11 Days and Counting......

Only 11 days left! I have a ton of stuff I should be doing rather than sitting here on the puter, but oh well. They'll be there tomorrow. :)


I was playing with a new brush I got...... I'm not sure I like what I did. I think the colored leaves are way too "whimsical" or something for the image. I don't think I like it..... The brush is cool...it just doesn't work here. And the back ground was supposed to be white...not pink. Egad! What was I doing????
This one is a pre-dawn shot at the Maroon Bells. We got up at the butt-crack of dawn for this shot. It was necessary. If you could see what was behind and beside me, you'd see why. This is an extremely popular spot for obvious reasons. It's aslo a great place to catch alpenglow. It was 27 degrees and there was ice around the edge of the lake. Our fingers and toes were totally numb, but we didn't care. I'll be going back.... :)

Countdown to Colorado

As of tomorrow, we're only 2 weeks away from leaving on our fall roadtrip!!! With my mammoth project at the office (mostly) behind me, I'm really looking forward to the break. It will be weird not being at the office for almost a month, but I think I can hack it!!! :)

True to form I haven't made a single reservation. When you are relying on the autumn color it's hard to know where you should be and when. We like to stay flexible (which sometimes translates to "we like sleeping in our car because we didn't make a reservation and there's a soccer hell convention in every town across America that we need to stay in...."). We've actually had such things happen....often, in fact. One year we stopped at a Wal-Mart in Rock Springs, Wyoming and bought sleeping bags because the ENTIRE STATE of Wyoming was booked because of the pipeline work. I'm not making it up......the whole state really was booked. We drove the entire state stopping in every town that had hotels. We ended up driving almost 18 hours that day to Steamboat Spring, Colorado. I guess that's just the risk you take.

We plan to hit Montana, Wyoming, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, maybe Oklahoma and Arkansas, Colorado and Utah on this trip. We'll be gone almost a month. Unless of course we just can't stand hotel beds anymore and come home early. We haven't taken a trip like this in a year and a half and we're really looking forward to it. We try to do it every 6 months, but we've just been too busy. Hopefully we'll hit awesome color and the snow will hold off. Last time we went Colorado had a very early winter and we got robbed. Oh, we still had fun, but we pretty much missed the color. We're praying for better weather this time.

Only 2 weeks left!!! WHOOHOO!