Vail 2010

After I was able to tear myself away from my kids, Rodney and I spent the next 12 hours or so showing each other pictures of the kids we had on our phones. The further we got from them, the more desperate I felt to feel closer to them. But after we arrived in Vail and got settled in our new digs for the week, I was able to calm down a bit and enjoy.........EVERY MOMENT!

Our trip was a week of good skiing, good company, good live music, good drinks, good food (hey, anything tastes good when two kids aren't hanging off of you as you try to toss something in your mouth so that maybe you'll have 50 calories to survive the day on), and lots of laughs.

Skip and Christel are our travel buddies....and for good reason. They do all the research......they do all the planning.....they do all the booking......and we just show up with a check and a smile. That's how we roll here in the Williams' house.

And we also think they're kind of awesome.

How do you come across such great travel buddies? Well, if you've spent any time with either Rodney or Skip, you would know that either of them can talk to ANYONE.....about ANYTHING....ANYTIME. So, when they ran into each other at a golf tournament (or a bar or something) back when they were bachelors in North Carolina, well they got to talking.....and have been doing so for about 10 years now.

Truth be told, Skip and Rodney were actually travel buddies before Christel and I were in the picture. But we girls hit it off just as well as the boys did.....so we've continued the traveling tradition. So far, we've been camping in NC, traveled to NC for S&C's wedding, took a New Year's snow skiing trip to Snowshoe, spent a weekend in Gatlinburg, and now a week in Vail. We were sad to hear they went to Italy without us. :-(

We were there for 7 nights which gave us plenty of opportunity to both relax and play. We skied three days, everyone but me went snowmobiling one day, we went tubing one evening, Christel and I took an afternoon to go get massages, we did plenty of shopping.....and we ate and ate and ate. Rodney and I had to take a double take when we got home and realized how much we had spent on food and drinks.

Vail is such a beautiful place. The people were all super friendly. The place was immaculate. Our accommodations were fabulous. And the skiing was fantastic. It snowed a ton while we were there, which made for some fun powder skiing. And we found that the China Bowl was our favorite place to ski. Except Christel....she kept complaining about Pizza not mixing with Chinese....guess you had to be there. ;-)

It was a wonderful trip. One we will cherish forever. We look forward to our next FAMILY trip with the Lilly family. Our girls are the same age, and we haven't met each others' daughters. We're looking forward to meeting Miss Peyton Annabella Lilly.

Longing for a Red Lion strawberry margarita,