Nature, Family, Food.

If you were worried that I didn't eat campfire-melted nachos this weekend, well, worry no more.
Phil and I went camping this weekend with our dear old pals Albert & Vanessa in Bald Eagle State Park and boy did we love it.
We cooked & ate delicious food all weekend on both the campfire and a tiny stove our pal Krister made us from a beer can & a nickel (worked AMAZINGLY well). & managed to find time to hike, swim & kayak (despite lack of proof here) too. Growing up, my family went camping every single summer with 3-4 other families from our town. It was the thing I looked forward to most all year, and I still link most smells & sounds of camping (crackling campfires, crunching sticks, whining stove fuel, wet leaves, the sound of a tent unzipping first thing in the morning, kids shrieking from other campsites, water splashing) to those trips. Now that I'm far from home, we don't usually get to go with the group as much, though the parents still take a trip every summer. We realized that we could meet our friends (who live in Rochester, NY) exactly halfway, which would only be about 3 hours each and thus we started our own new tradition.

Another reason we decided to get outdoors is that today marks our 2 year wedding anniversary!
We got married by (as our high school teacher & wedding officiant Tony D put it:) "...the power invested in me by these great woods of northern new england..." and we like to make sure we find ourselves in nature around the time of our anniversary so we can remember the feel of being in those big awesome woods with everyone we loved on that day.
Hard to believe it's been 11 years together with Phil... & at the same time, hardly seems like any time at all. I'm still obsessed with the guy. Still smitten with everything he does, still completely confused as to what anyone else in the world does without him. Surely there is not one person as pure gold in the entire universe.