Good morning and goodbye to all of you! At the time this goes live I’ll be in the car and headed to Dallas to pick up my besties, Laura and Tina. My first thought last year, when they announced that this year’s conference would be in Albuquerque, was that I wanted to drive. It’s not really even longer a drive from here to Albuquerque as it would have been to drive to New Orleans last year, but ever since I was a kid my family has been taking road trips from Oklahoma to Colorado and to my grandparents’ winter cabin in South Fork. We always drove to New Mexico first and frequently stopped over in Santa Fe or Albuquerque or Taos. But, it has been ten years since I’ve seen either of those places, and the prospect of flying there paled in comparison to the thought of making that drive again. Sure, west Texas and western Oklahoma are pretty lame — I won’t lie! But the drive holds some wonderful memories for me.

I’m so glad those two ladies decided that the drive sounded like fun. I honestly expected that I’d probably end up flying, but now that I’m leaving and driving, well… I’ve always enjoyed road trips the most, and I’m really looking forward to this one. It is just the icing on what I hope will be a really awesome week!

I took the week off of the blog just so there isn’t pressure to get everything done, but that doesn’t necessarily mean nothing will show up, so keep your eyes open (or you know, just sign up for updates on the side of the page). I know from last year, that there will probably be very little downtime to devote to updating the blog, even though The Armchair Reader wasn’t open then. But, keep your eye out for tweets from me about what is going on, a funny story or a pic that I wanted to share. If you aren’t following me or the blog on Twitter, please do: @coleriann and @armchairreader. You never know which account I’ll be using.

At the very least, I’ll be taking pictures to show you all about this year’s retreat when I get back! In fact, I’m thinking about asking all of you who happen to read the blog and will be there if you’d like to share any pictures, but more on that later.

If you aren’t going to be in Albuquerque this weekend, then it is too bad and hopefully you’ll be able to come another year. To all of you who plan to be there — I hope I get to meet you! I’m bad with names and faces, and when you put a drink in my hand my memory really goes to shit. So come and introduce yourself! I look forward to meeting you :) Safe travels to everyone, and I’ll see you on the other side!


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