The Stucky Family: It's Maine Time: Part I

Well, here I go!

I've been putting off starting our trip recap for two main reasons.

1. The number of pictures I have is overwhelming.

2. I've been working on another picture project in my other free time.

But, I've gotten teased about how long this is taking me, so I better get rollin'.

So, you can imagine how excited we were to travel to Maine! A beautiful place we'd never been before, to celebrate Brad and Racquel's wedding. We were pumped!! Brad and Racquel met in Wichita, as they attend the same medical school and live in the same housing unit for students. When they became serious, we thought, "oh my, there might be a wedding in Maine!" Sure enough, it was true love!!!

We decided to make this trip somewhat of a vacation too, and made plans to stay the next week after the wedding. Our little family of four left Wichita on Friday, May 23 and flew into Boston. Bryan's parents, grandparents and brothers left the day before us, and also flew into Boston.

We drove to Wichita the night before and stayed there since our flight left at 8am.

Watching the planes. It has really stuck with Makenah that we flew on blue and yellow planes.

The kids…I could go on and on about how proud we were of Makenah and Logan. They were such great travelers. I'll touch on my feelings about that more later, but just in case I don't do that justice, I'll just say that they exceeded our expectations of what traveling that far with a two and four year old would be like. I suppose I should have known! They are GREAT kids!! They were up early many days, Logan ran on hardly any naps for about 10 days, they were carted around everywhere, rode in strollers, sometimes did lots of walking, and kept different schedules than usual. Not to mention being in the wedding.

All that to say, we were SO proud of them!!!

Here's little traveler #1

and little traveler #2

I sat right between them, and we kept ourselves happy and busy.

In Chicago we had a longer layover than we would have hoped for, but we walked around, found a great place by the windows to make home base for awhile, and ate a slow lunch.

Chicago to Boston.

They both fell asleep.

That's how Logan sleeps. Pretty chill, huh.

And, we have arrived!!

We had very smooth and timely travels, and about the only thing that took longer than we thought was baggage claim and getting on the road with our rental car.

The only thing on the list for Friday was to get to Maine, so we made a stop on our way up the coast for some supper, once we finally got out of Boston. The most beautiful town, Newburyport, Massachusetts, had a main street full of lovely shops and fancy restaurants.

We had to explore a little to find one that would be good for supper.

On the coastline.

We found The Black Cow.

Don't let the name fool you.

There wasn't much beef to be found on the menu. This semi-impromptu stop ended up being home to the best fish and chips we had on this trip!

Our dinner dates were…mostly good. Ha!:) After such a long day of travel, we definitely didn't blame them. We did our best to hold it together…this also turned out to be one of the fanciest places we ate at while gone. Lowlights, candles, mostly adults…

It was a fun way to start the trip!

We drove about 2 hours up the coast to Freeport, ME. Racquel and Brad had rented us a vacation home up there to all stay together. It was fantastic to have a house to spread out in, and worked great with the kids. There were so many bedrooms and bathrooms, lots of living rooms, and a huge barn where the western themed rehearsal dinner was going to be held!

We slept great that night, after being greeted by the family once we got there. Racquel's mom had filled up the kitchen with lots of food and drinks. She even asked us weeks before the wedding, what the kids liked to snack on and drink. :) That was a huge blessing!

Saturday morning, there was a breakfast for all the of the family that was in town, and all of her family came over to hang out with us. Brad and Racquel, along with her mom and the entire family in Maine took care of so many details to make our stay there perfect.

Here we are just socializing and eating breakfast.

Later that afternoon, we went to a fantastic wedding shower thrown by Racquel's family. We had a shower for them here in Garden City, but we were obviously missing her family. This was a fun way to shower them with more gifts, continue to get to know each other, and also fun that her family got to do this for them.

There were so many fun and laughable details planned out at this event. Her brothers in particular are so outgoing and funny…there was dancing, costumes, singing, jokes, and lots of sweet moments.

The wedding party was introduced and danced their way in.

Brandon!

I missed Blake, but you can be assured that his moves brought down the house. :)