Belle Isle

I finally got all of my pictures from England edited, resized, edited some more, and uploaded to Flickr. It only took me two months! I put up a LOT of pictures but it was honestly only a quarter of the pictures I took, which is quite an achievement. My pictures are like my babies; no matter how unremarkable they are I want everyone in the whole world to look at them and marvel. So it's pretty hard for me to exclude any.

Here is one of my favorites:
Aaron tried to convince me to cut out all of the "pictures of pretty houses" because he said they had nothing to do with our trip and didn't really tell a story. I told him to shove it, basically, because when I close my eyes and think "England" the image that almost invariably comes to mind is pretty white cottages with thatched roofs and flowers surrounded by impossible shades of green. I was so thrilled to find out that England really looks like that. So there. It's part of MY trip story at least.

England also looks like this:

(muddy, muddy music festival)

And this:

(off Brick Lane, London)

And this:

(Tate Modern, across the Thames)

I wouldn't want to live there maybe, but looking at the pictures sure makes me want to go back there immediately (or maybe when the weather warms up.)

Now I'm off to warm my hands around a hot mug of Earl Grey tea. Pippip. Cheerio.

(rest of pictures can be found here)

a better Monday

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly realized that my weekends in Fall were almost totally booked, but I hadn't made time for camping in the mountains, which is an autumn must for me. So I ditched work one day and spent Sunday and Monday here:

with these guys:

We saw more deer than I could count:

We also ran into a full-grown black bear in the woods in the dark on the trail back to our tent:
{image unavailable due to I was walking too fast in the opposite direction and forget to take out my camera}

For breakfast we had sausages slow-roasted over charcoal and Graham crackers with apple butter I had bought for a little roadside stand on the way out (and homemade apple cider from the same stand):

(Aaron is so proud of the new camp sporks we bought just for the occasion.)

We hiked, just a teensy bit:

And took our sweet time getting back into the city. We stopped at a diner on the highway that we always see and I've always wanted to try:

(the Double Cheeseburger was good, the milkshake was okay, but Jared tells me the buffalo burger is definitely NOT worth the money.)

It's almost Fall in Shenandoah. Probably next weekend will be breathtaking:

It's not like I'm having a particularly bad Monday right now. It's just that, how can you beat that?