Ahhh, it feels good to be home. Mostly.
First of all, I want to thank so many of you for stopping by on my page! On my stats, I could tell people were checking into my homepage a lot more than usual. It could have been a fluke, but it made me excited to be able to post again. I didn’t have wifi and we were eating walking around and doing various concert things an awful lot for me to do much posting.
Currently, I am in sitting in bed with a mess of crap all over my room to unpack.
Some things I am not ready to face though. I am refusing to take off the most comfortable merch sweatshirt I got from Needtobreathe’s merch manager, and I have not removed my mascara fully in over 6 days. At this point it just sort of crumbles off when it dries out enough and then it falls into my eyes and becomes rather painful. I’m a stubborn lady though and I’m just not ready to go there.
Still, I must accept on some level that vacation is over. The self-tanning lotion has all but rubbed off, and my blisters from walking around the city in new shoes (bad horrible idea) are healing nicely.
Last Thursday, I hustled around Tulsa getting stuff done before the trip. I had to pick up Dani at 4. I got to her apartment/work, got her keys and got to work terrorizing her cats loading up her stuff into my car. We got on the road and quickly tired of any music that wasn’t “Fancy” by Iggy Azalea.
In Springfield we stopped for dinner at Hebrews Coffee. We found it on Urbanspoon.  Sandwiches and coffee were exactly what we needed to get us the next three hours up the highway to St. Louis. I got a chicken caesar wrap and it was the best one I’ve ever had. I wanted a Hazelnut iced coffee to go too; they didn’t have hazelnut syrup but they make their own almond syrup in-house so I got that and it was the best thing I have ever tasted.
Selfie Time

Fun fact- a guy that worked there was wearing a needtobreathe shirt. This was the look on my face when he said he wasn’t going to the show the next night.

Back on the road… More “Fancy”
We got to #stl and went to our hotel in the Central West End/Forest Park neighborhood.  As it turns out this is right in a network of hospitals, medical centers, medical/pharmacy schools so it was cool to see all the apartments, medical institutes, and stuff nearby.

The neighborhoods were very quaint, well-lit, and cute so we felt comfortable walking around after midnight, seeing sites like these.


 
Of course, at night it looked more like this

 
(These people take much better pictures than I do on my phone)
There were a lot of cute patio cafes with cute white lights strung, but nothing struck our fancy to eat so we kept on walking.
We went back to the hotel, I took a shower, and went to bed; ready for a day of Needtobreathe when we woke up.
I’ll stop there.
ADD Moment Change of subject.
On my list of things to do this summer, I have that I want to do a juice cleanse. Well, what better time to do that than right after vacation (read: eating out all the time)?
Plus, all I wanted to eat on my trip was bananas anyway. How weird, right?
So, right when I got back into T-Town, I stopped at the grocery store and got stuff to make my last meal dinner and dessert for my parents and I. I noticed that Target had a particularly wonderful selection of produce. I freaking loaded that cart. Seriously I’ve never bought so much fruit in my life.
So, 3 day DIY juice cleanse starts tomorrow.
Why?
1. It’s summer
2. I love fruit
3. I’ll try anything once
4. I’m interested to see if it changes the way I feel. For instance, I think it will make me feel hungry 🙂
5. I have no major plans/events this week
6. I’m young and I can do weird crap like this
 
Other details, things to keep in mind…
If you look into juice cleanse you will see that the lemon-water-honey-cayenne is a popular one, but for me it’s just not feasible. I have pretty quick metabolism and running means I have to have calories or it would just be a 3 day-headache-y-jitter-y mess.
Then, there are the online juice cleanses where they send you each day’s juices to your door. Sounds awesome right? Well, it runs you about $10 a bottle. 6 juices a day means $60 on food a day times 3 days =$180. Mama no likey. Enter, the DIY Juice Cleanse!
Obviously this diet is not sustainable or healthy for any amount of time, but spending $180 on food for three days isn’t something I even did on vacation. Incorporating fruits and veggies is something I want to work on and $10 for juice isn’t the way I ever want to do it so I will also be working on a cost breakdown and see if this much fruit/veggies actually costs that much and if eating healthier really is more expensive. Pound for pound though, I got A LOT of food.
Granted, these companies juices are very good quality and have a lot of ingredients I, as a novice juicer will not be using. Parsley, ginger, etc. Also, I only got organic produce when it was available and priced reasonably.
I’ll do a breakdown of my juices and prep later but I basically have 5 juices that I will drink everyday along with as much water as I want. Then I have a 6th backup juice that is different every day for the times when I’m dying of starvation and want a Quiktrip Pretzel.
This was my Target Haul, we’ll see how this goes.

My dad laughed when I told him this was happening.
#longhairdontcare
Fun Fact: The cashier at Target asked me what fruit my mango was.