bismarck

while half of my instagram feed was in iceland this weekend (???), i was enjoying a lovely weekend of firsts:

first time in bismarck, the great capitol of north dakota, filled with rolling hills and "now hiring" signs in front of every single fast food establishment.

first albino buffalo friend!! i saw them from a distance, outside of jamestown. we didn't actually become friends, but they look kind of friendly?

first fried egg roll skins as nacho chips, first bacon wrapped cheese curds

first days as a 26-year-old

first visit to space aliens (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) it was everything.

first north dakota man bun sighting (at my first north dakota speakeasy experience)

first nanaimo bar!

first neapolitan pizza this far from new york. it was really good and squishy.

first missile silo sighting

...

it was so crazy and fun! and now i'm recovering from all of the cheese curds and the open bar at the wedding. oops! how were all of your weekends??

-yeh!

a little tractor adventure

well, it was a big tractor, but a little adventure.

the tractor needed a new part, so eggboy had to drive it to the fix-it man.

junior cat was not allowed to come.

but i was! here is the view from the buddy seat as we drove down the highway and stopped traffic. tractors don't go very fast! eggboy was focused on not hitting any bunnies but he still smiled for my rearview mirror picture. what a guy.

(no cars ahead of us, they are all stuck behind us.)

we even drove across the bridge to north dakota.

past my favorite sign... 

and my other favorite sign... (look, the grain mill in the background!)

and then we arrived at the tractor fix-it place on the edge of town, where a row of combines welcomed us with glee.

eggdad picked us up in his pickup and gave us popcorn because you can get free popcorn at a lot of the farm shops in town. it was salty and tasty and perfect with eggboy's hat sweat. 

the end!

-yeh!

lucerne

our time there was brief and not terribly eventful, but it was beautiful and the coffee alone was enough to make me reconsider my whole life plan: find a new job and adopt a new value system that will enable me to justify spending $5,000 on a swiss coffee maker. each time we had coffee, eggboy and i could do nothing more than sit and sip and let our eyes roll to the back of our heads as we tried to find new ways to voice our love for this dark sweet buttery coffee that was thick as soup and finished too soon. 

fondue can wait, order seven more coffees.

let's marry this coffee.

let's have babies with this coffee. 

let's hijack the keystone pipeline, reroute it from lucerne to east grand forks, and then make it carry this coffee.

our love and obsession turned into confusion towards american coffee. how is it possible that thin watery bottomless coffee exists all over the states when even the coffee in the innsbruck train station lobby makes me want to lie on the ground and cuddle with it all day?

i'll shut up now. and then go make a swiss coffee maker fund piggy bank at the paint your own pottery place. 

there's this other thing i want to tell you about! chügelipasteteli. it's my new favorite word. (even though for the longest time we called it chügelipügeli because we kept forgetting the second part of the word.) it's a lucerne specialty that's basically a mountain shaped chicken pot pie with veal and meatballs instead of chickens. it was the thing you want to eat most when it's cold outside and you're dusted with snow. the one that we had was decorated with puff pastry hearts, so yes, i was obsessed from the beginning. 

other goodies we ate in lucerne were eggboy's first döner, a bunch of marzipan, an easter tart, breakfast like there was no tomorrow, and, of course fondue. it was great fondue, smelly fondue. we were touristy about it and had it at a touristy place, but we were, after all, tourists. 

-yeh!

cold mountain

oh man, oh man, i went to a photography workshop this weekend and it was like summer camp!! instead of arts and crafts we had food styling, and instead of capture the flag we had fishing, or rather sit by the river and drink beer and watch other people catch fish. we even made s'mores and told alien stories around a bonfire. (alien stories are way better than ghost stories, by the way.) it was splendid and beautiful and i miss all of my new friends so much already. 

north carolina was just as pretty as i imagined it would be, it was all mountainy and green, and i got to see some wondrous little waterfalls in the foggy brevard woods on my way from charlotte to cold mountain (thanks to lydia and ben, the best tour guides ever with the best taste in music ever). i think i would probably completely pass out if i ever saw north carolina in the fall.  

cold mountain was the perfect spot for a photo camp. eva and carey totally nailed this location. we stayed in the cutest lodge, ate carey's famous baked oatmeal every morning, took awesome photography classes every day, and at night, we gossiped and yolo-ate cheez-its with red wine. it was so awesome to meet bloggers that i've been admiring through the internet for so long and new-to-me photographers from all over the country. also it was just so refreshing to be with other people who stand on the table for overhead shots and recognize the value of an artfully placed rosemary sprig. 

the weekend was topped off with the most spectacular meal made by my good friend jacob. there was brown sugar crusted pork, black walnut charoset, smashed paprika potatoes, and fancy black bean toast that had about 12 layers on it, i don't even know what they all were, but it made me want to melt to the ground. in the end there was an extra dessert course because at one point during prep jacob's delightful assistant lena mentioned that she gets antsy if she goes three days without baking a cake and i thought, you know what, me too, so shelly and i stole her away and we made olive oil cake with rosemary syrup and lemons from kelly's tree.

oh it was so lovely. 

before flying home, i managed to find room for my first north carolina barbecue and holy poop, what have i been missing all my life. in other words, i'll be back for you soon, north carolina. very very soon.

for now i need to go investigate the landline that eggboy installed while i was gone (i guess people still have those?) and see if it came with any full house vhs tapes or something...

-yeh!

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p.s. big big hugs to all of my new friends that i met this weekend: eva, carey, jordan, rebecca, grace, shelly, patty, kelly. i miss you guys!!! 

most of the goodies pictured in this post come from: lodge, farmhouse pottery, food52 shop, finex, simon pierce, and carey's woodworker dad!