After shooting Andrea & Scott's wedding in November, Adrian and I headed up through North Carolina and visited the Great Smokey Mountains and then to Washington, DC for just a day and a half before heading home to Florida. Here are some photos chronicling our trip through the South!

I had never seen cotton fields before, nor had I seen how the leaves change color in the fall. It doesn't happen this drastically in Florida! Adrian shot these three...

I thought the leaves looked cool with the sun streaming through them.

I have a handsome husband!

Can you see the tiny little bee? I am normally too chicken to get near bugs like that, but I tossed my fears aside because I thought the flowers were lovely and I really wanted to try to get the shot! Hehe.

Adrian stopped the car at a lookout to go down and take a long exposure of this cool river. As you can see by the next photo, which he also shot, it was super cold, so I stayed in the car and get to enjoy the beautiful photograph from the warmth of my office!

Adrian spotted these icicles at Great Smokey Mountains National Park. So cool! Yet another thing I had never seen before. I love when he is able to show me new things on our journeys together.

In addition to the two photos above, Adrian took these as well when we got to DC. I was too cold and my feet hurt too much to schlep the big camera all over the city! However, I'm very glad that he did, as we now have some lovely artwork for our walls at home! :)

Hopefully we can return to the DC area soon, as a day was just not enough time. We saw many of the major sights - the Capitol building, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, The Vietnam Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Air/Space Smithsonian, but obviously we missed quite a bit. I would love to go back again soon.

The holiday season has officially started for our family, as tonight Adrian and I had my parents and my grandma over for dinner to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. We cooked a delicious dinner and finished up with some latkes, or potato pancakes, a traditional holiday treat. It was fun doing all the cooking this time - usually my parents are the ones who prepare all the holiday meals!

If you're looking for a little fun, holiday-related distraction, you should check out "Winterbells" which is a game that some friends of mine sent to me. Thanks guys. Now, since I am successfully, addicted, I am sharing it with all of you. The idea of the game is that you are a bunny.... an adorable little white bunny. You get to jump on bells and birdies and score lots of points. It's fun, I promise!

So, Happy Hanukkah to everyone! I hope your evening was as lovely as ours was!

We got married on the 4th of July so that we can always have fireworks on our anniversary. It was raining too much to go to the city show this year, but lots of people were launching their own. Having grown up in Arizona, a state that made fireworks illegal, it is strange to witness. Fireworks are constantly going off in every direction, creating a thick smoke haze. As you can see, some of them are quite impressive for DIY fireworks.







See the other fireworks being launched from two spots? On this small street there were three groups of people all launching their own fireworks

 





This was what it looked like a few hours earlier after the heavy rain. Unfortunately all this rain has been missing the lake that all of South Florida lives off of, so we're still in a bad drought. My feet were in about a foot of water in our driveway when taking this photo.

 

The trip up Highway 89 to Page was beautiful, though difficult to photograph. I saw this vista out the window and pulled over for some shots. I set the camera on a guard rail with the lens on a rock and took this timed photo.

 
I tried to frame the famous shot you see of Horseshoe Bend, but the evening sun was right in the lens and the 17mm focal length made it hard to avoid a bad lens flare. We're going back tomorrow after Antelope Slot Canyon as we head back down Highway 89 towards the scenic Highway 89A and the Vermillion Cliffs, as the lighting will be ideal and won't require HDR magic (at least not as much).

I forgot to post this yesterday, so here it is...

Karen Standin' on the Corner in Winslow, Arizona.

We were only a half hour away from Winslow while visiting Meteor Crater, so Karen insisted that we head there and visit the famous landmark from the Eagles' song "Take it Easy", even though it was pitch black outside. Don't miss my previous post or my Flickr photo set of our Western Vacation so far!

Here I am sitting on a ledge on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.

 
I got to introduce Karen to snow, which was a lot of fun. Karen absolutely loves the snow and still gets excited whenever she sees snow on the side of the road. Our "western vacation" was then paused for 5 days for my sister's wedding, which I'll post about when I get home.

 
Here you can see Karen chimping on the side of the road and our rental car (the horrible horrible horrible PT Cruiser, which was clearly designed by monkeys).

 
We climbed the "mountain" (yes, we're from Florida) a couple hundred feet and it qualified as Karen's first real rugged hike. These shots are wonderful and I look forward to posting them when I get back to Florida (and back to using Aperture on my Mac Pro and not a laptop!).

After a night in Prescott with my mom, we drove over Mingus Mountain to Jerome and then dinner at my old friend (and best man in our wedding) John's parents' place. We were delayed though because after helping Karen up from sitting in the snow, I helped pat the snow off and my wedding ring went flying! Unfortunately it wasn't virgin snow, so there was no way to tell where it went.

I kicked around the snow for a while and then as I was giving up, I kicked one last bit and Karen saw something... sure enough it was my ring! Lucky lucky!

Last night John came up and stayed with us at a hotel in Flagstaff and we went and played pool downtown until midnight, when the giant pinecone was lowered and everybody went wild. Today we tried to go to Snow Bowl but apparently they close the road when the ski resort is closed, which is rather annoying and disappointing (my tax dollars not at work). I wanted to show Karen more snow.

Afterwards we went to Meteor Crater. On the way we saw a sign for Walnut Canyon National Monument. Since we had time and we are going around looking at parks and what not, we checked it out and were quite amazed.

 
Still in love with snow after a week, Karen was tossing snowballs around and covering herself with snow.

 
I'll post photos from the monument after I get back to Arizona. It's an absolutely beautiful place that we just randomly decided to visit when we saw the sign on the way to Meteor Crater. We loved it. I don't know the last time I've been outside and really didn't hear anything at all.

Tomorrow we're going to Page, Arizona, and around the local monuments and parks. The next day we're taking 89A up to Zion National Park, with a stop at the Vermilion Cliffs National Park. I've taken Route 89 there before and that was amazing, so I can't wait to experience 89A past Page... the stretch of 89A near where I grew up through Sedona / Oak Creek is amazing and not to be missed, so I'm hoping for the same.

The next day we're going to Hoover Dam to drive on it before they close the road for security reasons, and then reaching our final destination at Paris, Las Vegas. I love that I get to do all this with Karen and be her guide to the west.

The Caribbean Princess at St. Thomas by Adrian Ziemkowski.

This is our ship at our first port of call, St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Eastern Caribbean.

We've had such a wonderful day today and the entire trip so far has been absolutely perfect!