I have a lot of updating to do, but since I'm neurotic, I feel that I can't post anything until I finish the wedding-related updates. So, here goes:
Our first destination was Yosemite National Park. We had a campsite outside of the park itself, so after a looong drive, we set up camp and then drove into the park. The campground advertised itself as being 10 minutes from Yosemit
e, and it was. Ten minutes from the entrance, that is. It's a full hour from Yosemite Valley, which is where all the good stuff is. It was getting dark when we finally arrived in the valley, so we didn't have time to do anything but drive around. I'd never been there before, and I was completely in awe. It's a magical, beautiful place. The word "awesome" is overused these days, but that's really what Yosemite is: awesome. We had two full days in the park, so we got in some great hikes and saw a lot of the key sights like Glacier Point, Bridal Veil and Yosemite Falls, and we took a long, somewhat arduous hike to see Vernal Falls by way of the straight-out-of-Tolkien Mist Trail. We also had a romantic dinner at the Awahanee Hotel, the ritzy and historic hotel in the center of the valley, courtesy of James' Uncle John. Our last day in Yosemite was only a partial day as we were driving out of the park, but we went a northerly route so we got to see parts of the park we hadn't seen before, in particular the Tuolomne Meadows. It was absolutely gorgeous up there, and I'm so glad that our GPS directed to go that way! We would have missed it completely otherwise.
The next day, we drove to Salt Lake City, and it took all day. Nevada is a very wide state! And, by the way, incredibly boring. There's only so much flat deserty nothingness that a girl can stand to look at! Luckily we had books to read aloud to each other to keep us entertained (we read books to each other all the way across the country). We stayed in the Little America Hotel,
which was the nicest hotel either of us had been in up to that point. Our room was decorated like a posh little French chateau. The next day we got room service for breakfast, which was the first time for both of us. It was fun! We biked around Salt Lake a little bit, got a tour of the conference center which is open to the public, and looked at the temple, which is not. There were a lot of brides outside the temple - they do multiple weddings at once! We also drove out to the Great Salt Lake and waded in a little. It was smelly but a neat experience. That night we stayed in the Grand American hotel, which is even fancier than the Little America.
The next day was Sunday, so that marks the first week of our honeymoon. We got a late start and drove all day to Yellowstone National Park. We stopped in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for dinner. It's a touristy cowboy town - it felt very Wild West with wooden sidewalks and Old-West-style buildings. We passed through the Grand Tetons National Park around sunset, and it was gorgeous. I wish we could've spent more time there.
Yellowstone, in case you've never been there, is huge. HUGE. Once we got it the park, we still had to drive a couple of hours to get to our campsite. And it's creepy, there was no one else on the road and we could smell smoke (from campfires we later found out, but how could we know it wasn't a wildfire?) and it's very very very remote. No cell reception, no sign of human anything besides the road for the longest time. Weird. We arrived at our campsite around midnight and had the difficult task of setting up camp in the dark while trying not to wake up our neighbors. Oh, and it was stinking cold, too! We had a miserable night's sleep because we could only partially fill our air mattress before the pump gave out (we forgot to charge it in Salt Lake), so we had to sleep on a nauseatingly squishy bed. And it was freezing! I spent the whole night shivering despite the fact that I was bundled up from head to toe.
The next day we drove all day to Omaha, and it rained the whole way. We stayed with James' aunt, Anne, and had dinner with her and her children Heather and Art and their spouses and Art's baby son. Anne has a hot tub on her back porch, so after everyone left, Anne set it up for us. We relaxed in the hot tub and watched fireworks on the horizon before going to bed. The next day was the Fourth of Julyso everyone gathered at Heather's house for a barbeque lunch. We went to the Omaha zoo that afternoon, and watched fireworks over a river. It was nice to be able to spend the holiday with family, especially since Heather's husband and Art and his wife didn't make it to the wedding.
The next day (Sunday, two weeks of honeymoon!), our plan was to drive straight from Omaha to Chicago, but over the course of the
day James came down with some sort of nasty cold, so we had to stop once we reached Illinois. We found a hotel, and I called Nawojka to let her know we were delayed, since we were staying with them. We got James some OJ and cold medicine and he went to bed around 7pm and didn't wake up until 9 the next morning. He was still feeling sick when he woke up, but gradually improved during the course of the day. We made it to Chicago and reunited with Seth and Nawojka (actually, James was meeting them for the first time), and it was wonderful to see them. They have a hip little apartment that is totally a reflection of Nawojka's fabulous sense of style. After a bit of catching up, James and I went to the Sears Tower, where we stood in line for over two hours in order to be at the top for less than ten minutes. It's the highest building in the Western Hemisphere, and it's really really high. The building swayed every so slightly, and I felt woozy and strange up there. We stood out on the newly-opened clear balconies and could see all the way to the sidewalk! That was crazy - even though I was telling myself it was perfectly safe, my body was freaking out and trembling and I had to hold onto James the whole time we stood out there. When we got back to the apartment, Nawojka had whipped up a gourmet dinner for us, and we had a lovely evening.
