Why? Might You Ask...

So this whole crazy trip was actually set into motion about 5 years ago in 2004 when I was living in Texas and I couldn’t afford to go home to Detroit for Thanksgiving and Molly invited me to spend Turkey day with her husband, Clifton and her parents. That was the first time I had ever had Fried Turkey, and Molly’s Sweet Potato Casserole is shockingly similar to my mom’s (both are equally amazing), so I was hooked.

I was back again the next year, which was the first year with little Jacob (well little for Jacob, who was never really little):

The next year I had to miss unfortunately because I couldn’t afford the money or the time off from grad school in Seattle, so my roommate Lisa and I hosted our own little Thanksgiving. Except that it wasn’t little and 19 people crammed into our apartment.

Although the party that Lisa and I hosted was awesome and fun, (albeit slightly dramatic), Molly and Clifton commissioned for me to come down for Thanksgiving in 2007 to paint incoming Maddie’s room in a Doctor Seuss theme, because I had painted Jacobs room, and you know how those Aggie’s are with their traditions:

But by the time I got to College Station, Molly and Clifton had accepted an offer to work for Texas A&M in Qatar, and they were planning on moving before the baby arrived, so instead of painting, I hung out with the fam and ate fried turkey (pretty good deal, I know). (And for whatever reason, pictures seem to have disappeared from this year...)

So in 2008, I found myself in Sweden, craving some fried turkey. What else was a girl supposed to do? Plus I hadn’t seen Molly in a year, and I was curious about the Middle East, so I started planning. Which brings us to now (or about 2 months before now, which isn’t really relevant, so please, let’s move on...)- Blake was interested in traveling there as well, and insisted on checking out Dubai while we were in the neighborhood. (Being a structural engineer and all, he sort of has a thing for big buildings... go figure.) This added quite a bit of cost to the trip, and I was pretty skeptical at first, because I just wanted to just visit the Griffin’s, but in the end I am super-duper glad we added Dubai to the itinerary.

And now that we have the motivation, we can move on to the actual trip!