Travel with Hunter and Sarah – Phoenix + Austin 2021
March 21, 2021
Hey friends! Every year, winter typically isn’t a very busy time for wedding and natural-light portrait photographers like Sarah and I. With most days barely peeking into the low 40’s, it’s not exactly the best time of year to get married outside! And with a COVID pandemic in full-swing, it wasn’t much surprise when Sarah and I looked at our winter and realized we only had three weddings on our calendar between Thanksgiving and April 1st. As we noticed a large 3-month gap in our calendar, we started to play with the idea of an extended trip to visit my brother Tanner and his fiancee Jess!
We spent several weeks playing with the idea before finally just throwing caution to the wind in mid-January, and booking two one-way tickets out to Phoenix! Since we knew there was a chance we’d be out there all the way until our friends’ wedding in March, and we had to pack for the warm desert AND wintery snowboarding in the same trip, we weren’t exactly traveling light…
But on the bright side, our travel from Charlottesville to Phoenix was nearly empty. For the first time ever, we witnessed parts of the Atlanta airport as empty as could be! But we arrived safely and got settled in with Tanner and Jess like we had lived there for years.
Our 3.5 weeks in Scottsdale were less like a fun and exciting vacation, and more like working-from-(not)-home while living with two awesome roommates! Most days, we worked from home alongside Tanner and Jess, enjoying the fact that if we wanted to take a midday walk or sit outside and work on some projects together, it was 70-degrees and sunny instead of 20-degrees and snowing like it was in Virginia most of February!
Although we did spend a fair bit of time working outside, if we’re being honest, I spent most of my time sharing a home office with Tanner. He just happened to have some extra screens and even an old desk lying around, so he hooked me UP with a killer work-station! I’m very used to working with multiple screens, so this was super helpful!
Meanwhile, Sarah and Jess worked on everything from wedding planning to home redecorating! While we were in town, they planned, purchased and executed a backyard furniture set, as well as redecorating the home office!
Of course, since Sarah is the one who remembers to take personal and travel photos, all the photos are of me and Tanner helping 🤦♂️
Although much of our month in Scottsdale involved working full-days from home, we did have a few fun highlights during our time in the Sun Valley. Like snapping a few photos in the desert before we went out for date night!
And of course, Sarah being her typical goofy self 🤣
We also went out to a really nice Valentine’s day meal with Tanner and Jess! There’s nothing like fancy Italian food and great company ❤
Throughout our time in Phoenix, we continued to run our business (almost) as usual. That included our Quarterly Gathering for all of the HSP Apprentices! February’s meeting was all about business essentials, as many of our Apprentices are establishing their photography businesses legitimately and legally for the first time!
We even got to connect with a handful of local couples for desert Engagement sessions!
And while we were scouting for those sessions, we got to capture a few new images for our Print Store!
But other than a handful of special occasions, COVID precautions kept us mostly cooking at home, or doing take-out. One exciting instance was Sarah’s first trip to In-N-Out Burger! It was pretty okay 🤷♂️
And of course, we got our fix of belly-scratching good times with Tanner and Jess’s resident good boi, Milo! We don’t feel like we’d be very responsible dog owners in our current stage of life (lots of travel, long days away from home for 12+ hours, and entire weekends/weeks away during our busy season). But we — and especially Sarah — loved getting to spend so much time cuddling and walking with their pup! We miss him so much now that we’re back in VA 😭
But the highlight of our time in Arizona was undoubtedly our time in Flagstaff, Arizona! It was so crazy to think that just two hours from Tanner and Jess’s house where it was 70-degrees and sunny every day, there was snow on the ground in what felt like a Pacific Northwest pine forest!
But even more impressive than the winter weather was Dean and Lisa Graziosi‘s Mountain Home that they let us stay in for a long weekend!
We shared an awesome weekend with Tanner and Jess, as well as their two closest friends (and quarantine-bubble companions) Jeremy and Teresa! If they look familiar, it’s because we captured some images of them as a couple back in 2019 during our first trip to Phoenix together!
