tourist | This Handmade Circus

I am hooked. Setting iChoose goals has changed me. Well, maybe its made me feel so much more accomplished and encouraged. I had a great time completing my October iChoose goals (you can read about them here and a few more posts are still to come) and I am really excited to get started on November’s goals.

So this month here are my plans:

Turn 25
New do: Get a haircut
Christmas craft
#TLHwalk30
Scrapbook 15
Be a tourist

My birthday is Monday, Nov 4th and I turn 25. I plan on enjoying this age and really soaking it in. I need a haircut, it will be a little birthday present to myself. I only get one every 6 months and I go to a salon that makes me feel like im not cool enough to be there but they let me in the club for some reason; it is such a treat. I need to start working on Christmas gifts! So my plan is to have a ton of them done in November so December is an enjoyable time. Last month I wanted to keep up with our #hoopersonfoot walks and have fallen even more in love with them, so Terrell and I want to challenge ourselves to go for a walk everyday in November and document it with #TLHwalk30. Im taking the Lifted class from Studio Calico and I want to complete at least 15 of the scrapbook and Project Life layout/challenges from the class this month. Last, I want to a be a tourist! We are spending Thanksgiving with our sweet, sweet friends in NYC. Ive been to that city a ton of times, but you can never finish being a tourist there, that’s part of its magic.

So jump on board and follow along with this months iChoose! What are your November goals?!

This post is a part of the National Blog Posting Month Challenge. You can see a list of more blogs participating in this challenge here and see a full list of my posts here.

Well hello there! This blog is the most difficult part of our trip-I’m pretty sure.

1. Because it is really hard to find WiFi and a few hours to write, edit, etc.

2. Because we travel so much so fast that we literally can get behind 2 posts in just 1 day.

3. I’m SOOO excited about certain places and where we are at that time that it is hard to make myself go backwards to keep everything in order!

Even though this post is weeks old, I’ll tell you where we are: Philly! We’ll, technically Barnes & Noble, somewhere in New Jersey. But the weather is yucky and we did the Philly highlights earlier this morning, so we decided to spend some time reading and blogging before we head into New York!! I am so pumped! We are going to camp outside the city and ride a bus in super early and spend the whole day there! If you want to follow us tomorrow during the day you can see us on Facebook, Instragram: TheHoopers, or Twitter: MrsLaurenHooper. Yeah! I promise if you stick with us we will be updating the blog in a more rapid pace since our trip is coming to an end in 10 days! Woah…

Well, onto the Deep South again. After leaving a fabulous week of camp, we began our very long journey through Texas, but we stopped for a morning of sight-seeing in Baton Rouge. This city was such an easy city for tourists, literally everything is on one street, is walkable and parking is 2$. It just doesn’t get better than that! We parked on the main street and turned around and here was this little guy.

That is the USS KIDD, pretty cool! You could walk along side it and take some sweet pics, but it cost to tour it and on our budget and time line touring every attraction is just not possible or smart. So this one didn’t make the cut, but Baton Rouge has a lot of awesome free places to tour. We saw the old capital building and the new one, which is the tallest capital in the US.

The capital had some really cool Louisiana History we never knew about and had some really awesome displays that we didn’t expect.

These are some pretty fantastic pictures Terrell snapped with his Disposable Camera App that has different light filters but doesn’t let you see the pictures until you’ve taken 24 photos, just like the original disposable.

This is the roof top of the spiral staircase in the capital.

I also decided that when I become Queen of a city, I will ride Lions everywhere I go.

Sometimes I take pictures of really cool stuff and immediately forget what it is. But I think that this is the wedding dress worn by one of the mayor’s wives.

We spent our beautiful morning strolling down the river and in 2 or 3 blocks we saw the old post office, the capitals, the USS Kidd, the governor’s house and lots of statues. As we were looking for somewhere to eat a very nice man stopped and suggested the Capital Grille, which was across from the river so we tried it, since we ALWAYS take the locals suggestions, and it was fabulous! Baton Rouge was a very quick, short trip and all we spent was about 20$ on lunch and 2$ on parking.

There were some museums that looked super interesting that I think would be worth spending a day in if you have more time/funds that were right on the river. If you go to them let us know how they are!