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Yesterday I shared Part Two of our romantic weekend getaway and the day before I shared Part One.

We had such a lovely time on our getaway. It was much cooler in Prescott and the wind was blowing in the pines. There is also an amazing smell in the early morning which I remember from a time in my youth when I lived briefly in Flagstaff. It smells a little like ice cream to me, I’m not sure why.

I’ll start with our breakfast on our last day in the cottage. For this meal, I wanted to eat out on the private patio. I wanted to use the hamburger I’d brought, so I made us each a hamburger patty and fried up the last of the 12 ounces of nitrate-free bacon. For hubby I fried three eggs [affiliate link]. We had more chicken stock with sauerkraut juice, and I made us each a fruit plate. We each had some honeydew melon, green grapes and for a sweet treat I made a little concoction that came to mind. I am going to call it a compote, although I’m sure that’s totally correct.

I’d bought a container of blackberries from Costco a couple of days earlier, and I also brought two frozen bananas with me on our trip. I melted one tablespoon of butter in a skillet and mashed the blackberries and cooked them for a while in the skillet. After a few minutes, I dumped in the now melted bananas. The bananas had turned a bit dark having thawed in the refrigerator. I cooked them in the blackberries for about five minutes on each side. What a delicious little treat!

After we ate breakfast it was time to start getting ready to leave. Checkout was at 11am and we started packing and getting everything into our vehicle about 9:30.

On our way our of town we took the scenic route again (we got lost) where we found this perfect huge Christmas tree.

On our way back, even though hubby had hoped he could get home, get his truck loaded and hit the ground running to the next job… we decided to stop at Lynx Lake. What a gorgeous body of water!

We hiked down and I took off my sandals and dipped my feet into the water. Ahhhhh… it was a little chilly at first, but after a couple of minutes it felt great on my bare feet.

After hubby climbed down from where he climbed up to take some pictures of me in the lake, we asked a couple passing by to take our picture which they happily agreed.

And one more photo as we left the lake:

It was such a nice weekend, and I think we both enjoyed ourselves and caught up on sleep! I got hubby to eat some good GAPS meals (even though he did drink Pepsi) and I think this was the nicest weekend we’ve had in quite some time. I am definitely getting more skilled at taking GAPS on the road! It really helps to have a full kitchen!

Yesterday I shared Part One of our romantic weekend getaway. I guess I didn’t get any photos of dinner our first night… in fact I can barely remember what we had. I think I made hubby some steak and fried eggs [affiliate link].

At any rate, here is breakfast our first day there. I brought all the food with us. I brought 8 cups of frozen chicken stock. Here we each have a cup of chicken stock with sauerkraut juice in each cup. Breakfast was chicken salad. Hubby’s is on the left, mine is on the right. Each salad had chicken, homemade mayonnaise, lettuce, carrots, celery, nitrite-free bacon and olives. Hubby doesn’t like sweet tasting combinations, like grapes in his salad, so I gave him avocado instead. Besides I figured he can use the calories and fat.

After breakfast I explored around the area and snapped a few photos. Here is the central area, it is pretty and green.

I sat for awhile and tried to do some drawing, (I’m not an artist! I just thought it would be something different to try and it seemed like it would be relaxing) and after awhile headed back to the cottage. Around 11am I was feeling tired again, so told my husband I was going to take a nap, and invited him to join me. We fell asleep until 3pm! Both of us have been sleep deprived, especially my husband, so I was glad he took me up on the offer to get some more sleep.

After we got up from our nap I made our next meal; we had burgers on lettuce buns with bacon and mushrooms, and our cups of broth and sauerkraut juice.

Next we decided to go on a hike (or rather it would turn out to be more like a walk, which was perfectly my speed). First we got lost going through town and stopped and took some pictures of these pretty roses.

And finally we got to the area where we had decided to hike. Hubby was disgruntled at having to pay a fee to spend a couple hours taking a hike. It was $5 per car, but we paid it and started on our hike into the forest.

The hike was supposed to take an hour and a half total. We stopped long before we got to the top. When I started out, just walking the incline was wearing me out, but I kept going. I had to stop a couple of times and sit down and take a break. But not because I was out of breath! Just because my legs and calves were tired.

