Clint's Birthday Trip!

I know this is crazy late... but I'm blogging... shut it.

So my 27th birthday came around and we had a dinner planned at Houstons on friday with one of my best friends, Jason. He had been saying he wanted to take us out for Laurens birthday for more than a month now, he was now going to take us BOTH to eat. So I get home on Friday thinking I'm about to go out to eat and Lauren says I have to open this one present. My family always wanted to open Christmas presents before Christmas morning but I wanted the anticipation, it like... makes the presents even better! So I didn't want to open it, but she insisted... so I did. It was some bicycle tires I've been wanting! They're lyke totally crazy awesome, no slipping, no loosing traction and falling down huge hills anymore.

Ssoooo I thought we were going to go biking in the morning, little did I know that it would be in ARKANSAS!! She made me open another present which was a bike rack so we could take the honda instead of the Xterra. It pretty much paid for itself in that one trip. Lauren already had ALL of the "gear" packed so we went to the bike store, gathered all of the necessary supplies and hit the road, 5 hours to the Highway 27 Fishing Village. We put up the tent at about 3am and slept until it started POURING. That was day 1.


It rained for hours and hours, we actually left the tent at about 2 the next day. We drove into town (pop. less than my graduating class) and got firewood (from good-ole-boy-justin, friend of the gas station lady), went to a crystal shop because Mt. Ida is known for their crystals, and scoped out the best trails to ride the next day. We found an awesome spot to take pictures and I climbed up on laurens car to take them (pics below). That night we made hamburgers over the fire and then s'mores and hot chocolate. That was day 2.


Day 3 we woke up, got the bikes all ready to go, cooked eggs and sausage on the fire, packed our lunches and headed out. We were advised to wear hunters orange because it was the first day of hunting season... so we did... for a little while. It was sooo much fun, nothing like here in texas. The section we rode had something like a 600ft elevation difference between the highest and lowest points, but by no means was it a straight line. We had lunch on a big log on the side of the trail and met a few people along the way. It was a tough decision between calling someone to pick us up or try to bike all the way back to the camp because the Cowboys kickoff was in a few hours! We biked back and made it in time, but we were soooreeee. We convinced them to let us into a cabin that wasn't rented at the time so we could shower and then headed to hot springs to watch the game. We ate there and then cooked s'mores that night.

the pics below were from the trail. huge mountain behind us and a river in front




By day 4 we were really really tired and looking forward to the comforts of the apt. We ate breakfast at the Mt. Ida Cafe because Lauren found that it was THE place to go. Their slogan was "best vittles in Arkansas"... we thought, hmm... vittles sounds kinda strange, what are vittles? So we looked them up... they're food... just, any food. We're from dallas. Then we packed up everything and came back home. Since we didn't have time to make a cake I got candles on zebra cakes!! It was yumm! The next day we went to her parents house to celebrate with a real cake :) it was the strawberry family recipe, amaz. It was a GREAT surprise and a wonderful birthday. There is no way she is topping it next year, I don't deserve her.