The Pioneer Woman Cooks!

2:00- Grateful for Grace and I leave the house. We leave our children, our husbands, our chickens…and we head off to Austin. It’s a two hour drive.

4:10- We arrive in Austin and decide to treat ourselves to some Chick-Fil-A. After all, this is a road trip and we deserve it.

4:30- We arrive at BookPeople in Austin and we are directed upstairs where we get our bracelets.

4:45- We walk next door to Anthropologie where we pretend shop and pick out all of the cutest stuff for ourselves, but buy nothing.

5:00- We head back to the bookstore, up the stairs and plant ourselves on the floor right in front of the podium.

Ok, this is where I must impress upon you my dedication. I am 44 years old, overweight and my neck hurts pretty much all of the time. But I sat on the floor. The FLOOR people. I sat on the hard, wooden floor for over two hours. This is big. I don’t even get on the floor to play with my babies. No, no. They can get up in a chair like a normal person.

5:30- The crowd is growing. Grateful and I discussed it and she thought there were around 300. Me, I thought it was more like 500.

7:00- Marlboro man and the punks arrive. Cameras start to flash all over the room. The excitement is in the air!

7:30- This is it. The moment we have been waiting for all our lives, or since 2:00. Whichever comes first.

It’s The Pioneer Woman!

Now, this is not a great picture of her. She is much cuter than this. You will see a better one later, but I had to show at least one of her standing there. You might not believe me otherwise.

8:00- She goes up more stairs to sign cookbooks….hundreds of books, maybe thousands. Some people had armloads of books. Grateful and I had one each.

8:15- Grateful stops PW‘s sister and starts a conversation. Grateful is like that. If she can’t stalk PW, she’ll stalk her family. It’s embarrassing. But not so embarrassing that I didn’t take a picture of it. Anything for you, my bloggy friends.

8:45- It’s finally our turn. We are next. Grateful was giddy and we were all ready with our books and our cameras and….what? PW has to go to the bathroom?! How dare she?!

One of her offspring took the empty chair. It’s a future Pioneer Woman right there.

8:50- PW returned from the privacy and quiet of the bathroom and was ready to get back to business.

She was lovely and kind and everything you’d expect her to be. I thought she seemed a little overwhelmed. It couldn’t be that she had already signed hundreds of cookbooks and would probably be signing them for the next three hours and it was probably 90° in there and that she was admittedly wearing Spanx that were too small and that she had been traveling all day.

I did give her one my Etsy scarves. She said it was pretty. So we’re friends now. I’ll show you the scarf I gave her in another post. It’s not important right now, so please stop asking.

We felt like the whole trip was worth it. Even though I won’t be able to move my legs for days and we missed the whole evening with our families, it was worth it.

But will you indulge me for one more second? I just have to tell you what we did on the way home.

Our drive took us through Johnson City (population 55,000). I don’t know if you’ve ever been through there at Christmastime, but their electric co-op is lit to the nines (is that how you write that phrase? It’s funny, I’ve never written it before). We couldn’t resist stopping to take a picture.

We had the bright idea that we could get out and snap a few for fun. The instant we got out, we were freezing. I mean shivering, chattering teeth, the works. I would have cried, but I am sure the tears would have frozen to my face. So we did a few poses because we are devoted to you, our blog friends. We just had to show you the spectacular lights.

I know we look a little bit scared in these pictures. But it was really, really cold! And we were waaay underdressed.

We did stop a woman that was walking past and asked her to take our picture together. She looked professional. She had a whoop-de-do camera on a tripod and looked like she was about to do some serious photography. She took several pictures for us, all while smoking her cigarette and acting like she had never seen a camera before. All of her pictures turned out like this…. (and yes, she was wearing hat, gloves, scarf and heavy coat. this was NOT the result of her shivering)

So we tried to take one of ourselves.

I know. We’re dorks. But we do have a good time. We giggled for the next 20 minutes about how freezing we were. It really doesn’t take much to entertain us.

At least I can show you how cool the trees look. It is worth a trip out there if you’re not too far away.

And the Pioneer Woman is worth the drive all the way to Austin. No matter how bad your legs hurt afterward. And her cookbook is fabulous! You must get one for yourself and all of your friends and future friends..

11:45- Back home and off to bed. What an adventure. I hope I can move tomorrow!

This will be reposted on my second blog.