Ribs and Spices and Salmon-oh my!

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This is exactly the type of weekend we've been waiting for ever since Trevor got home.  Unfortunately, I don't have many pictures, but it's blog-worthy anyway.  Friday morning Trevor had class and I took Rowdy for a nice, long walk then did some cleaning.  Once Trevor got home, we met up with my dad and went to Smokin in Steele, an annual BBQ and Blues festival held at the fairgrounds in Owatonna.  They were just getting set up, but there was still plenty to see.  We enjoyed some good ribs and a milkshake, plus all the great smells.  Then we went to the Big 10 for some beers and appetizers.

Saturday morning, Trevor, Rowdy and I went for a family run/bike ride.  

Trevor made us a nice, big French toast breakfast and did most of the clean up.  How did I get so lucky?  After some down time, we got ready to go and headed north.  Our first stop was Penzeys to check out some spices.  My dad has just about everything he could possibly use (and more?) from Penzeys, so we thought we'd check it out for ourselves.  It was hard to choose but we found a few good ones to try.  Our next stop was Coastal Seafoods, another one of my dad's favorite places.  We got some fresh Scottish salmon, more on that in a minute.  We made sure to allow some time to visit our friends Cory and Ashley since we were in the area.  Cory deployed with Trevor to Kosovo in 2007-2008 and he and Ashley married last September.  After a nice visit, we were off to our final destination, Chris' Welcome Home party.  Chris was Trevor's commander for the deployment and his wife Molly and I became good friends.  She was my FRG co-leader and is still running the show.  It was great to see them and it's always fun to celebrate others coming home.  Speaking of others, we saw more deployment friends there too: Cassie & Jon (and Addison) and Amy & Jerad.  We had some good food with good company, a great way to end our busy day.

Today has been exactly what it should be, for me at least-a nice, quiet, lazy Sunday.  Trevor has been hard at work on homework for most of the day, but I guess productive is a close second to lazy.  The big finale to our weekend was one of the best parts: our awesome salmon dinner.

Words can't describe how good this meal was.  We'll definitely be doing it again!  High-five for an awesome, pretty low-key weekend.  More of those, please!

-A