Welcome to my Scenes From the Week series! In these posts, I share the highlights from my previous week ranging from the simple, everyday things to the more memorable events. One of the primary reasons that I blog is to keep a scrapbook that I can look back on in the future, and these posts help serve that purpose.
So I obviously was wrong in my last post from about three weeks ago. My intentions were good – I had planned to come back to blogging after taking some time off for work, but I ended up still not having the time. After work calmed down, we had a friend stay with us (and I wanted to spend time with her, of course), hosted a party at our place, and then took off for a week-long trip to Portland/the Oregon Coast. It has been a lot of fun, but I am happy to say I am actually back to blogging.
This is a post where I’m going to try to share a huge amount of fun happenings in a small space because I don’t want these events to go undocumented on the blog!
Photos from the past three weeks, top left to bottom right:
(1) We hosted our annual(ish) pumpkin carving party. It’s a fun time with lots of food, conversation, and, of course, pumpkin carving! We don’t host big groups much since we live in a small apartment, but we really enjoy it when we do!
(2) My dear friend Kaitlin came for a visit almost exactly one year after her last visit to Austin with her husband Erik! The first full day she was here, we drove to Houston to scope out neighborhoods because she and Erik are moving there next year. I had barely spent any time in Houston myself, so it was fun to explore!
(3) I have so many fun pictures from our time in Oregon, so it is really difficult to sum up the trip with just two pictures, but I’m giving it a shot (at least until I’m able to do a travel guide about our Oregon trip in the future). One of my favorite parts of the trip was getting to see real autumn (which we do not get in Texas), and it felt especially like fall while we wandered the Portland Farmers’ Market on Saturday. While there, we picked up delicious Pine State Biscuits (and skipped the line we would have waited in at the actual restaurant) along with some road trip snacks for our drive to the Mt. Hood area later that day. The snacks included local cheese, sausage, apples, and bread.
(4) I took this picture on Cannon Beach, one of the stops on our Oregon Coast road trip. While it doesn’t capture it completely, I think this is the best picture I have for showing the beauty of the Oregon Coast in the fall. Call me crazy, but I love a good “gloomy” day, and Oregon had a lot of those to offer, especially along the coast.
Not pictured:
- An abundance good food and coffee in Portland
- Finishing Where’d Ya Go, Bernadette and The Woman in Cabin 10. They were both good reads, but I loved the former and just liked the latter.
- Driving around Mt. Hood and seeing Multnomah Falls (so beautiful!)
- Time in the stunning Willamette Valley and visiting several wineries
- Regretting booking only one night in McMinnville, Oregon as soon as we saw how adorable it is. It is one of the most charming little towns I’ve ever seen, and we were only able to see it in the dark at night and in the fog in the morning. We will go back!
- Driving along the Oregon coast – we explored many different beautiful towns, scoped out the house from the Goonies, hiked on some coastal trails, hiked to see a 500-year-old gigantic tree, and saw lots of cute sea lions.
- I don’t want to spend too much time on it since I know this drives plenty of people crazy, but I’m one of those people who starts listening to Christmas music the day after Halloween, so that happened. 🙂
Have a great week!
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{Thanks for reading! Want to know a little more about me? I’m a CPA learning how to balance a career with frequent travel while planting roots at home in Austin, TX. When I’m not exploring my home city with my husband Daniel or cuddling with our chubby orange cat Banana, I’m probably planning, packing, traveling to, or daydreaming about our next adventure. After all, my travel mug collection is never complete. If you have wanderlust too, be sure to follow me on Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat (emilya89), or subscribe to my blog!}