Great explorers

I failed a little at doing a complete blog series on our trip to California, but I couldn't let these shots go to waste. C has had a pair of binoculars since Madison which she alternates between loving and ignoring. They made the cut to come down to CA with us, and were prompted adopted by M when Jean was kind enough to let C use her real ones.

However, nothing they found on the hills was nearly as exciting as the garbage truck :o)

Back in PC

And we're back! Book ended by two very successful car trips (13 hours each way) we had a fantastic week in CA with so much of this.

More to come later in the week.

Road trip survivors

We made it home! 3 days, 1,000 plus miles, lots of rain, 2 winter storm warnings, and a couple of hour delay while I80 was shut down, we're home after Thanksgiving in Chicago. And the craziest part? It was kinda fun :o)

We set up the car so that I could sit in back to keep the girls entertained, allowing for some pictures of activities:

as well as some epic nap shots

We managed to take a reasonable number of breaks. Some at cool sculpture gardens right off the highway (thank you Amy for the tip)

...and some in walmart when it was pouring rain outside and we didn't have any better options.

We even got to play on a really big boot!

All and all, WAY better than anticipated. We're all pretty happy to be back in park city though, even if there was a foot of snow to deal with in the driveway :)

Ode to the Moby

This past weekend I had the immense pleasure of spending some time with the newest of the Provan clan, Baby R...

..and it was four days of snuggily snoozy awesome.

So hard not to get lost on memory lane though. It seems like just yesterday my mom flew in on c's due date and since c had no interest in making her appearance we had plenty of time to go through mom's suitcase and stare  bewildered at the three yards of fabric that she pulled out that apparently was supposed to be a baby carrier. We were both very confused.

A couple of weeks later Rachel showed up, and got me straightened out and the moby soon became c's favorite place to nap.

11/2011

Fast forward a couple years and m followed right along in the pattern.

6/2014

So this weekend we didn't waste much time before pulling out our old friend again. Baby r loved it.

8/2016

But more importantly, so did Caroline

It was so fun being on the "big sister" side of the story this time. Three mamas and five babies later, the moby is still awesome.

Adventures in Travel

While we wait for the pictures from a fantastic trip back east to trickle in, let me tell you about the time we had getting back west...

Tuesday afternoon we took off right after rest. Swung by my grandma's house to visit and be impressed as we always are by her gardens:

We then took back back back roads to the Bighamton airport (so much so that it wasn't until he saw the water tower that Alex believed me we were even heading in the direction-ally right direction).

BHG is without a doubt the smallest airport I've ever seen in the US. The flight that we were on was quite literally the only flight of the afternoon. Security wasn't even open when we got there since we were more than an hour early. We checked in without a problem, but then pretty quickly after found out the plane we needed was delayed out of DTW. There weren't really any options since again, only flight of the afternoon, so we decided to proceed as scheduled and hope for the best.

We went through security and when I picked up my backpack I noticed two sheet pizzas came through after me. Turns out BHG felt bad about the delay and the one restaurant in the airport was closed for remodeling, so they ordered the passengers pizza. It was awesome.

So was the play area stocked with toys and books, and a note that said if you weren't done with the book when the plane boarded you were welcome to take it with you, courtesy of the local library.

By the time we got to DTW our connection had of course left, so it was off to a hotel for the night. The girls were remarkably good sports about eating the "emergency" PB&Js we had packed for dinner.

After a quick bath it was time for books which quickly turned into this

followed by this

Fast forward to the this morning... We went from this

to this

in about 20 minutes. To delta's credit they did get us seats on the first available, and after some doubt the night before when on the phone with customer service ("No, it is not ok to put my two year old in a row by herself. She's two."), we ever had a whole row.

The girls were remarkably good on the plane, and even transferred back to the car reasonably well.

The rest of the day has been a little interesting and it was early to be tonight, but we expected that. I'll take the screaming and flailing that happened in the back yard over bubbles a couple of hours after being home over screaming and flailing on an airplane any day of the week :o)

Arches

Last blog post from the Moab trip I promise :o) Today - the best of the arches.

Delicate Arch

Delicate Arch from within a nameless arch a bit up the trail

Landscape arch

Private arch

Double O arch

Pine Tree arch

And Double arch

Notice Alex trudging away from the camera - he was pretty done with me pausing to take pictures by this point :o)

Three sisters

Well technically they're called the three gossips, but my favorite formation by far within Arches national park were these guys:

The pictures don't do a great job of capturing just how big they were, yet you can still very clearly see where they get their name.

The sky in these shots also gives you a feel for the conditions we were hiking in on the second day...

needless to say the camera stayed safe in the bag during most of the hike :o)

Ute rock art

So much of the west is so new - it's very cool to get to see some very old up close. Very near the trail head for delicate arch we stumbled upon this...

In which Sarah wishes she knew more about photography...

So I'm starting to go through my pictures from Moab. There are the ones that I got lucky

And then there are a large batch where I wish I knew how to work my camera.  Like how to change aperture so I have near focus instead of far

Or far instead of near

Luckily, the landscape is amazing enough that you can still capture some neat things.

Like a batch of color in the very brown landscape hiding in the shade

or in front of a rock that seems too cool to be bothered by gravity.

First of the good shots

After a fantastic weekend in Chicago (more on that to come), I came home to the hardware needed to both transfer the pictures off of my camera and start to restore the files from the backup of the dead PC. While those things are humming, here's the first of the good pictures of moab to hold you over :o)