The next morning, Nawojka made delicious crepes for breakfast, and James and I went back into the city for more exploring. We took the architecture boat tour and walked around in Grant Park. We just missed getting into the art museum, which was disappointing, but we met up with Seth and Nawojka in the John Hancock Tower's "Signature Lounge" for drinks on one of the top floors. We had a spectacular view of the city - it was a lot fun! We had dinner at a favorite burger place of theirs, and just hung out with them in their apartment afterwards.
The next day we drove to Laporte, to my parents' vacation home in the woods. It was strange to be back to somewhere so familiar after our long adventure across the country! Our visit with my parents was brief, but a relaxing stop before our final push to Massachusetts. We only had one full day in Laporte, and then we were off again Saturday morning. Our final stop was our house in Methuen, and it was strange to be back. After all, we'd only lived in that house for five days before we left for our wedding. And now we were "home" to a place that wasn't really home. But it was great to be back, to stop living out of a car, to sleep in our own bed!
And the next day, we were getting ready to go back to work, after the most amazing three week vacation. And it wasn't easy.
The day after the wedding, we had breakfast at the hotel. It was really nice to see some of the 
wedding guests and bridal party one more time! Afterwards, James and I drove back to my parents' house, where we spent a frenzied half hour getting ready for our flight to California. It was a bit crazy: the kitchen was full of flowers (yipes, we forgot to give the centerpieces away?! Was that my responsibility? I totally forgot about that tradition, I feel my parents should have reminded me.. or just taken care of it), the dining room was piled up with some wedding gifts (my dad insisted on parading us through to see them all, when we had about a million other things to do to get ready to go!) and everyone was feeling a little tired and frazzled. But after some pictures and some hasty goodbyes, my dad and my (new!) father-in-law drove us to the airport. Our flight out to Bakersfield, CA was uneventful. We wore our "Just Married" tee shirts, which was really cute, and we got several congratulations along the way.
wedding guests and bridal party one more time! Afterwards, James and I drove back to my parents' house, where we spent a frenzied half hour getting ready for our flight to California. It was a bit crazy: the kitchen was full of flowers (yipes, we forgot to give the centerpieces away?! Was that my responsibility? I totally forgot about that tradition, I feel my parents should have reminded me.. or just taken care of it), the dining room was piled up with some wedding gifts (my dad insisted on parading us through to see them all, when we had about a million other things to do to get ready to go!) and everyone was feeling a little tired and frazzled. But after some pictures and some hasty goodbyes, my dad and my (new!) father-in-law drove us to the airport. Our flight out to Bakersfield, CA was uneventful. We wore our "Just Married" tee shirts, which was really cute, and we got several congratulations along the way.Once in Bakersfield, we rented a car and drove up to James' hometown of Porterville. We stopped in at his parents' house, even though they weren't back from NJ yet, and found that his mom had left us a picnic basket full of camping goodies on the dining room table! It was so sweet. We didn't stay overnight in their house though -we got a hotel room! The next day, we had the seemingly impossible task of packing up our car (which we'd left at his parents' place when we flew out East back in April) with all the camping stuff we had stashed in their garage back in April PLUS all of the stuff we brought with us on the flight the day before. But somehow, we did it! And we were off on our honeymoon :D First, we dropped our rental car off on the way, so our first half hour of driving was actually in different cars. Once that was done, then we were off on our honeymoon!
Our first destination was Yosemite National Park. We had a campsite outside of the park itself, so after a looong drive, we set up camp and then drove into the park. The campground advertised itself as being 10 minutes from Yosemit
e, and it was. Ten minutes from the entrance, that is. It's a full hour from Yosemite Valley, which is where all the good stuff is. It was getting dark when we finally arrived in the valley, so we didn't have time to do anything but drive around. I'd never been there before, and I was completely in awe. It's a magical, beautiful place. The word "awesome" is overused these days, but that's really what Yosemite is: awesome. We had two full days in the park, so we got in some great hikes and saw a lot of the key sights like Glacier Point, Bridal Veil and Yosemite Falls, and we took a long, somewhat arduous hike to see Vernal Falls by way of the straight-out-of-Tolkien Mist Trail. We also had a romantic dinner at the Awahanee Hotel, the ritzy and historic hotel in the center of the valley, courtesy of James' Uncle John. Our last day in Yosemite was only a partial day as we were driving out of the park, but we went a northerly route so we got to see parts of the park we hadn't seen before, in particular the Tuolomne Meadows. It was absolutely gorgeous up there, and I'm so glad that our GPS directed to go that way! We would have missed it completely otherwise.After we left the park, we had an expensive and disappointing lunch at a diner that someone at work had highly recommended. We stopped at Mono Lake, which was pretty anticlimactic and smelly. But it was neat to see it, anyway. Then we drove to Lake Tahoe, which took the whole afternoon. We got a hotel and went on a bike ride to the lake, which was pretty but once you see the lake, there's not much else to do. We had dinner at Fire & Ice, and James made his second dish incredibly spicy but he still insisted on eating it. He had a miserably upset stomach afterwards so we just went back to the hotel and went to bed.
