For my birthday last month, Chris and I flew to Las Vegas for a long weekend. We met up with my mom and sister and took sooo many photos. I'm lucky that my sister obsesses over capturing every moment of our trips like I do. We pretty much decided we only go on trips for the photographic opportunities. Then we go home and scrapbook the whole dang thing. Kinda nerdy but what else are we gonna do with all those photos?

I've been slowly transitioning into shooting only film, and I realized on this trip that digital photography has pretty much phased itself out of my life. I used to take hundreds of digital photos every trip, with a few random film photos scattered in-between. In Vegas, I took about 30 digital photos total, and the rest was all film. It's taken a while to get to this point. I think I was mostly afraid that my film photos wouldn't turn out and that I wouldn't have any photos from my trip. But I feel such a connection to film photography, so I'm always much more excited about the images I get at the end of it all.

I usually fly home to Virginia every winter for the holidays, but this year Chris and I decided to drive. There are just so many places in the US worthy of visiting and I needed a break from work and the ups and downs of life. Every sunset was stunning, every road was unique. There's something about traveling that makes me feel content. Life just starts to feel stagnant after a while and seeing new places is the best way to get out of a funk. We took our cat Lula (kind of a nightmare, but we survived!) and we stopped in Bend on the way out of Portland to visit Chris' parents. Of course we left the minute a huge snowstorm hit Portland and Bend, but we slowly made it over the mountains, tire chains and all. Not gonna lie, I was a little terrified that we'd slide off the side of a cliff. But we made it through!

A few of our stops included Austin, Nevada (a very strange little town in the middle of ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE, but beautiful landscape everywhere), Las Vegas (incredible), the Hoover Dam (freaking huge), the Grand Canyon (we woke up at 5:30 am to see the sunrise!), Albuquerque (had a delicious Bahn Mi), Amarillo, Texas (bought a decorative Armadillo), Oklahoma City, Memphis (GO TO THE BASS PRO SHOPS PYRAMID, it's CRAZY), Nashville, and finally Lynchburg at 1 AM in the morning. It was stressful, fun, memorable, silly and beautiful. I haven't gotten my film photos back yet, but these are my favorite digital images from the trip. I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season. 2017 is going to be crazy, that's for sure. Chris and I will be driving back to Portland sometime in March, then getting married in April in Hawaii. I have plans of taking my creativity in a whole new direction, as well as focusing on my mental health, physical health, and spiritual health. We'll see how that goes...

Happy New Year!!!!!