April Coffee News

-Road Trip to Nashville
-Upcoming Events

Road Trip
Our April email newsletter is coming to you a bit later than we'd like because we just got back from a fun Spring Break road trip. With St. Paul schools on break last week, we decided to take the kids and head south to visit Cathy's brother and family in Nashville. We especially enjoyed seeing Spring arrive before our eyes as we headed south. Nashville is already lushly green with many trees in bloom and even a few leaves to see. It was definitely not as much fun heading north again yesterday and watching spring diminish and old snow piles start to return in the ditches. But at least we know that Spring is near.

During our short 5 day trip, there were many highlights -- traveling south (and then later north) along parts of the Mississippi River road, watching the cousins play hide and seek and tag, Blues and BBQ in downtown Nashville, family board games well past normal bedtime hours, visiting the Opry Land Hotel on a rainy day, stopping in Hannibal, MO Mark Twain's home town and Metropolis, IL to take pictures in front of the giant statue of SuperMan.

But one of the funnest moments came on Saturday when we all drove just north of Nashville to the Land Between the Lakes State Park for a picnic and hike in the woods. With the lovely spring rain the area had just received the forest creeks were rushing and bubbling along and were all too inviting to the small (and large) boys and girls in our group. Guillermo got to show our nephews how he used to dam up the small mountain creeks by his Honduran farm house with old logs, rocks and leaves. We watched as the water rose behind the mini-dams and then splashed in the pools of water that we created. We all got wet but it was great fun that we'll remember for a long time.

Upcoming Events
It's that time of year again, lots of fun events coming up -- Cathy will be at the World Jubilee Fair Trade sale again this Saturday, April 12 with a huge new supply of those crazy/amazing hand bags made out of potato chip bags by women in Honduras near the coffee farm. (There is one photo of the bags on our website in last year's newsletter section. We hope to post more later this week.) The spring Jubilee sale is from 9:00-4:00 at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in St. Paul at the corner of Snelling Ave and Highland Parkway and features wonderful fair trade items from all over the world.

The Living Green Expo is just around the corner too -- Stop by to see us and hundreds of other vendors, exhibits, workshops and more on May 3 or 4 at the State Fair Grounds.

Finally, we just learned that the Como Conservatory is hosting a special exhibit on the Birth of Coffee now through May 7. (Although the international photo exhibition is sponsored by Caribou Coffee -- it is OUR coffee that is for sale in the Como Safari gift shop! How cool is that!)