The next day, we drove to Salt Lake City, and it took all day. Nevada is a very wide state! And, by the way, incredibly boring. There's only so much flat deserty nothingness that a girl can stand to look at! Luckily we had books to read aloud to each other to keep us entertained (we read books to each other all the way across the country). We stayed in the Little America Hotel,
which was the nicest hotel either of us had been in up to that point. Our room was decorated like a posh little French chateau. The next day we got room service for breakfast, which was the first time for both of us. It was fun! We biked around Salt Lake a little bit, got a tour of the conference center which is open to the public, and looked at the temple, which is not. There were a lot of brides outside the temple - they do multiple weddings at once! We also drove out to the Great Salt Lake and waded in a little. It was smelly but a neat experience. That night we stayed in the Grand American hotel, which is even fancier than the Little America. The next day was Sunday, so that marks the first week of our honeymoon. We got a late start and drove all day to Yellowstone National Park. We stopped in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for dinner. It's a touristy cowboy town - it felt very Wild West with wooden sidewalks and Old-West-style buildings. We passed through the Grand Tetons National Park around sunset, and it was gorgeous. I wish we could've spent more time there.
Yellowstone, in case you've never been there, is huge. HUGE. Once we got it the park, we still had to drive a couple of hours to get to our campsite. And it's creepy, there was no one else on the road and we could smell smoke (from campfires we later found out, but how could we know it wasn't a wildfire?) and it's very very very remote. No cell reception, no sign of human anything besides the road for the longest time. Weird. We arrived at our campsite around midnight and had the difficult task of setting up camp in the dark while trying not to wake up our neighbors. Oh, and it was stinking cold, too! We had a miserable night's sleep because we could only partially fill our air mattress before the pump gave out (we forgot to charge it in Salt Lake), so we had to sleep on a nauseatingly squishy bed. And it was freezing! I spent the whole night shivering despite the fact that I was bundled up from head to toe.
Our days in Yellowstone we spent seeing lots of geothermal features like mudpots and fumeroles and hot springs. We saw Old Faithful erupt and hiked around to see lots of geisers. We saw Morning Glory (which was awesome) and Mammoth Hotsprings (which were a bit disappointing) and the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone (which neither of us knew about beforehand, but it's a spectacular sight that's not to be missed). And we saw lots of buffalo and elk! We got stuck in plenty of Yellowstone traffic jams caused by wild animals either on the side of the road, or crossing the road, or within viewing distance from the road. Basically, any time an animal appeared, the traffic screeched to a halt and everyone whipped out their cameras. We'd scheduled four nights in Yellowstone, but after two nights we were ready to go. We weren't sleeping well (although we did manage to fully inflate our bed), and the mosquitos were ridiculous, swarming us at our campsite all day long, not just at dusk like civilized mosquitos. And when I say "swarm," I mean "clouds of fierce, monstrous mosquitos hovering nearby and stabbing any bit of exposed flesh." Dousing ourselves in bug spray didn't really discourage the mosquitos, but it did make the fact that we couldn't shower much more pleasant. So after two nights, we cried Uncle, packed up, and took off. We did spend that day seeing more sights before we left the park.
Once we left the central part of Yellowstone, where all the sights are, we had a long drive to reach the edge of the park. But then we were still in the middle of nowhere, and it took another couple of hours to reach any civilization beyond the random ranch or tiny cluster of houses. We stayed overnight in Cody, WY, which was in our US/Canada edition of "10,000 places to see before you die." Our motel room was actually a little log cabin, which was pretty neat, and it was very nice inside! The next day we saw the Trail Village, which is a collection of authenic Wild West buildings from around Wyoming and South Dakota, including a salloon with bullet holes in the door! We drove all day and were going to stop in a little town called Moorcroft, but we got there at 6pm and the sun was still shining so we decided to keep on driving to Devil's Tower instead of waiting until the next day as we'd originally planned. Plus, Moorcroft turned out to be a little nothing town with only sketchy motels. So we drove to Devil's Tower, which was really neat, if a bit surreal. It's not an old volcano, which is what it looks like - it was a plug of magma that was level with the surrounding ground, until the sedementary rock around it wore away, so now it's this huge dark rock tower climbing out of the rolling Wyoming plains.
