combinations back then!
We finished our trip in Waco eating at this wonderful lil restaurant on the river! We got some good cajun food and Kevin tried the alligator! Those scary reptiles tastes like chicken if you ever are tempted to try it out!
The last stop was in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. The picture below shows both places at once! We had a nice time visiting some of our friends over there.