Jas's Birthday Plus Four Shows And Another Drive Day

Well hello again, readers! Tis I, your humble captain (am I a captain? Today I'm going to be a captain -- dream big!).

We have lots of catching up to do! My last post was a side-splitting recounting of my trip to Lambeau Field and while I have no more sport stories to report, I do have more adventures to retell!

Thursday was Jas's 23rd birthday! I love birthdays! I mainly love planning birthday surprises and I was on my game for Jas's big day. I got him a shirt that combined our longstanding bald eagle joke from Red Wing, MN with our gym obsession and took him out for lunch. Jas loves Italian food so I asked our contact where we should go in the area and she immediately said "Victoria's!". There is a "Victoria's" down the street from my house but I can tell you that the similarities end there. Our contact told us that their portions were huge and that they basically brought the to go box to the table with your meal and she was not joking! The portions were scary big. Even Jas was intimidated and as he said, he doesn't usually believe people when they say that he won't be able to finish a meal! My meal basically looked untouched when I slid it into the to go box (that had not been provided with the meal, but wasn't far away when the time came).

Now, not only did I ask my contact to supply me with the name of a great Italian restaurant, but I also asked her to serve as my accomplice. I ordered Jas a cake for his birthday and had her pick it up! He had no idea!!! It was such an amazing surprise! All of the kids were excited as well (free cake, duh!). I told the kids on Wednesday night that we wanted Jas's 23rd birthday to be one of his best and I think that we might have achieved that goal by the end of the night.

Also, the cake was super huge -- way bigger than I'd expected -- so Jas and I get to have cake for like the rest of the tour.

Along with Thursday being Jas's birthday, it was a crazy day because we had our first show on Friday morning. This is not normal for us. Typically, the earliest you can schedule a Friday show for is noon, but Luxemburg got special permission since they've been doing early Friday morning shows for so long. To add to the strangeness of Friday, we had three shows scheduled for one day (and another one on Saturday!). Normally, we only do two shows for a residency! Four is a lot (we get paid extra for the extra shows, but it is still a ton of extra work). Four is so many, in fact, that I took a photo log of exhaustion of my day and made a collage for all of you lovely readers:

Long day.

In between shows, we did get to do some exploring in Luxemburg, which we hadn't been able to do up until then. There had been a cheese shop that I'd had my eye on all week that we stopped in between our second and third show of the day! Now, I didn't buy this, but I did take a picture of it because I didn't think anyone would believe me otherwise -- the pumpkin spice epidemic has reached Wisconsin and they now have... pumpkin spice cheese curds! Why would you want pumpkin flavored cheese? I don't know. Like I said, I'm not going to try/buy this but I did think it was funny. I did, however, buy myself some cream cheese and that is delicious and is flavored with herbs and spices and not pumpkin.

We finished up our residency in Luxemburg with our fourth show on Saturday and then treated ourselves to a night at the movies to see The Jungle Book.

On Sunday, we said goodbye to another town but also said hello to a familiar one! We drove back to Stratford, WI, which is where we'd been staying while we worked in Edgar two weeks ago. We're at the same homestay, so it was basically like coming home again. It's a new feeling for us! They had, however, stocked up on the local paper, which featured pictures from our show in Edgar and spoiler alert, I'm amazing!