The next day we saw Mount Rushmore and got pounded by an intense rainstorm that included mothball-sized hail. We were soaked, but we were still happy to be there. We drove through the Badlands, which turned out to be on a road that runs parallel to the highway we were going to take
anyway. It was nice to be able to add another national park to our collection! We saw prairie dogs, too :) That night, we drove until 10pm, then stopped at the first town we could find to get a motel room. There were only two motels in the town, one sketchier than the other, so we got a room in the less sketchy motel. When we went to our room, #25, we found a toothless drunk man already in there! His key to room #26 had unlocked our room, so he thought it was his. The room that was supposed to be his was a gross smoking room, and that was the only other open room, so we couldn't stay there. The rooms looked crummy and it seemed that they hadn't seen an update since the 1970s, so I didn't mind that we had get our money back and keep driving. We drove another half hour and found a clean and modern Holiday Inn Express with brand new mattresses and it was divine.
The next day we saw Mount Rushmore and got pounded by an intense rainstorm that included mothball-sized hail. We were soaked, but we were still happy to be there. We drove through the Badlands, which turned out to be on a road that runs parallel to the highway we were going to take
anyway. It was nice to be able to add another national park to our collection! We saw prairie dogs, too :) That night, we drove until 10pm, then stopped at the first town we could find to get a motel room. There were only two motels in the town, one sketchier than the other, so we got a room in the less sketchy motel. When we went to our room, #25, we found a toothless drunk man already in there! His key to room #26 had unlocked our room, so he thought it was his. The room that was supposed to be his was a gross smoking room, and that was the only other open room, so we couldn't stay there. The rooms looked crummy and it seemed that they hadn't seen an update since the 1970s, so I didn't mind that we had get our money back and keep driving. We drove another half hour and found a clean and modern Holiday Inn Express with brand new mattresses and it was divine. The next day we drove all day to Omaha, and it rained the whole way. We stayed with James' aunt, Anne, and had dinner with her and her children Heather and Art and their spouses and Art's baby son. Anne has a hot tub on her back porch, so after everyone left, Anne set it up for us. We relaxed in the hot tub and watched fireworks on the horizon before going to bed. The next day was the Fourth of Julyso everyone gathered at Heather's house for a barbeque lunch. We went to the Omaha zoo that afternoon, and watched fireworks over a river. It was nice to be able to spend the holiday with family, especially since Heather's husband and Art and his wife didn't make it to the wedding.
The next day (Sunday, two weeks of honeymoon!), our plan was to drive straight from Omaha to Chicago, but over the course of the
day James came down with some sort of nasty cold, so we had to stop once we reached Illinois. We found a hotel, and I called Nawojka to let her know we were delayed, since we were staying with them. We got James some OJ and cold medicine and he went to bed around 7pm and didn't wake up until 9 the next morning. He was still feeling sick when he woke up, but gradually improved during the course of the day. We made it to Chicago and reunited with Seth and Nawojka (actually, James was meeting them for the first time), and it was wonderful to see them. They have a hip little apartment that is totally a reflection of Nawojka's fabulous sense of style. After a bit of catching up, James and I went to the Sears Tower, where we stood in line for over two hours in order to be at the top for less than ten minutes. It's the highest building in the Western Hemisphere, and it's really really high. The building swayed every so slightly, and I felt woozy and strange up there. We stood out on the newly-opened clear balconies and could see all the way to the sidewalk! That was crazy - even though I was telling myself it was perfectly safe, my body was freaking out and trembling and I had to hold onto James the whole time we stood out there. When we got back to the apartment, Nawojka had whipped up a gourmet dinner for us, and we had a lovely evening.
The next morning, Nawojka made delicious crepes for breakfast, and James and I went back into the city for more exploring. We took the architecture boat tour and walked around in Grant Park. We just missed getting into the art museum, which was disappointing, but we met up with Seth and Nawojka in the John Hancock Tower's "Signature Lounge" for drinks on one of the top floors. We had a spectacular view of the city - it was a lot fun! We had dinner at a favorite burger place of theirs, and just hung out with them in their apartment afterwards.
The next day we had another delicious breakfast (waffles this time) and then had to say our sad goodbyes. We drove all day to Cleveland, stopping in the afternoon to visit the Notre Dame campus.
The next day we drove to Laporte, to my parents' vacation home in the woods. It was strange to be back to somewhere so familiar after our long adventure across the country! Our visit with my parents was brief, but a relaxing stop before our final push to Massachusetts. We only had one full day in Laporte, and then we were off again Saturday morning. Our final stop was our house in Methuen, and it was strange to be back. After all, we'd only lived in that house for five days before we left for our wedding. And now we were "home" to a place that wasn't really home. But it was great to be back, to stop living out of a car, to sleep in our own bed!
And the next day, we were getting ready to go back to work, after the most amazing three week vacation. And it wasn't easy.
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