This is the best time of year! We spent Thanksgiving with Chance's family this year, at his Aunt Sally's.

Chance and I wanted to think of something we could bring to our Thanksgiving celebration with his family. I told him how when my Grandma was still here and we went to her place for Thanksgiving, she would have gingerbread houses for us to decorate at the end of the night. He liked the idea so we ran with it! Instead of buying kits, we wanted the challenge of making all the gingerbread ourselves, just like Grandma did. We found a recipe online (foodnetwork) and spent all morning making the gingerbread for 6 houses and cutting out the shapes (which was a trial and error... cutting the gingerbread shapes again right after they come out of the oven is the better way!), just hoping they would work out! At the end of the night we quickly made some frosting (we were rookies and put the frosting in the bag before we put the decorative tips in the bag... haha), put them in bags and had everyone start decorating. It turned into a contest with cash prizes! We think everyone really enjoyed decorating, competing, and even eating the gingerbread scraps, so we decided it was a success! As I watched everyone decorating their houses, I felt like I got a glimpse of the joy Grandma must have had when she saw everyone really enjoying the things that she had spent a lot of time and effort doing for us. I miss her everyday, but I'm so thankful for her influence in my life. Chance and I gave ourselves the crappiest of the houses, the one we tried to cut when it had cooled, and we were thinking it wasn't going to turn out well, but we love how it turned out! It's so cute! Gingerbread houses are such a charming decoration. And I'm so happy that it will even be good enough to eat when the holiday is over.

I just noticed I didn't really post details about our trip to get the trailer, and it's definitely worth talking about in detail! As I've previously posted, Chance and I decided to purchase a vintage Airstream Trailer to restore and make into our tiny mobile home. We researched for a while to find which model we wanted and when we decided what it was, the best one we could find was in North Carolina! And when I say the "best one" I just mean in the best condition for the best price.

We left on a Thursday morning and got back Sunday evening. It was a really long trip to make in just 4 days, but it was worth it and definitely an adventure. Luckily Chance's brother Jordan came with us to help us drive. I actually didn't end up driving at all, but I did stay up some of the nights to make sure the driver stayed awake.  The first like 10 hours were fun! Exciting and adventurous. After that first all nighter, well... lack of sleep does things to people! We watched a ton of movies ate some good snacks and meals, ALL in the car. We never stopped anywhere to eat. We only stopped for gas and bathroom breaks, and we had good conversation as well. Also as a side note, we were having a really hard time finding an affordable way to get the trailer. Having it shipped to us was going to be a small fortune, and all the places we looked at renting a car were also really expensive. Like 2 days before we left Chance found this AWESOME price for renting a truck. We weren't expecting it to be super nice or anything, but the truck ended up being a 2016 Dodge Ram 2500, and OH MY IT WAS A BEAUTY! It was definitely a beast of a car, but wow, it was so nice. So much space! We set up a little sleeping station in the back of the truck and it worked out so well. It was also a champ at pulling the trailer back.

We drove through Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and finally to North Carolina! I've been to a couple of these states before, but I still saw so many things I've never seen. Like Kansas is SO FLAT, but so pretty. And Kentucky and Indiana, SO GREEN. So many trees. It was really fun to drive through these states and see so much, even though we were just driving through. It would have been so fun to make like a 2 week trip out of it, but we couldn't take that much work off...We ended up getting to NC about 6ish hours later than we thought we would, all the stopping for gas time really added up. It was starting to get dark when we arrived at the location of our Airstream. The previous owner gave us a little tour of the trailer and told us a little bit about it. Another funny side note, they showed us this spreadsheet that was like 6 pages long of all the different trailers they looked at before they decided to buy this one... After looking at it all, we actually almost backed out of the purchase! We both had mini panic attacks about how big of a purchase this was, how big of a project it was going to be, and how BIG of a trailer it was to haul all the way back to Utah (not to mention we were unable to get any kind of temporary registration or license to pull it back... whoops!). Well I told Chance to call his dad because I knew he'd be able to calm us down, and I was totally right. After talking to his Dad, we felt good about it again, and went forward with the purchase! We mentioned to the previous owners that we had planned to fix it up and restore it, and the woman was like "Oh! Well, don't make it... too new!"... We just laughed because we were planning on completely overhauling it... haha.

We hitched that trailer up (which took forever....), checked to make sure the lights were working, and we headed on our drive home. At this point it was like midnight. The previous owner of the trailer offered to let us sleep in the trailer overnight and then leave in the morning, but as nice as the offer was, we thought it would be weird... and the trailer was kind of gross I don't think we would have slept well anyways... plus we needed to get home because we didn't want to take anymore work off.

We started driving home and about 30 minutes into it, we noticed that the lights on the trailer were really really dim. So we pulled over to try and figure it out. Chance wasn't quite sure what was going on so we decided we needed to wait until it was light enough to drive without lights (because we could NOT get pulled over... remember how I mentioned we didn't have any kind of license to be pulling it?....). So we ended up sleeping in a store parking lot with some other Semi Truck drivers, for  just a few hours. As soon as we could tell it was getting lighter, Chance ran into the store for some tools and materials and we started driving again. Everything was going great! We stopped for Gas in Kentucky, and then Chance wanted to try and fix the lights. As we parked at a Walmart, we noticed the Airstream tires were really cracked. That freaked us out, so we decided to buy new tires right then and there. That set us back about 4 hours... Chance fixed the lights though, which was great and relieved some stress, since we knew we would be driving through one more night! When we took the Airstream back to the tire shop, the guys said they couldn't change the tires on it because they didn't have anything big enough to lift it. Well the guy we bought it from gave us these blocks and told us how he has changed/replaced tires. So we bought the tires, but Chance and Jordan ended up changing them themselves! And we still had to pay full price! Haha, so lame... After we got all the tires changed, we were off again.

Not too long after that, we ran into a HUGE RAIN STORM THAT WAS SO SCARY. We could not see a thing in front of us or around us and I was soooo worried we were going to get in a wreck! But we made it over to pull off the road and just waited it out. The rest of the drive was smooth and breeze (besides how tired all of us were). We made it home and we were all pretty mangy! Yikes!

Though I would definitely think twice before driving that far and long in that amount of time, I'm so glad we did. It's definitely fun to look back on!

Here are all the "before" pictures! This is what out 1976 Airstream Sovereign looked like when we bought her :) In the next post I will go over all we have done to it so far!