Well we are back in the good ol’ USA after a couple of weeks in Europe. Overall, it was an amazing trip, but at the same time it’s good to be back at home. The cruise went very smoothly, minus the last day at sea, which was cold, windy, and stormy. That weather led to a rather rough ride through the Mediterranean. And we did have a change to the itinerary, skipping Tunisia and instead heading to Palermo, Sicily, more on that later. I have nearly 1000 pictures that I’m going to slowly sort through and add to the site. Today I present the first few shots of our trip and some from a few hour tour of Paris.

And if you’d like to view photos of our wedding, those can be found on our photographer’s website. Thanks once again Joe, the pictures are awesome!

If you didn’t already know, the Democratic National Convention started yesterday and is going through Thursday. Even though I’ll miss some of the bigger events, like Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field, I’ve been doing my best to get downtown often and catch any other happenings around town. Here are some pictures from Saturday, Sunday, and yesterday. The last pictures of the set come from a march gone bad last night in downtown, which can be read about here or here.

Looking at the pictures I took from our visit to Bryce Canyon, I think for the most part these turned out better than the ones from Zion. Though this may have something to do with how hard it is to capture the absolutely beautify of Zion on film, I still feel pretty good about all of these I took in Bryce Canyon and think they do a good job showing what the park is all about. Check out the panorama at the end for a full view of the amphitheater.

As promised earlier, here are pictures from our hikes in Zion National Park. Overall I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out. I read that sunset from the top of Angels Landing was very pretty, so that’s when we went, though I think it would have been even better just a bit earlier. You’ll see some very dark shadows in some of the pictures. And I wish I would have taken a full 360 degree panorama from the top, it was such an amazing view!

Sunday morning came early and we headed into the mountains to go out for a hike. My original plan was to hike to the summit of Mount Edwards, and at first we were well on our way. That was until we parked the car and started walking. At that point we forgot the directions in the car, and missed the actual trailhead that we needed to take to go up to Argentine Pass and then over to Edwards. Not knowing that we missed the trail we wanted to take, we actually ended up walking right to the bottom of Edwards at probably close to 13,000 feet. But then we didn’t see a very good route to take up to the top, and the storm clouds quickly closed in. However, I still managed to get some really good photos.

You may recall a flip cup tournament that we participated in last year. Well we attended again this year with a new team but had the same results as last year, pretty much nothing but loses. Our theme for this time was baseball, calling ourselves the “Grand Slammers.” Despite not winning a single match, we still had a blast.

I’ve been battling with the photo gallery I typically use on my site, and I am still continuing to do so. In the meantime, I found out that I can host a photo gallery from inside of my blog engine, wordpress. So I’ve finally added these pictures from Kim’s cousin Katie and Bill’s wedding. There are some good ones in the group, so I’m glad they are finally up somewhere. Let me know if you think this photo gallery is better or worse than the other, as I’m still comparing the two. It was tough to get the exif data to display and figuring out how to just display the first image on the main post page. Enjoy the pics!

Over the weekend I also took my first trip to Garden of the Gods and Pike’s Peak. We met up with our family friends, the Hemmelgarns, whose daughter Amy just recently moved to Colorado Springs with her husband Corey. After checking out some of the various rock formations in the Garden of the Gods, we took a drive over to the base of Pike’s Peak. We paid a discounted rate to get through the gates, since the trail to the top was only open 13 of the 19 miles. Though we didn’t get very high, very close to the tree line, there were still some great views along the way. I’ve added some pictures to my site, and my mom has a ton more on her flickr page.

I’m sure we are all relieved to see the site is back up. My IP address changed once again and I really had a battle getting everything working again. I swear the new IP address was bad, as I wasn’t able to open any webpages. Finally, I was able to get yet another IP address and things appear to be normal again. Here’s to hoping that this IP stays around for awhile.

To make up for all the downtime, I’ve added some pictures to the site. The first batch come from a hike we had over the weekend with Kim’s parents. We headed up toward Boulder early on Saturday morning straight for the Flatirons. Though we weren’t going to actually climb up any of the Flatirons, we walked around them for a few miles and enjoyed all the nice scenery.

On our way back toward the car, we actually got snowed on! It’s crazy that the white stuff is still occasionally falling on us this far into spring. Speaking of spring, I snapped a few quick photos of our flowers in the backyard. Some of them are already fading while others are just starting to bloom. Our yard is also really starting to green up. I’ll probably have to get out the mower for the first time in the next day or so.

I had my first experience with the game Rock Band over the weekend, and I am addicted. If I had a copy of the game at home I don’t think I’d do anything else, so maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t. My brother hosted a leap day party featuring the game and encouraged everyone to dress in their favorite rock attire. He had a killer Bret Michaels (of Poison fame) costume, complete with eyeliner. Fortunately my mom was there with her camera to capture pictures of the night and a couple from a disco party the next night.