StevenLaura

Promised Pictures Part II
Note & Warning: Many of these pictures are designed to make certain family (all, really) want to come with us next time as we discovered family was the only thing missing from this trip. Thus they are necessarily manipulative, and not for the weak of heart. The same warning holds true especially for the third and fourth part of the promised pictures posts (yet to come).

Day 1 (Saturday) & 2 (Sunday)

Boarded the ship in Seattle around lunch. Ate a nice lunch and dinner on the ship. Ship took off in the afternoon.

Here's the view that evening.

And the view from the next morning. Mmmm... mountains.

The evening of day 2 was formal night, we dressed up for a five course meal. Gotta love the menu. (sorry you can't read it, but it was, like it looks, approximately a mile long.)

Gotta love the handsome man.












And, because Wick might recognize it, I link to the full-length dress shot. (Senior prom, anyone?) I'm proud that I still could fit in it. Note: That's past-tense. I no longer fit in it thanks to the aforementioned 5 course dinner, which, I was pleased to find, we recieved every night. Thanks to my "diets don't exist on cruises" rule, we had approximately 4 to 5 full meals a day: Breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and occasionally either a brunch or a midnight snack. Steve gained weight. I have yet to step on a scale. Ignorance is bliss, baby!

Promised Pictures Part I

This trip took up a lot of space on our camera. It's a process to narrow down the interesting shots, so I'm dividing the trip into seperate blog posts. Part I, below, is pictures of Seattle, and our gracious hostess for the first two days of our trip.

Seattle was beautiful. Thanks to jetlag, we got up at the crack of dawn Friday morning in time to go into work with aformentioned gracious hostess, (whose work is really quite the cool place, with an ideal location!) and visited all the sites before they opened.


On a tight budget, we didn't actually go INTO any of the museums, but had a lot of fun regardless.




Can an economist fit through the eye of a needle? ----------------------->>

Let's see...

<<---------------- We think so.



We also found the original Starbucks and "discovered" the original Starbucks logo. I am ever so thankful my sis sent me a Caribou card (NOT Starbucks) for my birthday, because after seeing this logo (ugly naked mermaid with two fins, bare breasts, and an odd pose), I'm not sure I could swallow any more Starbucks for a while. Ick. Glad they changed it. The original is NOT always better...

Thankfully there are other coffee shops in town. (Duh! It's SEATTLE!) So we enjoyed a nice cup a' joe elsewhere.

We also enjoyed the interesting shapes of buildings:


And found the most perfect spot in the city. A crumpet shop, that makes fresh, British-style crumpets, and will sell you "all you can drink" tea for under two bucks! We went here twice. We'd like to start our own branch here in town, just so we can eat at it, but aren't sure that'll happen any time soon. We'd first have to figure out how to make crumpets.

To conclude today's blog, an inspiring quote which Steve found on the top of a door frame in Seattle, and which he found to be true throughout the remainder of our trip:

"Man has not yet contrived anything by which so much happiness is produced as a good restaurant." -Samuel Johnson

Honeymoon over.
Real life beginning.
I made the mistake of checking my e-mail. 200 some messages. Arg. Happy Birthday to me. No phone calls from family yet, but I'm now done with the first quarter century of my life. YEAH! To celebrate, I'm eating fat bars. Mmm.. my favorite. And hanging out with Steve & some Seattle friends.

So, let's not focus on the future (e-mails to be read upon return, ick!), let's think about the past.

The trip was beautiful! Two nasty rainy days is much better than the originally anticipated seven. I (Laura) saw orcas, otters, hump-backed whales, and what I swear was a dolphin. Steve saw all but the orcas. No northern lights. LOTS of bald-eagles and beauty. 5-course meals twice a day, in addition to three regular-sized meals means that Steve's pants fit a bit tighter than usual.

MMM... beautiful. Very beautiful. Pictures will be coming.

Steve Rocks

By the way, Steve rocks, and has recently won TWO, that's right, TWO teaching awards.
One because HIS students did better on average than any other T.A.'s students,
and one because his students ranked him highest of all T.A.s on teaching quality ("most deserving of a teaching award"). Wonder if the two go together?

TWO DAYS

In two days we leave on our honeymoon. Close enough that I checked the weather today. Cold I was prepared for (we are going to Alaska). But, um... not quite THIS:
The rain is set to follow us through Alaska. The temperatures will be in the 40s, several degrees colder than average for this time of year. Depressing.

Then I checked Seattle's temps (we'll be there a few days). I was excited to see that there was SUN on the weather map! SUN! BLESSED SUN! ... every day EXCEPT the day we are to be there. Then there's a nice raincloud on the map. I guess we're destined for rain.

So, for all my praying friends... Could you send up a selfish prayer? I'd like a few days of sun during my trip. And a few cloudless nights as well. I have two goals for this trip: See a whale, see the northern lights. Clouds will imped both goals quite greatly.

I am excited for some non-honeymoon stuff, too. Seeing 10lee and Tim in Seattle! (+ their respective significant others.) It'll be nice to see old friends.

Pictures, I'm sure, to come.