Leaves, a winery, and an Eagles game!!

We had a pretty busy weekend!!  We raked and bagged some leaves, but we still have more to do... And I met up with my friend Colleen at a winery on Saturday, and we went on a nice winery tour, and then we also signed up for a class on pairing wines with your holiday meals! So it involved tasting some wines and pairing them with a variety of typical holiday foods. It was great to see Colleen and catch up a bit! And we both learned a lot about wine too. And then on Sunday McGee and I went to the Eagles game!!

The Eagles game was soooo fun, but it was also soooooo cold!!  We'd purchased standing-room tickets for the game (rather than tickets for an actual seat, because the price difference is INSANE), and we wandered around a bit and found a few good places to stand and enjoy the game.  But, by the end of the 3rd quarter we decided we were both FREEZING (the wind just cut right through our layers and jackets!), so we left the game and walked to the bar across the street to finish watching the game on TV there so we could warm up!!  The Eagles ended up losing... They aren't having the best season (my Chargers lost too... boooooo). Outside of the bar was a really HUGE chair, so we hopped up in it and while we were sitting there a nice lady asked if we'd like our picture taken!  Luckily she took two because I was totally blinking for the first one... Whoops.

My blink! 

Not blinking in this one...whew!!  

Here was a pretty tree outside of the baseball stadium!  It's right next to the football stadium. 

This week is going pretty well so far, but I can't believe Thanksgiving is almost here!!  Where did November go??  Actually, where did October go????  We're going to McGee's family's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and I'm happy to say that I was able to claim bringing pies this year!!  I'm stoked to make a few pies. I think I'm only going to make two, and one will be my apple pie that I've made a few times and feel comfortable making, and then I'm going to make a Nutella Cheesecake that I've never made... but I figure everyone loves Nutella, right??  So hopefully that turns out ok. 

Theoretically my Nutella cheesecake should look like this one!!  

Oh, and I'm bummed to say that the weather conditions are supposed to be very mild for this year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade!  I love watching the parade, but it's always so much better when the weather is a little crazy... Either really windy or rainy or snowy... But this year it's supposed to be super mild and nice. So, that's not very exciting...  But anyways, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!  

I Love Fall

It's already mid-November!!  How did that happen?  I have no idea... I feel like Fall is just flying by. And with that, I should update my Fall Bucket List!

We didn't do the Yuengling Oktoberfest this year, because that's actually the weekend that I went to CA when my dear Grandma passed away. So, it just definitely wasn't meant to be this year, so we'll go next year! 

I've made a few soups, but no breads yet... And I did make an apple pie, but no pumpkin goodness... and I plan to make more apple goodness and some pies for Thanksgiving. And we have to figure out when to do our own mini-Thanksgiving meal, but I'm thinking maybe the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Hopefully we can fit it in! 

I took a few pictures of some nice Fall trees in our neighborhood, as well as some pictures of the leaf situation in our yard: 

This is our backyard... We have a bit of a leaf situation we need to take care of. There are a lot of rakes and paper bags full of leaves in our future! 

These are a few trees down the street from us. The lighting is weird because it was right around dusk... 

But here's the same area on a different day during the daytime (but it was an overcast day...). 

This is a view from just up the street from our house. That's our house down on the right side. 

This is a picture from our back window!  Do you see all the deer in our backyard?  There are 3 that I can see... Deer are EVERYWHERE right now!  They love our side yard, and they walk through our backyard too. 

I hope all is going well for all of you! I can't believe it's already almost Thanksgiving!  And an early Happy Birthday shout-out to my awesome sister-in-law Amanda!  This coming Sunday we're going to the Eagles game, so that will be fun!!  

Halloween!!

We had such a great Halloween, and I hope you did too!  We had SO many trick-or-treaters! We'd heard that our street is kind of quiet for trick-or-treaters even though lots of kids live around here (probably because our street is on a MASSIVE hill...), so we weren't expecting much at all, but it ended up being great!

I'd decorated the inside of our house at the beginning of October, so here's a few pictures of our indoor decorations:

Here's the left side of our fireplace mantle... 

And the right side of our fireplace mantle! 

