A pause along my journey – Architect Vacation at Red Wing Roots Music Festival

As I pause along my journey I was spending some time reflecting this morning before heading out to Red Wing Roots Music Festival.

This is my favorite weekend of the year, Red Wing Roots Music Festival 2019. I am unplugging for a few days and enjoying incredible music and friends at Natural Chimney. It is rare you can take a vacation and be surrounded by so many friends – but that is what Red Wing Roots Music Festival has become for me. It is an oasis of good wrapped up in a music festival located in one of the most beautiful corners on earth. If you have not attended you should plan to be there this year if there are any day tickets left and certainly next year get your tickets early.

As I stress about taking this pause, knowing I have work that needs to be finished, I was thinking how fortunate I am to be able to take this time away from the office. I am grateful for the incredible team at GG that allows me such flexibility of schedule. Thank you Deborah, James, Paul, and Ray for working on my projects while I am relaxing. I was also thinking about how fortunate I am to have a lot of work that is keeping me busy allowing me the opportunity to stress about getting things done. It was not long ago we had virtually no projects and I was new to the valley. I am thankful for clients that trust us to share their dreams as we work through the process of balancing design goals with budget and schedule. I am thankful to have a career doing work that I love, work that makes life better for my clients and community, and work that can make the future brighter. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do what I love as a career and to be able to take breaks from it. Also thank you (Mike, Michael, Jeremiah, and Jeremy) for giving me the opportunity to design this beautiful stage and sit in front of it hearing beautiful music. (Thanks to James and Deborah for helping figure out how to build the vision).

I am also thinking about how much life has changed in the last few years. I thought I had things figured out and then I was smacked in the head with unexpected and unbelievable change. Now life is settling down and I am learning to trust that good will come if I wait. I am so fortunate to have two beautiful daughters that enjoy spending time with me. They are probably more excited about this weekend than I am – one for the adventure and the other for the music. However, they both, teenagers, still want to be with this old man. It has quickly become a family tradition to spend the weekend at this festival and they are already talking about next year’s plans before we arrive this year. We have also shared our camp space with the Sachs’ family which has become part of my family. Getting to live with them for the weekend is a gift!