Of course, this time, we got them in front of our cameras because they’re actually engaged!! Both Tanner and Jess AND Jeremy and Teresa had gotten engaged since our last trip to Phoenix, so we had a blast shooting a snowy engagement mini-session with both couples while we were in Flagstaff!
We capped off our time in the mountains with a trip to Arizona Snowbowl to hit the slopes with the squad!
I never thought that we’d one day fly out to the desert of Arizona in order to go snowboarding 😂
Overall, we had a very restful, productive, and fun 25 days in Arizona, and we miss these two goofballs like crazy already!
The 3.5 weeks flew by, and before we knew it, we were back in an airport, this time packed like we hadn’t seen since pre-COVID times 😨
But just one short flight later, we were back in Austin, TX! We wasted NO time in hitting our #1 favorite Austin classic: Torchy’s Tacos. The AirBnB we rented for our time in Austin was 500 yards from their South Congress location, and I think we ate there 4 or 5 times in just 6 days 😂
We also stayed next door to Meteor Coffee, a great little coffee shop with excellent lattes and even better biscottis! 😍
We also tried a handful of new recommendations, like Cold Cookie food truck and Home Slice Pizza…
As well as Bananarchy frozen banana treats, and we even stopped by the internet-famous El Arroyo!
In case you’re noticing a theme, yes. All we do is eat. We planned out 3-4 coffee shops, restaurants, food trucks, and/or dessert spots each day, then just spent the late-morning and early-afternoon figuring out what to do until our next meal 🤣 We’re truly foodies at heart.
But we did do more than just eat. We went Kayaking one afternoon on Lady Bird Lake (which is basically just a section of the Colorado River as it runs through Austin and very much not a lake in any way).
And we checked out some classic Austin murals!
After a few days of eating our way across Austin, we connected with my best friend (and best man in Sarah and I’s wedding), Caleb! If you read our “Top 12 Personal Moments of 2020” Blog, Caleb and his now-wife Linsey are the reason we were up in Boston last winter! Now, they were officially tying the knot, and we were there to celebrate them!
The long weekend started with Caleb’s bachelor party. It involved a nice dinner at one of Austin’s most highly-rated steakhouses with all the groomsmen telling stories and celebrating Caleb. But before we went out on the town, Caleb’s brother had booked us an hour at something called a “smash room”. I had never heard of it, but when we arrived, they showed us to a back room where an old-ish Chevy truck was waiting in a garage. Then, they suited us up, gave us a handful of sledgehammers and pickaxes, and told us to go to town. It was an hour of just smashing stuff with hammers and axes, which was — as I’m sure you can imagine — both exhausting and strangely satisfying. There have definitely been times over the past year where I would have loved to have a smash room at my disposal!
We also spent some time exploring downtown Austin with the wedding party, including a visit to the Texas state capitol, the largest US State Capitol, which is 100% on-brand for Texas.
The entire month-long trip culminated with Caleb and Linsey’s wedding. It’s not often that Sarah and I are wedding guests, and it was crazy to do normal wedding guests things like play cornhole with the groomsmen before we got dressed for photos, or take iPhone pics during the cocktail hour with each other!
It was an absolutely gorgeous affair – I wish we had more than a couple of iPhone shots to share with you!
Then, after a late night of celebrating the newlyweds, we were off the next morning, bound for home. We stopped by a little food truck to grab breakfast tacos on the way to the airport, only to find (after we had placed our order online) that it would be almost 45 minutes to get 3 tacos! We were doing the math in our heads, but decided that we could still return our rental car, check our bags, and make it to the gate in time. We apparently miscalculated, as we were running INTO the airport as they called our names over the “LAST CALL” speaker. We were the last ones on the plane, and they were apparently *seconds* from closing the boarding door. Of COURSE that’s what we almost miss our flight for 🙄.
After that ordeal, we were SO grateful to be on our way home! As much fun as we had, exactly 31 days after leaving Charlottesville, there was something so special about walking in our front door and being home again ♥
Thanks for traveling with us! Hopefully this is the last trip we take in crazy COVID times! We can’t wait to see where our cameras take us next 😊
—
Well, that’s it! Thanks for following along, and check out the links below if you want more adventures with Hunter and Sarah!