finally, a visitor

this past weekend, mine and jonathan's good friends betsy and jon came up to visit. i've known both of them for a long time...jon and i grew up in the same church and i got to know betsy in my college freshman political science class. jonathan and i've been married for 10 months now. here is a list of visitors we've had so far: jonathan's friends/family

• jonathan's parents
• jonathan's brothers jeff and jason
• jonathan's sister jessica and husband brandon
• jonathan's cousin robert and wife melissa
• jonathan's cousin sandy
• jonathan's friend pepe
• jonathan's friend marty
• jonathan's friend cece
  

so jonathan has had 12 different people come from out of town to visit him for one night or more. my friends/family

• my parents (4 hours maybe)
• my sister becca (24 hours)

and that concludes friendly visitors on my behalf. so, i was pretty excited when betsy called me up to tell me that she had the whole month of april off and was thinking that they'd come up to visit. jonathan and i had teased the couple that they owed us a visit because they live in my parents hometown and we'd drop by their place for an evening every time we've been down. we didn't think they'd ever actually be able to come up!

they got into winston late thursday night and we spent most of the evening catching up and watching necessary tv shows such as the office and 30 rock. friday morning we slept in and took our guests out to a local cafe for brunch. we spent the rest of the afternoon trying to cram an unecessary amount of camping gear for four people and a dog into the trunk of jonathan's little green accord. it was quite a puzzle, but of course, a puzzle that the boys were insistant about solving.

owen is doing his stress yawn here...not biting betsy's head off.

we got everything in and headed out in a packed car, owen crawling all over everybody. we scoped out a campsite up at pilot mountain, got our tent set up, and set out on a 2 mile hike to the top of the mountain. little owen was quite a trooper. i had thought we'd get a quarter of a mile in and have to carry him the rest of the way. that certainly wasn't the case. 12-week old little owen hiked all two miles up and two miles back, up boulders, over roots. i was really impressed with him...he is a little fluffy light colored dog and i guess i didn't have much expectations for him. i was a proud mama :).


the view was gorgeous up there! the weather was absolutely perfect, sunny, and we hiked down during a beautiful sunset. we had planned out a dinner of steak quesadillas...i had a checklist for our meals and was really organized about it, but i failed to pack the tortillas. so we ended up having to eat just steak, cheese and sour cream. it turned out pretty good still. oh well. of course, no camping weekend would be complete without s'mores. roasty, toasty marshmallows...mmmmm.

everyone else at the camping grounds had their fires out by 9:30 pm. i couldn't believe it! but we kept ours going strong until about 2 am. i got pretty cold during the night because we had left one of the window flaps down. i just need to be more prepared for the coolness of night i guess. but we survived.

when we got back from our camping excursion the next day, we tried out another local restaurant and it ended up being really unique and delicious food. we tried to show jon and betsy the town of winston all in one weekend...visited old salem, a couple parks, walked around downtown. anyway, it was a great weekend and we were glad to finally get to use our guest bedroom once again!

hopefully we'll get good reviews from them and more people will make their way on up to visit us!