Old Post Photo Updates

In case you are interested in meeting my "Marley", I added photos to my "Puppy Love" post. I also added a photo to the end of my Caribbean Cadence travel essay.

More from St. Louis!

I finally finished editing my photos from Kirsten's graduation weekend in St. Louis and uploaded them to my shutterfly website (the newest photos are at the end of the album). I will probably upload them to myphotoalbum as well since that website enables high res. digital downloads (of course most of you already have all of these in the "dropbox"). Here are a few more photos from that fun celebratory weekend:

Cannon Valley Trail Adventures

Evan and I ventured down to the Cannon Valley Trail over Memorial Day weekend for a butt-buster of a ride: 40 miles! Well, I know plenty of people who have completed more than that, but we both found 40 miles to be enough to make our butts hurt! We actually rode the same trail a few years ago on less adequate bikes, so now that we finally had our road bikes ready to go we were itching to try it again. It was a lot smoother this time, and we just flew over those paved trails along the Cannon Valley River from Cannon Falls to Red Wing, then back again. We rode right past Welch Ski Village -- the site of our wedding reception almost 2 years ago. Unfortunately no wedding was going on that day or else we would have had fun poking around ; ) Even with sore butts Evan was already talking about a bike ride the next weekend. Perhaps we'll check out the Stillwater trail one of these days. I grew up riding with my dad on the country roads of New Jersey (and for those of you who are wondering -- yes, there is country in NJ). But the roads in Minnesota are so much more open, flat, windy, and just less inspiring. So I imagine E and I will be hitting up many of the trails in the area instead. Here are a few pictures from our excursion:

                                 Camp Pearson???                                                          COWS!

Surprise Date #1

Evan and I decided it would be fun to take turns coming up with date ideas and surprising each other. Although we have fun adventures pretty regularly, there is something special about planning a date and watching it unfold as the other (in this case Evan) tries to figure it out. This past weekend I was the mastermind behind our plans -- and how clever I was. I decided to take Evan down to Red Wing, a town close to his hometown of Lake City. Even when we arrived in town he had no idea what we were going to do! He practically lived in this town compared to me far off in New Jersey, but yet I was able to find an activity he had never done before... but I'll get to that later. We first ate dinner at the St. James Hotel on a lovely little patio overlooking the river. I highly recommend this place as the food was very reasonably priced ($8 for a chicken salad croissant and sweet potato fries and about the same for Evan's burger) and it was delicious! The St. James is actually the hotel where we spent our wedding night, so it was kind of special stopping by again. After dinner we started walking along the river and I knew I was looking for a certain park for our final activity, but couldn't find it! So finally I asked for Evan's assistance in finding Bay Point Park and when we got there E discovered we were going to watch Toy Story at an outdoor theater! Funny thing is Evan's date idea was a drive-in movie theater -- looks like I snagged that idea first ; )  The movie was fun even though we got awfully cold. We brought 4 blankets, 2 towels, and were wearing sweatshirts and jeans, yet after an hour and a half of sitting on the ground we were really looking forward to some hot chocolate. We both highly recommend Cinema Under that Stars at Bay Point Park -- their next movie is The Sandlot, showing in a few weeks.