The Road Trip

 Andy's cousin, Kelsey got married in Santa Fe, NM on May 14th! We met Trent, her new husband, the first time we went to Texas for Thanksgiving. It was Trent's first Thanksgiving at the cabin as well, so we feel like we've known him since the beginning of their relationship. I found this old Facebook message that I sent to Kelsey after we first met Trent:

The good news is that we were invited to the wedding (maybe because they knew we would come whether we were invited or not)! Kelsey and Trent asked Ellie to be the flower girl, and Joey and Hannah to be the greeters. 

We decided to take a road trip out to Santa Fe for the wedding. 

Who doesn't love a road trip?

We made it all the way to Albuquerque the first night. Road trips with older kids and electronics sure are easy!

We had a delicious, free breakfast at our hotel, which I always love.

We had some extra time before we needed to get to Santa Fe, so I had reached out to our old church friends, the Newnams. They weren't in town the last time we had happened to be in Albuquerque, so I was so glad that they were going to be there this time. We hadn't seen them in over a decade.

A few years ago, Susan opened a needlepoint store in Albuquerque called Twisted Stitches. It's so popular, that needlepointers from surrounding states come to Albuquerque just to visit her store. We met Mike and Susan there and got to see it, which was great. 

Then Susan had the idea to go get a bite to eat at Flying Star, a popular cafe in Albuquerque. Ellie was quite pleased with their chocolate cake!

We really needed to get on the road after that, but we thought it would be fun to show up at our other friends' door unexpectedly, and their house was right on our way. We hit the jackpot because they both happened to be home with two out of three of their kids! It was so fun to surprise them like that. We got to chat for about thirty minutes before we headed up to Santa Fe.

We were so excited to get there after months of looking forward to it, and we made sure to play the song "Santa Fe" as we drove into town!