we [myself, my beautiful wife Val, our housemate Sueihn and my gym and office buddy Coe aka ‘Bubbly’] just got back from a very long trip which involved two twenty-five-plus hour two day road trips on either side of a one day Nurturing Communities conference which lead directly into the Christian Community Development Association [CCDA] annual conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota… what a complete blast.

we had a great time road-tripping up, but it was our decision to take some moments on the way home in particular, to stop and in the absence of any roses to smell, just do some really silly things for good photographing and memoryabilling and so we did…

from upside down white house buildings to giant cow hay bales to halloween head platters to being asked why we climbed the ‘mountain’ with the native american on the horse on it [“it’s dangerous because we haven’t glued the rocks down”] we did a crazy bit of everything and had a LOT of fun…

Coe’s big desire on the way up was for us to take a jumping pic next to a “Welcome to [insert state name] State” board and every time we entered a new state there was a different reason why we missed them and on the way back it looked like the same thing was going to happen [to be honest he spurned the one i offered to stop at because it was not impressive enuff] and so when we hit our state of Pennsylvania on the way home i did a ‘now or never’ and we stopped at the Welcome Centre just inside of the state and took jumping pics near an even crappier sign… mission accomplished.

and then there was Coe’s new friend(s) mr and mrs stick insect hand creatures who at various parts of the trip made an appearance next to him or on both sides of him or occasionally on his head just to keep him on his toes and navigating well [has a bit of a spider underappreciation]

but the point was that life needs to be taken seriously, at all times, but sometimes it is the having fun aspects of life that need to be taken really seriously… we did that a lot and it made the whole trip a lot of fun and bonding and laughing goodness…

thankx team white lightning [our car’s name!] for making it there and back despite creative brake moments, oil light flashings and the dashboard lights pretty much coming on and off at random intervals as they always do…