After weeks (feels like months!) of planning and preparation the time has come for my epic summer of travel to begin. Early tomorrow morning Will and I set out on a month long journey to new lands, celebrations, and what I’m expecting to be some pretty amazing adventures.

Our travels are taking us to Ireland and Northern Ireland where we will spend two weeks exploring the land, meeting friends in person for the first time, and where I will be taking part in a food photography class. Then after we get back to the States, we will be heading down to Southern California to be apart of a dear friends wedding. And not stopping there, the weekend after said wedding we are headed up to Northern California for another friends wedding.

For me this trip is about three things:

Friends

While I feel like the whole trip is going to be one giant ball of awesome, the highlight for each our adventures is friendship. How all these people, from different walks of life, were brought together many years ago through a silly little band, have become integral parts of our life. Just wow. More on this post-epic summer.

Photography

Photography has been apart of my life many many years, but never quite like it has now. It is as if the flood gates have been opened and I am riding the water as it gushes out of the gates. This part of the reason I feel so incredibly blessed to be taking part in a photography master class with Helene Dujardin (whose blog is here) at the Belle Isle cookery school.

I know, right? Food photography, at a castle, in Northern Ireland? Consider me amazed and honored to be apart of this.

Adventure… also known as broadening my horizons

If I am honest with myself, I have long since lost my sense of adventure. As my life has been cast with enormous amounts of change over the last five years, I can see now that I traded in my sense of adventure for a desperate need for security. It’s time to step away from the insecurity and step into security. I will no longer let fears keep me from seeing and experiencing God’s creation. I am blessed and thankful to be taking these steps with the best possible traveling companion.

I’ve gone ahead and scheduled some blog posts for while I am gone that way this place isn’t a ghost town for a whole month. I’m not sure if I will be posting anything while we are in Ireland but you may see a picture or two.

I’ve also set up email subscriptions (thank you Dana for suggesting I add this feature) for the site. You can sign up here (it’s also located on the front page, under the archives on the right. We haven’t had any time to stylize the link and make it recognizable) and you will receive an email when a new post been published.

So with that I bid you aduie.