Rowley Campout and Summer Adventures!

WHEW!!!!

I had to take a break from blogging! Plus, I don't know WHAT happened to the formatting on that last post. Blogger, you are a weird beast. The pics never insert where they are supposed to, they always end up at the top. And I want to make the post wider -- it's all squished at the moment. And trick out my page, but first things first... I'm still just in June and a lot happened in July...

Well I'm NOT trying to insult your intelligence, but if you see a picture that you like, if you click on it, it will open in another page to original size. You can right-click and save, and then upload to Walmart or the like and print professional, goodlookin' photos to pick up or have mailed to your house. It's what I do. My printer doesn't do the best job with my pics, so I outsource.

So without further ado: More of Danelle and Adam's summer adventures!!!

Here we are driving to the Rowley Reunion Campout - The Heat is On! (And that song was stuck in my head a lot of the time...)



I took a lot of pics of the scenery on the way up. I guess I was feeling inspired. Don't worry, not everything is a picture of a tree. Pretty quaking aspen and scenic views, though.

Adam gives my picture-taking the thumbs up!!! Okay, maybe not really...









And we have arrived!





We brought our telescope and had a lot of fun looking at nebulae, clusters, and Jupiter and Saturn. We also attempted to take long exposure pictures. I like the way the stark trees look against the black sky. In reality, the sky was so lit up with stars, and the Milky Way was sooo bright and beautiful. Perfect timing to go camping, with the new moon and the planets up and a favorable tilting of the rings of Saturn. And all the moons of Jupiter were out! Io has a really fast rotation period so sometimes if you can't see it, just wait an hour or two and then you will see it. ;-)

Anyway, big tangent... back to campout pictures. We had fun talking and playing games.



This picture makes me laugh really hard, and not just because of Adam's jocular face. :-)



We went and hiked Twisted Forest and it was amazing. I had never been there before. The hiking went slowly because we were so high up. Usually I like to go fast, but we were always running out of breath and needed frequent breaks. That was odd. But the scenery was beautiful. I had to take more breaks to take pictures. :) It was nice to sit in the dirt at the top though, and try to catch my breath. (I didn't care if the tiny ants at the high elevation were climbing on me.)





Me and my baby





Lovely wildflowers poking out of a rock.













Finally made it to the top!



















Throwing rocks off the cliff!!!









Back at camp, lots of cute kids!









Beautiful Sego Lilies - the Utah State Flower.



Messy kids playing in the dirt! I'm cracking up!



The kids (and some adults) played with water pistols and the marshmellow shooter. Some did a taunting dance to the people shooting marshmellows on the hill.



Glenn had a good time hitting his brother Mark with the marshmellow shooter.



The marshmellows were making it around 40 ft, and some would land on top of the blue tarps and roll off. It sure got the adults' attention underneath. We had fun watching people shoot marshmellows. :)









Nathan taunting the marshmellow shooters while holding his water guns.





Later on we built a fire and asked some of the boys to get firewood. Well they found A LOT of firewood!







The kids started to play teeter totter on all the logs they had found and piled up.





Gwendolyn makes some GREAT scary faces! Oooooh!



Making a monkey face!



Happy Fourth of July! (And the parade around camp was really fun.)





I have this fun LED wand that you wave to make messages and pictures appear and I thought it would be fun to play with at camp. I could wave my green LED flag proudly. It just looks faintly green in this exposure but Adam took a better picture of me waving it at night. I got this device from Thinkgeek.com, one of my favorite nerdy websites. I'm not sure if they still offer this LED wand, but there are a lot of other good items.







Adam got a pretty good exposure of the night sky. You can see Saturn (it's the bright one) and a few other stars. We really enjoyed bringing the telescope up, even if it did take up most of the car.



Hope you enjoyed the campout photos! Still got more to post...

Meramec Caverns - Hide-out of Jesse James

While we were visiting the inlaws in Missouri, Adam, Anne, Nathan, and I went and checked out the awesome Meramec Caverns. Truly an amazing place! We had a great time and our tour guide was pretty funny. Here are some pics from our adventure. At the Cave Entrance! Haha, Nathan's cracking up because he's giving Adam bunny ears. Unfortunately they are hard to see with this camera angle. The first cave room is HUGE! It's ballroom size, it gets booked for parties, it can fit a lot of chairs and there's even a discoball. In this picture, Nathan is boogie-ing under the discoball in the dark ballroom. Adam and Nathan posing in a room full of stalactites and stalagmites, ... and "soda straws." Just gorgeous and immense! Illuminating the caves in different lightning makes them look so mysterious-o. Going up the big stairs to the Wine Room. Excerpt from wikipedia about the Wine Room in the Meramec Caves: "The fifth level of Meramec Caverns includes a "Wine Room." The Wine Room is home to the world's rarest cave formation, The Wine Table. The onyx table stands six feet high and is supported on three natural legs. Known as an aragonite formation, this structure was composed almost entirely underwater. The Wine Room and the Wine Table are adorned with grape-like clusters called botryoids. Originally called the Wine Room because of these grape clusters, the cave now claims that it is called that because of the "whining" that visitors do when they learn that the room is accessible only after climbing numerous stairs." There are only three of these "tables" in the known world and this is the largest one. It doesn't appear to be able to support its own weight anymore. Either that or someone broke it. Check out those large "bunches" of "grapes"! Playing around in the slippery caves. Now onto the Stage Curtain room, complete with stadium seating. We're going to see a light show and listen to Kate Smith sing God Bless America.

