Homesick pictures after a weekend away

We travel a lot but sometimes even an exciting weekend away leaves me a little homesick and by the end of the trip I just want to get home and unwind in my own house before the week starts. On the drive home, I start thinking about the laundry I need to fold, the lunches that need to get made, or the groceries I have to buy to restock my fridge.  But not this weekend. This weekend, I traveled north to my hometown and I really just wanted to savor every drop.

I had the loveliest evening with my hubby at a crazy penalty-filled/nail-biter of a hockey game.

Our favorite Vancouver restaurant, Chambar was part of Dine Out Vancouver so I got reservations and it was such a beautiful meal.  I love how their dishes are so artistically presented and taste really yummy too .

We managed to do a family ski-trip to Seymour, which has to be the best kid-friendly mountain in the Northwest to learn how to ski. (FYI when kids are in the ski-school, parents get half-priced tickets.)  We couldn’t put the guys in ski school this weekend but they did a private lesson and it made it really easy to get a couple kid-free runs in too.

I showed up at a dear friends’ with some donuts I bought (I finally made it to Cartems where they have Earl Grey AND pear/blue cheese donuts on the roster) and she had picked up my favorite cookies (sprinkle-y pink from Casa Del Pane in Newport Village), so we had the ultimate dessert feast.

And the rest of the weekend was filled with people I love and lounging and feasting and catching up.

But instead of a photostream that captures those sweet memories, I have this:

And I guess this proves I have to make a better point of snapping pictures, even though it seems a little cheesy to stop and take a picture for the memory. It is so much easier to capture a still little slice of the day (especially a food slice) than the beautiful people in my life when I’m living the moment and I’m the happiest.  I need to remember to snap a shot when I’m  having dinner with a dear friend on a very-good hair day or when I see how gracefully another friend has grown into a beautiful mother of two.  I wish I could capture a piece of how heart-soothing it feels to watch the Bachelor with my mom or chat late into the night with my sister while she bakes or how thankful I am when my dad still rescues me with my car.  (Thanks for scraping my windows this morning, dad.  It was FREEZING out there!)

And yes, I know I can’t take pictures of ALL these things all the time, but I’ve ordered a real camera and I think I’m going to make an effort to actually LEARN how to use the buttons and lenses.  I might even take a class.

At least it’s easy to take photos of my kids and sleepy dogs.  I guess that’s a start.

But today, if I could take a picture of my heart, it would probably look like the fog that just spread all over everywhere along the drive between my two homes.  It’s times like this, when I leave one home to go to the other that I truly wish I could always be in two places at once.

Terumi

Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys.  She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live.  She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)