A few weeks ago I went to my annual girls-weekend with my ABSOLUTELY AWESOME photographers girlfriends.  This is our third trip – last year we went to Cape Cod and the year before we met up in Chicago.  It is hard to believe that I’ve known some of these girls just for a bit over 2 years because it seems that we’ve known each other forever!  To say that this trip was BEYOND AWESOME would be an understatement – I cannot put into words what this trip meant to be – and not because English is my second language:)

Our hostess – Michel and her family not only opened their beautiful home (AND a POOL!) for us, but she did an amazing job planning out our four days together.   We were so well fed (free-range eggs picked from her chicken coop along with home-grown tomatos and basil picked in the backyard tasted SO GOOD!), and taken care of – think organic body lotion made by Michele.  Seriously, I don’t know where she finds time to do all that she does!  Having an amazingly supportive husband (who we all had the pleasure of meeting!) definitely helps, I am sure:)

There were outdoor showers and private jokes, midnight swims in the pool and talks into the morning hours, ‘feel-good’ portfolio reviews and business discussions, chocolate chip cookies and late night Kalhua s’mores,   But most of what stands out from the whole weekend for me was love and laughter.  I am so lucky that fate (disguised as Michele) introduced us all and I will treasure their friendships forever.  It feels amazing beyond words to be able to have friends like these ladies – of all ages and backgrounds – that really GET you, treasure, support and love you.

And because pictures are worth a 1000 words (and because I am a photographer after all!) no blog post can be completed without a few images.  I barely picked up my camera during the whole trip (I do hope that between 11 of us this trip will be very well documented though) but here are a few images that will always bring back very fond memories for me.

We started out with an amazing fiesta (completed with fiesta dresses, Paco the pinata, handmade pinata cookies, maracas, margaritas and all fiesta related accessories that you can think of) and things only got better from there:

Being photographers, we could not be in Austin and NOT do at least a few hours of shooting so one day we woke up earlier (well, kind of) and spent a morning in downtown Austin photographing cool graffiti walls:

and we photographed each other::)

And the rest of the time we had lots of yummy food:

and lounged by the pool:

And way before we were ready, our four day weekend came to an end and we had to say tearful good-byes to each other:(   Good thing that we already have a date/location set for our 2015 trip!

Want to see more images from our awesome weekend?  Click here to check out what my friend Heidi (who is an awesome photographer in St. Louis, Missouri ) captured!