Nathan's Baptism - June 2008

Adam and I needed to find some housing in St. Louis while Adam's going to law school at Washington University. Luckily around that time, Nathan, Adam's brother, was going to be baptized, and Adam's dad Glenn was also having a birthday too! (We all chipped in so Glenn could have a great new Canon camera to take to Afghanistan.) We got to visit and here are some pictures from the momentus occasion. :)

Adam and Nathan




I was having some camera drama (which has finally wrapped up nicely - Adam downloaded some drives for the Canon on the computer that we needed but weren't included in the software. Also, the USB cable I was using was a dud. And the wireless internet connection needs to be unplugged when uploading pics from the camera. And I need to stand on one foot and hop up and down and sing "Waltzing Matilda" and THEN the pics download properly!! WHEW!)

Anyway, camera drama was making me bummed*. I couldn't figure out how to use the flash at will or turn it completely off. Turns out the camera needs to be in "Portrait Mode." Of COURSE! At least I have Adam around to help me with such things! And I had to play the piano anyway, get some prelude goings on, so Adam took over taking the pics...

*We've figured it all out so I'm not bummed anymore! :) And my camera is taking great pictures and it's been taking great pics and videos all summer.







CHEESE!!



MORE CHEESE!





Great pictures of father and son.





Sometimes Nathan likes to make faces.



A great family photo.



Some near misses.



Sometimes Campion likes to pick his nose. In pictures.





Stayed tuned for pictures from the Rowley Campout! :)

Gift From Adam - Dwight Bobblehead

Adam got me this lovely gift back when we were dating and we had become big fans of The Office. I love it and it sits above our computer. Dwight's head is moving from the vibrations from my typing. Well I just took a picture of it because I had gotten my new Canon camera and was snap-happy. Hopefully it survives the move... it probably will. Surprising during our last move, none of our glass or crystal dishes got broken, and the trifle dish and salad bowl remain intact. I hope that we have the same good luck this next time around!

Here's DWIGHT!



"If they don't bobble, then what's the point?" -Dwight, touching all his bobbleheads.

More on the way!

When I feel like jogging....

... this is where I go. In the springtime the blossoms from the nearby orange groves would waft in through our windows and the surrounding area. It was such a heavenly scent, and it stayed that way for at least THREE WEEKS! Anywho, Adam said it reminded him of living in Oceanside back when he was in high school, and he could smell the orange blossoms from some nearby trees there.

So I decided to take a camera with me to get some good pics, although this isn't smellavision and you can't smell what is happening. I guess you'll just have to imagine or experience it for yourselves.

The orange orchards(? do you call them orchards or groves? Groves seems more likely...) are right by our apartments and are now owned by UC Riverside. There aren't any sidewalks, but there is gravel, sand, dirt (and broken glass, my favorite!) along the roadsides and that's what I like to run on. I'm hoping it will help save my knees for a few years longer with the cushioning and what not. So I try to map out a good route for me to go on, but it can still allow me some creativity and tailoring. And I can measure it by car odometer to find out how many miles I'm doing. I started doing this back when I lived with Madison and I had a great route to go around Irvine. Then Hina talked me into doing the L.A. marathon, so that motivated me, and I did my first 10 mile straight run on my own nifty course. I moved to Costa Mesa while I was still training for the marathon and had to find a new route to run, but I found that running by the back bay along Irvine Avenue was a good way to go. I could do a 5K in about 30 minutes and a 10K in an hour and worked on my endurance, being able to run 6-7 miles without stopping to walk. Then when Adam and I got married and we moved, it was hard to motivate myself to run and I had to find a new course. Unfortunately, the birth control prescription I was on made my legs feel weird and throb and it would scare me to run because of the tingling. Side effects are no fun. Cue the weight gain...

So anyway, I'm off the meds and trying to stick to an eating and exercizing regiment and I'm feeling better and I've lost just a little bit of weight. I'm hoping that I can shed more in the next few weeks and months. The views are nice as I'm jogging though. Here are a few of them.





Don't mind the barbed wire. I don't.



Orange trees all in a row. Orange trees as far as the eye can see!



The setting sun. It's so hot I need to wait for sunset to get my jog on.



There are a lot of palm trees along the way and they are beautiful. I love them. And they give me some shade sometimes when I'm crazy and I go out around noon.







Okay, I'm gonna jog tomorrow! Or go for an hour-long walk. I've been doing that lately and it's been very enjoyable. I went and walked around the UCR Botanic gardens a few days ago and it was awesome! I got some good pictures on my cell phone of some swimming turtles!

Okay, I'll put more pics up tomorrow. Adam and I are going to bed. We are tired, and it is 2:39 a.m. We are crazy t.v. watching night owls!