A birthday Surprise!

Last weekend while I was up in PA with my family, I shot Laura a little txt about how we were going to the outlets and I missed our ridiculous shopping runs that we did occasionally while in school. To which she replied, "I'm on a boat!"

Her friend Chrissy, whom I have come to love and adore has a boat and they were out enjoying the delightful weather. I was surprised to get a message a few minutes later from Chrissy saying that the following weekend they were going to a German festival at Hunter Mountain for Laura's birthday and I should come and surprise her.

Before that moment my plans were to finish out the weekend in PA, drive back home to work Monday-Wednesday, drive back up either Wednesday night or Thursday early morning, help my parents/grandma pack up and leave Friday morning for Monticello where my other grandma has a cabin. Then I'd spend the weekend there cooped up with my family in the tiny cabin.

But then Julibean and I realized, why the hell couldn't we go up to Hunter Mountain and surprise Laura? I always miss her birthday because it is always the weekend of our reunion with my Mom's family but this year it was totally do-able with the switch to a Friday-Friday week.

A few hours later, Chrissy, Julibean and Laura's sister Ursula and I were all conspiring about how Julianne, Chris and I would drive up Saturday to meet them and surprise the crap out of Laura and then drive back up to Albany for the night and hang on Sunday with them.

Well let's just say Laura had NO idea what was going on. I was very proud of Chrissy and Urs for keeping the secret, they usually are horrible and tend to blurt things out without thinking about it. Laura thought she was being mugged when I jumped out in front of her to surprise her...the day was fantastic. The weather was beautiful, not too sunny, not too humid, not too cold, but perfect beer-drinking, bratwurst-eating, chicken-dancing weather.

Urs bought her much pined after dirndl, which might I add looked smok'n on her!

Laura & Urs are half German, half Cuban. My sister and I are a quarter German, and Chrissy is Dutch which for us was close enough! We had a great time meeting other people, buying fantastic hats, and really getting down with our German pride!

I have no idea who that guy in the back is, just jumped in on our picture I guess.

We even took a ride up and down the skilift to enjoy the view. It was beautiful and definitely something Laura won't forget since she was scared the entire time. On the way down though Urs (who was in the chair in front of us) got everyone to say/sing/toast Laura's birthday as they passed us...that was wildly entertaining, and Chrissy, Kyle and I even serenaded her to a broken version of Happy Birthday in German.

It wasn't too far into the day when we decided that we should totally make the German Alps Festival at Hunter Mountain an annual birthday extravaganza for Laura. We all had the best time and it was relaxing and fantastically enjoyable to boot!

Speaking of das boot. I didn't buy a boot, because none of the designs appealed to me, but I did almost buy this glorious stein...

We match...no?