Travel Thursday: Mixing Business with Pleasure

 

                I’ve been having so much fun looking back over our birthday trips these last few weeks. We sure have had some fun adventures! And our fourth trip together was no exception, but it was possibly our most unusual trip.

                My friend Olivia was living in Wisconsin at the time and invited me to apply to be a speaker at a big women’s conference at her church. I was newly self-employed after leaving WBCL, and we felt it was important to take every opportunity that came our way. So I applied and was invited to be a breakout session speaker. We decided this trip would also need to be our birthday trip, because Ryan had limited time off work, and we couldn’t swint TWO trips.

                The plot twists to this trip included:

·         We ended up moving to Kokomo one week before this trip and were still living out of boxes.

·         Ryan was really sick with a sinus infection.

·         Though we had an unseasonably warm spring for weeks before our trip, that entire weekend was filled with snow and sleet.

·         We stayed with our friends to save money – and didn’t know until after we arrived that they didn’t actually have a guest room. (We weren’t upset!)

·         So. Many. Toll. Roads.

But the fun parts of the trip included:

·         Lindsay Sherbondy (of Lindsay Letters Art) had a storefront in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, so we routed through there to shop and even got to meet Lindsay! We still display the art we bought that day!

·         Even though we spent one day of our trip working, it was a great conference. I gave two identical versions of my breakout session – on singleness. Ryan ran my power point, and we had a great time serving the women.

·         Olivia is a GREAT tour guide and planned all the fun parts of our trip for us so we could focus on the conference.

·         One of the places they took us? Scoops Ice Cream in Chilton, Wisconsin. This remains my favorite ice cream shop I have ever been to anywhere. The salted caramel ice cream was SO good that we ended up going back another time before going home, AND Olivia once sent a pint of this ice cream home on ice with her mom, just so I could have it again. If I could order this for my own home, I would. It’s that good.

·         Olivia is a fellow coffee lover, so she took us to TWO coffee shops in our short visit – plus the ice cream place. Find you a friend who will load you up on coffee shops while you’re visiting.

·         We visited a cheese factory, where we learned all kinds of fun facts about cheese. (We purchased a keychain from this factory to serve as our “trip ornament” and enjoy hanging it on our tree every year!)

·         Though they have since moved away from this area, at that time, Olivia’s husband was the veterinarian at a couple of large farms. (Fun fact: after church on Sunday, he was called to come in and perform surgery on a cow, so he had to leave after lunch to go do that.) Before we left Wisconsin, we stopped to visit one of the farms. That one farm had 8000 cows, 7000 of which were milked three times a day, every day of the year!

·         We were able to watch the milking process – and this is where our official Wisconsin picture originated for our travel map!

Things we learned from this trip included:

·         We were so thankful for our friends’ generosity and provision in meals and lodging, but we probably should always make sure we have our own space when celebrating a birthday trip.

·         We should strive to make sure our birthday trips are pure fun and not also work mixed in.

·         We can have a lot of fun, even when the weather stinks, we don’t feel good, and we have other things trying to get our attention!