After our walk we stopped by the grocery store and picked up a couple of things. I still had plenty of food, but I had forgotten to bring apple cider vinegar for our salad, and decided to use a lime instead of buying a bottle of pasteurized apple cider vinegar when I had raw at home. After I squeezed half the lime into the salad, I cut them and put them onto our glasses. All the plates and dishes were provided by the cottage, including the pretty wine glasses. We don’t drink, so we just had ice water.

We had London broil steak with steamed cauliflower, a salad and chicken broth with sauerkraut. The salad was made with lettuce, hard boiled eggs, nitrate-free salami, onions [affiliate link], mushrooms, and black olives. It was delicious! For the dressing I used olive oil, crushed garlic, Celtic sea salt [affiliate link] and lime juice.

We’d rented a Blockbuster movie from the grocery store; I’d brought my laptop and we started to watch the movie but it turned out to be a dud and we turned it off 30 minutes into watching it.

Tomorrow I’ll share our last day.

My husband has been working really hard this whole year, trying to keep his business afloat. I’ve shared before my concern about his diet, and he was not getting enough sleep either, so I begged him to go away with me for the weekend.

We are not the type to go on vacation. We both come from poor families, where a yearly vacation was something unheard of. I remember piling into my stepfather’s Chevy Vega (there were four of us older children, and an infant, if I remember correctly) and driving to California to visit his parents and disabled sister, Aunt Nancy. I don’t know about the rest of my siblings, but it was my first experience with a disabled person. That is the only vacation I remember, and eventually there were seven children. My husband has four children in his family, and he remembers going camping with his aunt and cousins.

In our adult lives, we have not gone on many vacations. Since moving out here we owned goats, and it’s not easy to leave when you have to milk every single day. We did go to Washington, DC last summer and that was a nice little vacation.

But it’s hard to relax here at home. I’ve tried camping out on our property (when we still owned the goats) but my husband manages to keep himself super busy around the yard. If he takes one day off, he’s still working all the time.

So I thought the only way I could get him to relax (which in turn would lower my stress level!) would be to go away for the weekend.

Thankfully our youngest son is still living at home and was willing to stay home with his older brother who has Down Syndrome.

I searched online for someplace to go “up north” with the most important criteria: a full kitchen. It’s typically much cooler in the higher elevations of Arizona at this time of year, and one of my coworkers told me of a place she likes to stay in Prescott, so I started with that place. It turns out it was full and continued my search. All the regular hotels that have full kitchens were completely filled, and I just happened to find a little place with cottages that looked like it might fit the bill. I made our reservations and we planned to check in on Friday. Let’s say that I planned to check in at noon (check in time) but we were running late and then had to make a few pit stops on our way out of the city so we didn’t arrived until 8pm! I was feeling very disappointed as we were driving away from home about 3 o’clock. It was hard to not feel bad for the time we’d lost already, but I worked hard to try and just accept that we were running late and it would be okay. We had two more days after all.

On the way to the cottages which were in Prescott, we had to drive through Prescott Valley and I caught this beautiful photo of some cattle grazing. They look like Black Angus.

A little further down the highway we found these pretty white “flowers” and stopped to take pictures of them, they turned out to be some kind of stickery weed!

Finally we arrived at our cottage, I was happy with it for the most part. This was the bedroom area. The bed was very comfortable. I brought my own pillow as I usually have trouble sleeping without my own.

The kitchen was compact but it had a refrigerator, a gas stove and an oven! And it even had cast iron skillets! I was very happy to see those.

Here is the dining room area and part of the living room:

At the far end of the room is a door which led out to the private patio area. The door was one of the half doors that could be closed on the bottom so the top could stay open to let in the cool air. These two photos show it closed first, then open:

Here is the living room area:

This is the hidden television. I thought for a minute there was no television! And I’m happy to report we didn’t turn it on even once!

Here is the outside of our cozy little cabin:

Tomorrow I will share Part Two (there were so many photos I wanted to share I decided to break it into three parts, one for each day we were there).