Enduring Love

So we are finally back home in Texas, and I am happy to be home! My state has delivered wide open skies, lush green landscapes that go for miles, and even a massive Texas thunderstorm (14 inches in 3 hours to be exact). My best friend’s wedding is tomorrow, and was meant to be set on a beautiful little platform over the Guadalupe River in Gruene, TX. The Guadalupe is a lazy river, popular in summer with ‘locals’ from across the state who love to lay back in an inner tube with an ice cold beer and float down the river.



Fourteen inches of rain in three hours equates to some pretty nasty flash floods. As I sit on the balcony of our hotel overlooking the river and intended wedding site, I am listening to raging rapids. It’s pleasant, as moving water always is, but it’s not supposed to be something I can hear right now. I am also looking directly at three buses used to transport tubers from one end of the river to the other submerged and partially submerged right behind the wedding altar – at least what used to be the altar – that’s somewhere downstream now.


But all is not lost, and love will prevail. An understandably upset bride to be and her groom took a walk last night through the inches deep mud along their wedding site, and devised a plan. I love this couple. They are truly one another’s complement. Two free spirits who love life and who love each other. I’ve never been a part of a wedding that so captured the personalities of the bride and groom individually, and the couple collectively.


Both are outdoor enthusiasts. They own a river guiding business called Live Love Paddle. They will commit their lives to each other on the banks of one of the most scenic rivers in Texas on a summer morning, surrounded by their friends and family who can’t help but love them. They will feed their guests breakfast tacos, bloody marys, and mimosas in true Texas style – and exploiting a shared love of that perfect combination of fresh and fiery flavours called salsa! To embrace the love of living, they had arranged a river float for their guests, leaving no detail unattended. Mother Nature has thrown a little kink in the works, the river is closed and the wedding plans have had to change slightly, but a wedding is cause for celebration, and nothing can stop celebrating the love these two share and the love we all feel for the two of them!


This post is obviously more about love than food, but rest assured, I have plenty to say on that topic as well, and more to come! But for right now – congratulations Casey and Beverley – I love you both! And may the love you feel for each other be forever hotter than fire roasted habanero salsa!