Our Christmas Vacation, Part I

Hello!  Merry Christmas!!!  Happy New Year!!  It has been too long since we've chatted.  I didn't mean to be away so long but I just never got around to posting while I was on vacation.  I had a lot of things to share but nothing so important it couldn't wait.  And now it's 6am and I am on the bus again, back to work, like vacation never happened.  I am hoping I am refreshed for the new year and motivated to get a lot of work done and all that.  We'll see what happens when I get to the office...that motivation often disappears!

We had such a fun holiday.  Honestly, it would have been difficult to not have fun though.  We really needed some time away from reality and work and the move and unpacking and all that jazz.  By the end of the month it was starting to wear us down and we just wanted to be finished with it all.  I took my Chem final without studying (and luckily got a B, not a high B but I still kept my A in the class so who cares), we moved, started to slowly unpack (which we are still doing), and packed up our suitcases for Vermont.

Yet again we woke up on the Friday before Christmas super early and were on the road close to 5:30am...me, hubs, Evan, and Dolce.  It was squishy like always but we survived another ten hour car ride.

The dog and Evan get lots of very close time together.  Evan pulls out Dolce's fur and Dolce eats Evan's snacks.  I think it's a fair trade.

Once we hit Albany the drive got a bit interesting.  The temperatures started dropping and it started raining...and freezing.  Literally the rain froze on our windshield almost faster that we could clear it.

That stuff in the upper right corner is pure ice.  It was crazy!  Ivan was driving and he did a great job...while I took pictures.  We were still able to make decent time and arrived at my parent's house close to 4pm.  Not too shabby.  And even though it was a bit treacherous, it was a very pretty snow-filled trip.

If you can believe it, the picture above is Lake Champlain, frozen over and covered with snow.  It was weird looking at it and knowing it was a lake, but seeing no water.

The rest of our trip went similar to the car ride: snow-filled, treacherous, lots of people and animals, yet still filled with the people you love and lots of fun times together that make it special.  Our first adventure was a terrible ice storm (figures, since we battled ice on our drive up).  Literally everything was frozen -the streets, our cars, the trees, the snow.

It looked beautiful though.

The snow was frozen right onto the trees, which I thought was the prettiest thing ever.  It made the trees look like they had fresh snow on them for days.  However, you know what else freezes during a nice storm?  Power lines!  And it rural-ish Vermont, when you have no power, you also have no heat and no water.  Not fun...especially since a nice storm usually means cold temperatures.  I was happy that power was restored about four hours later...not too much suffering.  It would have been three weeks before we got power back in Maryland!

Ok, I feel like this is getting long and I still have so much to share so I think I'll end it now and continue tomorrow.  Don't stay away too long though - the adventures continue!!

Happy Monday!!