The day before Halloween we did some decorating outside:

The picture didn't turn out too great, but they looked nice in person! We got some cool vintage-looking Halloween cutouts for our window, and we love them! We also got some fun blue bat lights. Oh and this is a sneak-peak of our new windows before they were finished... They hadn't updated the outside trim, etc yet when I took this picture! It's all nice and finished now though. 

The morning of Halloween, Kevin and I woke up semi-early and drove to Linvilla Orchard to get a pumpkin and some other fun Fall items! With the honeymoon this month and everything, we haven't had a lot of time to prep for Halloween! We weren't even sure if we'd have time to go to Linvilla or if we'd just need to stop by a grocery store for a pumpkin, but the night before Halloween we decided we could head there in the morning! So we got there nice and early and got some coffee and apple treats from their cafe, and then we wandered over to their pumpkin area and picked up some cool stuff!  We found a pumpkin with lots of character that we both loved, and then we also picked out an assortment of gourds because I think gourds are so darn cute and full of character. And after we were done with the pumpkin area, we went over the the apple orchard and picked some apples!!  And when we got home, we carved our pumpkin!!

Linvilla Orchard! 

McGee carrying our apple box! It's later in the season than we usually go, so a lot of the good apples were gone already!!  We ended up finding some great ones after searching really hard though! 

We have like 4 gourds there, plus a cute pumpkin that McGee's folks got for us, and then a little pumpkin that we thought was fun (on the right). 

Here's our pumpkin! We loved that it was far from perfect... It had a lot of weird lumps and it was kind of oddly shaped. It had quite a good stem though! 

And here it is all lit up that night! 

At about 4:30pm on Halloween our neighbor had a fun party (lots of kids, lots of adults), so we got to meet a lot of our neighbors! We were told we could bring an appetizer, so I checked Pinterest for Halloween appetizer ideas and we made a fun one! And at the party I found out that one of our neighbors was born in Oakdale, CA (where the almond ranch is)!!  What are the odds of that??

This was our appetizer we brought! It's just some guacamole and some olives and sour cream for the eyes, and blue corn chips! It was easy peasy. 

And at the end of the party when it started to get dark, we left and went to our house to get ready for trick-or-treaters! We ended up just grabbing a few of our camping chairs and putting them at the end of our driveway, and our neighbor across the street did the same, and we sat at the end our driveways with our jack-o-lanterns. We chatted for a few hours and drank some beers, and we ended up getting quite a few trick-or-treaters! It was such a fun night. 

In non-Fall news, our new windows are in and completed and we LOVE them!!  Another HUGE project is checked off our list. We'd really wanted to have them finished before winter, because we could feel every cold breeze with our old windows (they were like 60 years old). If you stood anywhere near a window, you could just feel the freezing air coming through. So, we can already feel SUCH a huge difference in the temperature in our house (which will help a TON with our heating bill this Winter!!), and we've also noticed it's a lot more quiet in our house now!!  You could hear the wind and any outside noise, so now it's nice and quiet.  I have a picture of before and after, so you can see a difference for sure, but we didn't do it for the appearance at all. We just wanted more functional windows and they're so great!! 

This was a "before", taken last March I think. 

And this is the "after". Just a few subtle differences in appearance, but they are SO much more functional now!! And also before, we couldn't even open a lot of our windows because they were permanently stuck closed. So, they all open quite easily now! Oh and if you can see the window grids in the "after" picture, they were there in the before picture too but they were painted dark green so they were quite hard to see! 

Honeymoon Day 8: The Narrows at Zion National Park

We woke up before the sun and made a quick campfire so we could make ourselves a good breakfast. Then we hurried over to the shuttle stop and caught a nice early shuttle to the area where The Narrows start. We put on all of our rental gear which included some waterproof pants (they just go over your regular pants, and they have these rubber gaskets at the ankles to keep water from getting to your pants/skin), some neoprene socks to keep your feet warm (they definitely still get very wet), and some shoes that are specially made for hiking on the slippery and pointy rocks in the water. We also each rented a hiking stick, which is very necessary for finding where there were drop-offs in the water or where there were huge rocks, and it also helped for preparing for how deep the water was going to be for certain areas.

