Merry Christmas?!?

Every Christmas my Dad gives each of his children and their spouses an envelope with cash to buy something special for ourselves. We've been waiting until this summer to go on a fun weekend trip for our Christmas present. Last weekend we headed up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. We had soooooo much fun. We did a lot of hiking and found some really beautiful sights.

The cabin we stayed in was perfect. http://www.maplelodgecabins.com/cabins/

Our last day was our biggest hike. Using Tucker's Ravine trail, we hiked about 7 miles round trip - it took 6 hours.
Here we are, 2.4 miles into our hike. See way off into the distance, the top of the ravine on the right hand side of the picture? Yeah, that's our destination.
We crossed over the top of this waterfall to get to the top - I couldn't let myself look down.

Here we are at the top of the ravine. We were only 3/4 of a mile from Mount Washington. My calves were sore for 4 days!! For our next trip to the White Mountains, we're planning to summit Mt. Washington. :)

Happy Birthday, Chris!!

When Chris found out that my sister, Mandy, was going to bake him a cake for his birthday, he immediately texted her, "I want a kayak cake". You see, he's been doing a lot of camping and kayaking the past couple of weeks. So, since she's pretty awesome, she made him an awesome cake.

If...

If both of the batteries for our camera were not dead during the Fourth of July Weekend, you would see these pictures up on our blog:

• Chris' Great Aunt Emily's stuff scattered around the lawn in front of her enormous house across the street from the ocean in Connecticut. (She passed away several months back and we helped out during the estate sale).

• Chris and I snuggling on the beach as fireworks lit up the sky in front of us.

• Chris, surrounded by fearless seagulls, using Aunt Emily's golf club to whack golf balls into the calm ocean waters early in the morning.

• Me, wearing an amazingly tacky beach hat of Aunt Emily's, halfway into the ocean and begging Chris to join because it was 8 in the morning and already wicked hot.

• Chris and I standing in front of the looming skeleton of a dinosaur while visiting the Peabody Museum in Connecticut.

But of course, our batteries were dead that weekend, so I have nothing to share.