summer vacation

Vacation In Photos…

 

2010_AUG Vacation-52--Don’t Worry, be happy! I am posting only a SMALL selection of our trip to:

Sioux Falls, Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, Needles Highway, Keystone, Billings, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Salt Lake City, The Salt Falts, Rocky Mountain National Park, Boulder and whatever else we see before we head home. These are only the first few days!

 

2010_AUG Vacation-1= All vacations are better with Nutella! Sioux Falls Park, picnicing.

2010_AUG Vacation-12--See, our little black rain cloud did come with us on vacation after all!

2010_AUG Vacation-23-This is for YOU, dad!!

 2010_AUG Vacation-48--   Jesse James Memorial. First Train Robbery right here!

 2010_AUG Vacation-53--Wind Turbines. They have a lazy elegance, tumbling slowly and not quite synchronized.

2010_AUG Vacation-82- After breakfast every morning, we need to get rid of the evidence of our mass-murder of insects. A white car is a sorry sight in SD… There have been some gross and blood fronts of cars!

2010_AUG Vacation-97=Sioux Falls, South Dakota….A very lovely downtown water park area….would that the James in Richmond could realize even a portion of this feeling of community.

2010_AUG Vacation-72-Fog. Much, heavy pea fog, for hours and hours and hours.

  2010_AUG Vacation-162= Mitchell’s Corn Palace! Yes, the facade is decorated in CORN. And other grains. Yearly, they change out the corn and the theme of the art.

 2010_AUG Vacation-172--One of our constant companions, Timmy’s FAVORITE sign of all. (BTW. South Dakota? It’s under construction.)

2010_AUG Vacation-198-Walk the Dinosaur!

 2010_AUG Vacation-190-- Field of sunflowers.

2010_AUG Vacation-266-Badlands Park. WOW, is really the only word that I can find. Amazing, astonishing, incredible, unbelievable, unearthly, WOW.

2010_AUG Vacation-296-  The most common form of wildlife in the badlands. These little buggers are EVERYWHERE.

 

Oh, you wanted REAL animals?

 

Ok, how about HIM?

 

2010_AUG Vacation-396-Long Pronged Deer. Yes, I AM that close…there were a dozen grazing at an overlook….

So, there you have it. The first three days, in a few photos (mostly unedited, and what I DID do was on the laptop, and i am not thrilled with the screen)…

Hope you enjoyed!

Westward, ho!

After careful consideration and lots of juggling, requesting time off, moving vacation time around and juggling some more, we think we have established our summer adventure, set for a few weeks of late summer. (Exact dates not being smart to publish out in the WWW, as we don’t want the bad guys to know exactly when to come and strip the mansion of all its rubies and gold and all that… :)  –seriously, there is a site called Please Rob Me, that discusses the over-sharing issue…)

Over time, we have had in mind various treks across our somewhat spacious country, with the ultimate destination of Sisters, Oregon forming the route. Unfortunately, in order to do such a trip, we would require, first, prodigious amounts of money.

Next would be prodigious amounts of time, and the time would need to have coincided with a particular date. The reason for this? What, you’ve never HEARD of Sisters? Ok, most people haven’t; quilters have and know exactly the day we would need to descend. Alas, someone on Timmy’s job already claimed that week, and of course the prodigious sums of cash have yet to appear.

Plotting and thinking and breaking up the mega-vacation (we were originally operating on the ‘Well, we’d be SO CLOSE to….’ itinerary that I have for our eventual European jaunt. You know, since we are already in Paris, we can’t leave without going to England. Well, England is SO CLOSE to Ireland and we’ve come all this way….) We came up with a smaller in scale, but still a massive undertaking for two weeks.

We won’t make it to Sisters, or to Vancouver (BC or OR). Mt. St. Helens, McMinnville (where the Spruce Goose resides) will be another year. No Glacier National Park, no Salt Flats or St. Lake City, no Montana wedding (sorry, Jenn!) Next time we can visit Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse, The Field of Dreams, and on and on….

Places we WILL visit: Leaving Virginia, we plan to travel through Louisville, KY, St. Louis, MO, Kansas, to Denver, CO. There picking up Trail Ridge Road over the Rockies, through parts of Utah and onto Las Vegas (prodigious sums of money maybe??) From Vegas, we will head south to the Grand Canyon, and Flagstaff/Sedona, AZ. Then we will need to go back east, through New Mexico, Amarillo, TX, Dallas and home again, home again, jiggety jig.

Are you in one of those places? (Maybe we can meet for coffee or tea?) Where should we NOT MISS? What is your favorite quilt store? Tell me about the thing that tourists just don’t know about, but that should be experienced. How about a great restaurant that we can’t miss? Do tell, I am excited to visit!