A few highlights from the weekend!

We spent the weekend in Arkansas with our friends Courtney and David. Courtney is one of my very first internet friends! We became friends in winter of 2006 via our blogs and have communicated almost every day since then (at first via blog comments and emails, now, via text). Courtney and David used to live in Texas and moved to Arkansas in early summer of 2021. They moved on to an amazing property with nearly 22 acres (including a pond, limestone, and a cave) on the top of a valley. We’ve been bugging to visit since they moved, and they were waiting to invite guests once they got most of their renovations done.

The four of us have only met in person once before in April of 2013! I wasn’t worried we wouldn’t get along, but I did wonder if we’d run out of things to talk about. Ha! We didn’t. We stayed up way too late every night talking. It was so fun. I haven’t done that in forever.

Friday

• Good weather for our drive. It was a ten hour drive (657 miles)!
• Stopping for vegan tacos at Terror Tacos in St Louis. We were regretting not documenting what we got when we first went in April, so I will document – Steven got the Double Diablo or Deathwish (can’t remember, was so so), Tofu Terror V2 (his fave), and Basic Witch (also good), and I got the Cowboy from Hell and the Behemoth (both delicious!).  Their tacos are so good, and super loaded, but they all had some spicy sauce on them and I had to stop and get sorbet after to cool down. Ha.
• Hiding a rock with the skeleton in the women’s bathroom at Terror Tacos (reel of it here). I regretted not doing this last time and had the perfect “boo” rock that a friend sent me.
• Talking to my snis on the phone while we drove. Ha! I got off the phone and was like “we should turn GPS back on” and we had just missed a turn to get on a new highway!
• Finally getting to Courtney and David’s around 8:20 pm. Eek! Such a long day. We hit bad traffic in St Louis and that held us back a bit, but we also stopped a lot to go to the bathroom and make sure I kept the circulation going in my legs.
• Getting the house tour. Their home is BEAUTIFUL! Ahh! I felt like I was staying at a hotel. They redid a lot of the finishes and fixtures and it looked so nice. The guest shower was particularly amazing with a rainfall shower head and separate water handle and rock flooring that felt like it was massaging your feet. I was bummed we arrived in the dark and had to wait until the morning to see their gorgeous view.
• Them opening and loving our house warming gifts. I brought Courtney a bunch of the fun pumpkin flavored stuff from Aldi, because they don’t have one. We always joke about how “basic” she is and how much she loves fall so those were perfect for her. We also got them a weather station for their home. It’s the same one we have and it measures a ton of things – wind, pressure, rain, temperature. They were really excited about installing it (spoiler – and did later in the weekend!).
• Trying their homemade salsa and eating other snacks after the tour.
• Staying up late talking (until 2:30 am!). We discovered Courtney and I have a lot in common, and Steven and David do too. So that made for a lot of fun connecting, and a lot of jokes over the weekend too (for example, Courtney and I both have terrible hearing and can never hear our spouses and it makes them crazy).

Saturday

• Not feeling like total crap from staying up so late! I think I went to bed at 3:00 and slept until 8:20 and somehow did NOT feel like garbage. We stayed up late all weekend and I felt fine each day, even the day we drove home. Mind blown.
• Seeing their beautiful view in the morning sun. Like I said, their home is on the top of a valley. The cleared the trees blocking the view of their pond and the lower part of the valley and it’s just stunning (top left picture above). You can see the view from their huge back deck, a glassed-in three season room, the kitchen, and their bedroom. It was so peaceful!
• Getting a preview of town. Eureka Springs (where they live) is a huge tourist town! We had sort of an idea that it got a lot of visitors each year, but didn’t realize there was so much to do! We:
  • Visited Thorncrown Chapel (second photo above) and were underwhelmed by it. Steven and I were comparing it to a chapel we visited in Nebraska in December, and we had subconsciously set some standards based on it. And based on how much we could see of it. I am still glad we got to see it.
  • Stopped at Razorback Tower to climb it for view of the valleys but it was swarming with hundreds (thousands?) of wasps, so we nixed it!
  • Drove through downtown. Whoa! Downtown was hoppin’! It took a long time just to drive around and there was NO parking to be seen. We decided to make that our preview of downtown and come back earlier the next day.
• Grilled Impossible burgers and veggies for late lunch. David loves to cook (like Steven!) and we had a lot of his great food this weekend. He had a delicious spice he put on squash and onions and it was the best squash I ever had. And it was their first time trying Impossible burgers and they liked them and were really impressed by them. We joked later in the weekend about how David was like “what are we going to eat when they are here?” because he eats meat and isn’t familiar with the vegan options and had no idea if they would be garbage.
• Courtney giving me their leftover rocks from their bathtub (that is the top right pic in the photo above). My jaw dropped when I saw the rocks around their bath (their entire bathroom is stunning too). I even made a reel about pretending to take a rock. Ha.

• Seeing more of their property. We walked what we could and took the “buggy” (side-by-side) around the rest of the property. Whoa! It was a steep ride down! Fun and scary at the same time. We saw big blocks of limestone, a little cave, and fed the fish in their pond (so fun – they hear the buggy stop and come over for feeding). Since we’ve done so much work on our property we could really appreciate all the work they’ve put in to theirs! It was awesome to be able to see the house from the pond and really understand how far of a drop it is – well over 200 feet!
• Teaching Courtney how to paint while the boys smoked cigars. We had fun painting and gossiping. She painted the cat butt rock in the photo above – she did so well and was really proud of her painting and I was proud of her!
• Making pizza really late. We were talking about what to have for dinner and that it was too late to make dough and let it rise but I was like… aren’t we going to stay up super late anyway? (we did) So we ate dinner around 9:45 pm. We used Impossible sausage and they really liked it too! And I really liked the pizza (Steven was shocked I wanted pizza since I rarely want it at home but Courtney had raved about David’s pizza and I wanted to try it!).
• Staying up late talking again!

This got really long so I will post a part II later this week!