Smith Family Reunion

This weekend we headed to Carmel, Indiana for the Smith family reunion.  Technically it was a destination reunion since no one in the family actually lives there.  The town is quite classy; it has a public waterpark, where Dad, Mark, and I took the girls for a few hours.

It was great to see the fam.  It'd been over a year since Erica and I saw the Carlsons, more than three years since we'd seen the Freers, and the poor Gazleys we hadn't seen since our wedding.  Here's the cousins photo to prove I'm not lying:

Not Pictured: Adam Freer

Unbelievably, this is the only good picture we managed to get with just James and the girls.

Finally, a real cousin!

We stopped by Danville on the way home to see mom and dad's new lake house.  They are to be congratulated on their awesome new digs.  I can see spending many a' future weekend there worrying about James falling off that rickety pier.

Speaking of the boy, he was very good during the long car rides, which bodes well for our trip to California in a couple of weeks.  He even woke up 45 minutes before we got back to Chicago and just chewed coolly on a towel for the remainder of the ride (Erica just slept through the whole thing).

Total car miles of trip: 441

--Grant

Why "The Big Pigs"?

For years, Grant saved up loose change in a little pink ceramic piggy bank which he spent only on travel. Occasionally, he'd go stretches where he'd devote a whole $20 bill from an ATM visit.  When he pitched to Erica the trip that became their 3.5 week European adventure in 2011, he pointed out that he had socked away quite a stash in his pig.  Dryly, Erica observed that they were going to need a "much bigger pig."

The Little Pig

Erica's wasn't wrong.  While the little pig did disgorge quite a bit of cash, it was only enough to pay for about 2 nights accommodation, and so for the rest they plundered their accumulated credit card points and frequent flyer miles, and dipped into savings.  (But it was worth it.)

Venice, The Big Pig

It wasn't long before Grant and Erica began to refer to their trip itself as the "Big Pig".  The subsequent big summer trip of 2012 (Sequoia NP, Yosemite NP, Lake Tahoe, Napa, Berkeley) became "Big Pig 2: West Coast Boog-A-Loo".  And while Erica insisted on taking 2013 off from excessive traveling to gestate James, all future week+, multi-destination adventures will inherit the sobriquet.

Yosemite, Big Pig 2

That doesn't mean that our travels are limited to "Big Pigs".  We're always going somewhere.  Check back at this space for updates.