Wedding Reception @ The Daufuskie Golf Club

Zak took a timeout after the wedding ceremony back at the beach cottage to switch off his dress shoes for his dancing shoes! Off to The Club he goes!

The introduction of Mr. and Mrs. Jonathon Powell to all their friends and family. Sarah & Jonathon definitely lit up the room with their glowing grins! Momma Jane clapping in the center, a very excited, and ready to celebrate Mother-of-the Bride.

Bride & Groom's FIRST DANCE as husband & wife!

Father-Daughter dance. She's so pretty!

Proud Pappa! His favorite hiking buddy now, married, I guess Donald will have to get use to sharing her at a campfire with Jonathon too!

Beautiful and tasty wedding cake. There were different flavors for each layer, I got the lemon cake layer with buttercream frosting. Delicious! Each layer had different piping designwork and pretty flowers on top. Like our wedding, they had chocolate dipped strawberries as well.

Apparently they had a hard time cutting into the cake, weird, but once they got through I think they quickly each took a bite, interlocked elbows and drank champagne. It happened really fast, I think some people missed it.

Some of you may know, that I'm not one to pass up on dancing. Especially, as silly and junior highish as it may seem, the Electric Slide! I think Jamie can appreciate this as her country line dancing equals similar expressions. I'm in the left side of the picture rockin' it with Christa to my front right and Kara Morgan (my old boss Hunter's wife) to my back right!

Mike & Sue are cutting up a rug on the left, and their son Stephen dancing with Renee to the right. Mike always does an excellent job of photographing everyone else, it's time we get him in the picture!

Stephen & Renee

Now, this was an interesting experience. The band they hired was AWESOME they have performed at several of the Heath Family & Heath friends' weddings. They were phenomenal, the musicians so talented, and the vocalists especially AJ were fantastic! So, they invited Sarah and all her bridesmaids up to the stage, made us face the back wall away from the crowd and place our hands on our knees. I'm the one on the far right. As we're doing this the band starts playing the song "shake, shake, shake...shake, shake, shake...shake your booty..." so we're all up there shaking our booties, in front of the entire room, and I looked over at Sarah and asked her if she knew about this. She laughingly said, "Nope" as she shook her booty! It was pretty hilarious. Thanks to Zak & Christa who managed to snap some pics to not miss out on this memory!

Since the band wonderfully embarrassed the bride, they felt it was time the groom, the best man, and the father-of-the bride also experience some humility in the spotlight. Jonathon with a few ques began singing "My Girl" with Hunter and Donald backup singing and dancing. Very amusing, Jonathon did a great job, as he is musically talented, however the other two should stick to their day jobs!

Sunday Morning Post Wedding Breakfast & Activities

Zak challenging Brian to a dual with a "sea turd" en shell, otherwise known as a Sea Cucumber. We learned from my "all-knowing" brother-in-law Jacob that those little brown blobs randomly scattered on the beach are washed up sea cucumbers. Fortunately for us, I think they were too far gone on their "long walk", not to initiate their defense mechanism of puking up & spitting it's insides all over us. That would have been too much for those boys to handle!

Brian playing with a dried up baby horseshoe crab skeleton. He was cringing when thinking about stepping on one of these in the ocean, as the spikes on their heads are incredibly sharp.

Breakfast with Mr. and Mrs. Powell, this however is not Mr. Powell, but rather our beloved Zak nicely posing with Mrs. Sarah Powell.

Trouble, Trouble, Trouble, did I say Trouble yet? This on the left is Mr. Zachary Curtis, best friend to Jonathon, and on the right is Mr. Zak Slutzky, one of Sarah's closest friends. These two fellas have an insanely amount of characteristics, qualities, activities, habits, and mischievous thoughts in common. Good thing we love them both! I think they've started a new sport, Golf cart bumper carts. Fortunately no one was seriously injured, and the carts only suffered a few minor losses of hub cabs, small shards of burnt rubber, and perhaps a slightly cracked bumper or two, besides this no one would ever know.

A small reunion of WSMRT (Western State Mountain Rescue Team) members welcoming Jonathon to the pose!

A little Bocce Ball anyone? "Nothing beats a sport like throwing bigger rocks at smaller rocks," exclaims Zak.

Zak... well he's showing his creative accessorizing skills, maybe he'll start a new trend. Maybe not. Maybe he's just got bar-b-q on the brain, or maybe he's feeling cupidized from all the LOVE floating around the air from the wedding full weekend. Not sure, but I think it's just Zak.

We moved on to play Croquet on the lawn, where thankfully for the many years of playing at Granny's house in Elsah, I kicked their booties! If only Brian had come over more often as a child for croquet lessons, he would have proven to be a better competitor. Christa, trying to wack the flying dragonflies with her croquet mallet, later told us some interesting stories of her own about duck surveying. For those of you who don't know Christa is studying Veterinary Medicine at a University in Minnesota. On one evening while taking a break from her 31 credit hour hours of homework (crazy lady) she decided to participate in collecting ducks from a nearby body of water for research purposes. This involved her strapping on a helmet equipped with spotlight attached, generator cord running down her side into the boat, a basket strapped around her back, and a net in one hand to capture the ducks with. This all done while hanging out off the bow over the water at night. Sounds adventurous someone should film that sometime.

