Pinetop, Arizona

For us, it's not about where we meet, but that we meet.

So, now, here it is...our second annual gathering!

The beginning lineup.

Sara gets to work on the margarita pie to go with my margarita chicken.

We couldn't find the electric mixer, so Sara gave the manual one a go.

And then Clare gave it a try...I did next, but I couldn't take a picture of myself since I needed two hands.

After dinner Tami and Mish took care of the dishes.

Breakfast from Sara. Pretty, huh?

A hike in the woods.

We ran into an Eagle Scout candidate and his dad building this bridge.

We were among the first to cross.

It rained.

But we trekked on.

When we returned, we were muddy. You can see where we tried to clean off our shoes in the watery parking lot.

I tried to get our muddy footprints on the concrete, but the light was working out.

Here they are close up.

We changed and prepared to snack on a late lunch.

We had a smorgasboard of stuff.

mmmm...

Oh...remember that picture of Sara with the wine bottle? This was the implement that we struggled with all weekend.

Our happy hour...beer tasting.

The noisy birds.
The noisy birds got closer.
This turned on while we were there and the sound scared us!
My beer. Mmmm...
Me
See Clare in the background? She's not drinking beer.
Our happy hour view.
Lovely.
Inside, I enjoyed a few of the quotes on the walls.

Back at the condo, Sara introduced us to a new game. Here you can see she's very happy to have already figured out that she's beating the pants off the rest of us.

We caught on pretty quickly and the next game we took her out...when Tami and I got frustrated with not being able to finish with all of our pieces on the board, we took some liberties and did what we could to fill up the board our own way, rules be damned!

Sara moved on to solitaire.

Clare moved on to dinner.

Later, Sara and I decided to give some of her drink recipes a try. This was a Bahama Sunset...I think. It was pretty good.

In the end, this is what we had left. Note the open wine bottles and the empty beer bottle. There was more beer consumed, but we didn't line up the bottles, this is a mere representation of it.

Here's what went untouched.

Mish made breakfast our last morning.

When we went outside to pack up, I noticed our footprints were still all over.
Oops.
We had to wait for the towels to dry, so we went for a walk in the neighborhood. Pretty day.
!

Our first attempt at a group shot - out of focus.
Ahhh...that's better