The Crazies Are Out!

Hey, just me again. By request, I am uploading a video of Rebes and Katherine doing a little jig about 10 minutes before Katherine had to leave to the airport to catch her plane back to Arizona. Enjoy.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Old Rag Hike with Katherine!

We had a visitor this weekend from Arizona. Katherine and I had a lot of fun hanging out and eating all the food Rebes cooked up. It was a VERY short visit (she flew in Friday afternoon and left Sunday afternoon). She was a good sport and awoke at 5:30 am EST (3:30 am Arizona time) Sunday morning to hike Old Rag mountain. It was very nice of Katherine to come out and visit us with the little time off she gets from work.

It was a beautiful day for being outside. Rebes is looking forward to her trip down to Texas and I will have to miss out, but look for pics upon her return.

Padre, Madre, y Hermanito en D.C.

Wow, what a week! My parents and little brother, Stephen, made their way to the East Coast and spent some time with us. It was interesting to see the people in church on Sunday do a double take when they saw me, then my Mom, and then my Dad. I could see the connection being made. We did not have much time and were not able to properly introduce them to many of our friends. However, we did manage to go out to dinner twice (Cheesecake Factory and Sweetwater Tavern), play the Wii twice (tennis, golf, bowling), see some sites in D.C. (Arlington Cemetery, U.S. Capitol, Botanical Garden, White House), visit the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum, do a little walking at Great Falls National Park, watch a movie, and eat hotdogs from a famous (alright, not so famous) downtown hotdog vendor. Like I said, what a week. We snapped lots of pics and thought you might like some of them, so here they are. You might also enjoy watching me pretend to know the words to this song as I sing along with Stephen and Rebes in the car. Hope everyone is having a great day!

An AMAZING hike!

Hey everyone, I did it. I finally got over the fear of putting my face on the internets (the network of tubes that connects us). Here we are at the saddle of Mount Timpanogos. The conditions for this hike were perfect - except for the hurricane level wind gusts at the top. Despite feeling like a human kite, we made it to the top. I failed to get a pic at the summit. Our hands and faces were numb and we were very busy trying to scarf our trail-mix and tuna-in-a-pouch before we headed back down. The smell of the various trees and flowers was incredible while hiking through the valley up and down the mountain. From the top, we could almost see the bottom of Emerald Lake, the result of the melting glacier/permanent ice flow. We were joined by ReBecca's brother, Aaron, and sister-in-law, Jenny. It was great to have such nice (and funny) people to talk to the whole way. I felt like I accomplished something after we reached the car (thanks to Elyse for letting us borrow her stylish little Lancer), that is until we found out that ReBecca's Grandma Ricks has been to the top of Timp twelve times. Wow. We have committed to doing it again and if anyone reading this has the urge, please let us know and we can correlate.

Some details of the hike:

• 7.5 miles to the summit (one way on the Timpooneke trail)
• 11,749 foot summit
• link to map of hike here (thanks to www.climb-utah.com)
  

Our trip to Utah was very brief, but Kevin and Melissa's wedding was wonderful (our main reason for going). Good luck to them in their journeys. Anyway, we will hopefully be good bloggers and make many more interesting posts in the near future.


For those interested, you can see a few pics of the quick trip we made to Utah for Melissa and Kevin's wedding here.