Sunday Night in Savannah @ The Shell House

Our long awaited seafood craving was finally satisfied. I think we all have had better, but probably never this much fun. We ordered snow crab, crab cakes, fried shrimpies, hush puppies, slaw, and fries and shared it all. Sweet tea to quench our thirst and a slice of pecan pie for dessert (which beware is served VERY HOT, I burned my mouth...which served for a good laugh however, so I guess it was worth a little scalding.)

The center of the table had a hole for trash, amazingly enough that alone entertained us throughout the entire dinner, of course it wouldn't have been funny without Zak's sound effects of the trash can eating our trash. The Atlanta, GA airport had trash compressors instead of just trash cans all over the building, which made a funny munching type noise, thus reason for Zak's trash noises.

Zak's true colors coming out. Hopefully these will scare the scarey bridge troll we had to pass under to get back to our complimentary hotel rooms.

Random Pictures Around the House

The FIRST SNOW of the season! We were very excited! This is our Burley trailer or in Toby's world, his chariot, but we also use it for groceries, recycling when we're feeling motivated, and whatever else we need it for. A great investment!

Everyone has been wondering how Brian can take Chemistry online. Well, this is how... Chem lab on the kitchen table. Safety first, got to protect those big beautiful brown eyes!

Lab #1, Observing the reaction of chemicals, yes I get to participate as well! Although, I don't have cool glasses like Brian does.

One of the many sunrises I get to see when I get up to do my morning Pilates or various workout tapes. This view is from our backdoor with the sunrise highlighting the mountain known as "Sleeping Indian".

Another beautiful sunrise.

Sunset with Birthday peak way far in the background to the right of the tree, looks like a perfect triangular peak.

Mt. Princeton with some fresh late Fall snow. The sun was setting and there was some rich reds & pinks glistening on the ridges, challenging to capture though.

Another pretty sunset over Mt. Princeton. Not bad views from one's front door! We're not complaining ;)

LOTS of SNOW YIPEE!! We can't wait for winter, we're ready for some skiing!

We didn't get out much to take photos of the golden aspens, so we figured the aspen trees in our front yard would have to do. The leaves didn't last very long, as you can see it storming toward Columbia & Harvard in the background.

Handies Peak

This shot is taken from around 11,550 feet in the northwest facing basin of Handies Peak, called the American Basin. It was raining when we drove up here from Redcloud & Sunshine Peaks. It's always fun setting up a tent in the rain :(

Toby was so exhausted he didn't seem to mind the bumpy 4WD road up to our campsite. We practically had to carry him over to the tent.

The wildflowers were absolutely amazing! I think we chose one of the best weekends to be hiking during the crest of the wildflowers. This is shot from our tent since we pretty much relaxed/slept until early morning.

O.K. since it's been awhile since I've blogged, I again got these out of order. With that said, here we are on the summit of Handies Peak about 2 hours after we left the trailhead. The views from Handies were incredible, mountain peaks stretched along the horizon in every direction. We took a 365 degree picture shot, we'll see if we can actually get it to turn out.

Here we are on day 3 of our EPIC weekend and Toby and I are pushing up to the saddle where we'll turn north (left) and head up to the summit. The trail was obviously very well travelled and maintained we almost could have worn flip flops (except it was a little chilly for that)

Looking down from the saddle toward the west, where we had come up, we get a great view of the small mountain lake we passed earlier. This will be definite stop for Toby dog on the way down. He's earned a frolick in the lake.

Brian went for an evening walk, so I was testing my camera skills and captured what I call a watercolor shot of Brian amongst the wildflowers. Pretty cool I think.

Brian was capturing the 365 degree views so I was trying to duck out of the way, but it apparently didn't work very well. It just looks like I'm "watering the rocks".

Here's our individual poses on top. We acted quickly because as you can see behind Brian a storm was rolling in very quickly.

Handies Peak sits at 14,048 feet. It is the 40th highest peak out of the 54 or 55 fourteeners, depending on who's counting. It is also located in the San Juan Range, 15 miles southwest of Lake City, and other nearby towns are Silverton, Telluride, and Ouray. The route from the American Basin Trailhead is 6 miles long, gaining around 2,500 feet of elevation. Surprisingly we scampered up the peak with no trouble, although we were motivated in trying to peak before the storm crept up. Definitely something to be cautious of, but we could tell we had plenty of time. And, actually the storm dissipated upon our descent.

Toby is an awesome hiking partner. He mostly stays on the trail and is in amazing shape. We're so grateful he's been apart of our life for the last almost 8 years! He's very photogenic too!