One of my goals for this summer is to go through 15,000 (yes, you read that right) pictures, pick the ones on I want to keep and back them up on-line, and try and document the stories behind them in some shape or form. That shape or form may be blogging or scrapbooking or just adding captions in my on-line storage site. My preference is to blog them, partly because I get to tell more of the story and partly because I find the things I blog are much easier to go back and scrapbook later.
Anyway, I’ve made some progress toward that goal. When I was going through pictures last night, I found these from June of 2011. Ruby and Emmie were down for Cousin Camp. On Friday, I told all four girls that I had a surprise for them on Saturday morning but they all had to get up really, really early. I thought I might have trouble getting them up, but they all were ready and in the car by 5:00 a.m., excited for their surprise.
We drove for about 45 minutes to Foley, Alabama. The girls slept a little, but when we arrived at the field, they helped me set up the picnic blanket and pull the still-warm muffins out of the basket. They still had no idea that we were at the Gulf Coast Hot Air Balloon Festival. The balloons were all supposed to fly in at 6:00 a.m., but there was a storm brewing and we had to wait a while. We had our picnic breakfast and giggled and enjoyed being outside so early in the morning.
Finally, about 7:15 a.m., the balloons started to appear over the trees in the southwest. The girls were so excited. It was quite a sight!
We went back to the festival this year, but it was too windy for the balloons to fly. I’m so glad we got up early last year – it was well worth the effort!