Boise

My freshman year of college, I happened to live on Ed3, where I met an amazing group of girls and we are still good friends, 20 years later. Marissa, my roommate, transferred out after one year. Yen and I lived together for 2.5 years after that. After graduation I lived with Liz and Marissa for a year in Eastern Oregon. I never lived with Mindy or Sarah, but I did manage to travel with most of them. Marissa and I went to Nicaragua. Liz and I went to Europe twice. Sarah and I went to South Africa and Mindy and I traveled to Peru. Yen and I need to go somewhere in Asia or Australia to complete the circle…

We’ve done a lot of life together. We were all single for our entire 20s, except for Marissa, who got married pretty quickly. Then we all turned 30 and started going married and having babies. Now as we all hit 40, we’ve added 5 husbands and 13 kids to the mix.

This week, all of us girls got together for Sarah’s wedding, the last one of us Ed3 girls to get married.

It was so good to see them all again. I haven’t seen them since I was just barely pregnant with Josy, which is far too long. Mindy, Yen and I didn’t bring our kids either, which means that we got some quality girl time in, which we all desperately needed. It was pretty wonderful.

Since Mindy and I weren’t officially in the wedding, (although we did manage to be in charge of handing out programs, setting up the reception, cleaning up the reception, buying supplies to decorate the getaway car, setting up the rehearsal dinner, organizing the rehearsal, carrying the dress train over the mud and sending people down the aisle at the right time…), we got to skip out on some prewedding activities and head up to Stanley for the wedding early. And what do two moms who don’t have their kids do when they’re in a super beautiful place? Go swimming at the lake, obviously.

It was pretty wonderful, even if we both kept thinking about how much our kids would enjoy it… 

Everyone finally showed up for the rehearsal and it turns out there is a pretty good reason why Sarah picked this for a wedding location. It’s amazing!!

Then we headed back to our hotel, which just happened to have a hot spring. 

The next day was wedding day, which meant that there was all sorts of craziness. With all of our other duties, Mindy and I finally got back to our room too get ready and had 20 minutes to get dressed, do hair and make up and check out, but we made it!

The wedding was beautiful. The smoke from the fires even cleared out enough that we could see the mountains better.

After the wedding, we ran to the reception to make sure everything was ready and noticed that the cake was leaning. The longer we waited, the worse it got. Marissa’s husband, the builder, was watching it go, mentally trying to figure out what he could do to fix it. When we started seeing daylight between the layers, we had to do something, so he did his best and disaster was averted. But as soon as the photographer showed up, I told him to make sure he got pictures of it now, in case something happened…

Eventually the reception started and we all danced the afternoon away. We even got a finally Ed3 wedding picture. Mindy and I had no idea that the bridesmaid dresses were purple, it was totally just a coincidence…

Once the wedding was cleaned up, Mindy, Yen and I sat at the lake for a while, just decompressing. Now that Yen was done with the wedding, we actually got to catch up with her a bit!



Then we did the long drive back to Boise and flew out the next morning. I had some crazy lady behind me on the flight…



When we got back to Portland, the next phase of my trip began…