12 years and counting!

September is our anniversary month. This year we are celebrating our 12th year. We met at a Halloween party, on Halloween night, thirteen years ago. Man, to say those words are almost surreal. Feels like less than five years. Wow!

Well this year we decided to spend our special day up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Now, we did play hooky from Stake Conference... don't tell Pres. Blau or Pres. Booth, but this was the one sunday that we didn't have any responsibilities, so we took the day off. So we took our picnic lunch, our scriptures and Ensign, a camera, and ourselves up to the parkway on a somewhat sunny day. Even though we skipped conference, something kind of cool happened. Just when we were starting to feel guilty that we played hooky, we ended up bearing our testimony and telling the basics about our church and the Mormon religion to a non-practicing Jewish biker guy. He was really amazing, and was very glad he learned the "real truth" from us about the church. He's a cool cat who has his own jazz/blues band in Flat Rock, that hopefully we'll go and see soon. So here are the pics from our lovely day!






We heard about a Masonic marker along the parkway near Maggie Valley. We did find it, but the cool part is the rocks/stones that are mortared into the monument have an amazing story. There is a stone/rock from each continent (including Antarctica), all fifty states, 41 nations, from Plymouth rock and from the rock of Gibraltar, from the Alamo and from the white house. How cool is that!! Click on the pic below to see close up!

Then while there, little critters came from the woods, in the misty rain. Out came four beautiful, and big, female elk. One was waaaaay to comfortable getting close to us while she ate. We took as many pics and video as we could, before we decided she was getting to close (in case things went wrong). This is just a small fraction of the pics we took.What a great day!!





Stay tuned for a little story about the blueberries that we picked on the parkway and the amazing blueberry muffins I made out of them... Can't you just smell them now.....