We hiked The Narrows for about 5 hours, and WOW was it tough. It was so beautiful and amazing, and such a cool experience. We're really glad we did it, but it was incredibly tough. For the way up The Narrows you're fighting the current the whole way so your legs are getting pretty exhausted, and then on the way back you're having to fight to make sure the current doesn't take you too fast so you lose your footing and fall. The water was COLD, so we were very thankful for our waterproof pants!!

Wahoo!

Some areas just had water depths that were to mid-calf, but others got to mid or upper thigh 

A waterfall

If you looks closely on this one, you can kinda see the strength of the current! The water was really moving the whole time, even though in a lot of pictures it looks pretty still. 

 We were SO exhausted after The Narrows! We both felt a bit beat up from all of the rocks and everything, and we both had sore knees and ankles (I think I twisted my one ankle like 8 times... haha). After we finished, we took the shuttle back to the our campground, and then got in our car to drive into town to return the rental equipment and we also got some coffee and a snack at a little coffee shop. We had decided that it would be better to stay in the Zion Lodge that night rather than camp, because it would be easier for our flight day to not have to break camp and try to get everything organized in our luggage. So we broke camp, checked in at the lodge, and took our time getting packed for our flight the next day. We had dinner at the Lodge too, which was lovely!

There were 3 deer hanging out at the Lodge! They had NO fear of people, and were just chowing down on the grass while people walked by. 

And on Day 9, we drove to the Las Vegas Airport and took our flight back to Philly!!  It was an AMAZING honeymoon, and we both can't wait to go back to some of the spots we saw. We're happy tot be back home with our house and our dear Guinness though!!

Honeymoon Day 7: Zion National Park

We had set our alarms for around 7am on Day 7, because we did NOT want to miss the sunrise at Bryce Canyon! We were like a 5 minute walk from Sunrise Point, so we figured that was probably a great place to watch the sunrise. The weather was perfect (it was a little chilly, but nothing our jackets couldn't fix!), and the sunrise was AMAZING.

 After we watched the sunrise, we packed up all of our stuff into our car, and we started our drive to Zion (and had Cheerios in the car for breakfast). We accidentally went in the back entrance of Zion National Park, which meant that we had a looooooong crazy drive (including a super long tunnel that was over a mile long and only one direction of cars could go through at a time!) until we got to the front of the park where the Visitor Center, campground, etc was located. We went to our campsite and set up our tent, etc, and we made lunch (mac-n-cheese and hot dogs) and we had to eat in our car because there were a ton of wasps!

After we finished our lunch, we walked over to the Visitor Center to get advice on some trails. And because Zion is such a huge and popular park, you have to take the park shuttle to get anywhere! To be honest, when we first got to Zion we weren't loving it... It just felt SO busy and crowded, and the whole idea of needing to take a shuttle everywhere really felt like an amusement park or something instead of a national park. So, we were trying REALLY hard to have an open mind and a positive outlook about Zion, but it definitely wasn't love at first sight. Anyways, back to our day: After talking to the ranger at the Visitor Center, we took the park shuttle over to The Grotto, and then started the Kayenta Trail to the Lower and Upper Emerald Pools. The hike to the Lower Emerald Pools was beautiful and easy, but the hike to the Upper Emerald Pools was pretty darn tough!

The Upper Emerald Pools! 

Upper Emerald Pools! You can see how the water is running down the side of that mountain into the pool... 

Here's a little waterfall we had to walk under on our hike back.

Lower Emerald Pools

 The hike ended back at the Zion Lodge, where we caught another shuttle back to our campground. When we got to our campsite, we hopped into our car to drive into the nearby town to pick up our rental gear to hike The Narrows the next day. The rental facility also had us watch a safety video for hiking The Narrows, and that was very useful and informative! We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant in town, and then headed back to our campsite where we enjoyed our campfire for the rest of the evening. We toasted some marshmallows for dessert, and went to bed decently early so we could get a nice early start the next morning. Oh, and I should mention: Day 7 was our first day without rain!! So that was pretty lovely :)  

This is a picture I took while we were at a gas station in town. Can you imagine having these views from your local gas station??  Crazy... 

This is a view of the moon and a mountain from our campsite! We were sitting by our campfire just enjoying the scenery. It was gorgeous. 

Just having fun in front of our campfire!