"Honeymoon"- Day 1

We are so glad we were able to see everyone for the wedding, and appreciate you traveling to be a part of it! During this last week, we've been saying bye to people leaving town, taking care of bills and laundry, and getting used to our new "husband and wife" titles. :)

While Patrick and I would have ideally visited South America and hiked to Machu Picchu for our honeymoon, we settled for a vacation closer to home that we could afford. St. Louis seemed to fit the bill, and although we were originally disappointed when we had to trim our 1 week plan down to 3 days (after we realized anything more would be out of our budget), that probably ended up being a good thing.

Our honeymoon wasn't quite what we expected. Just not as romantic, smooth, or as planned as we had hoped (which affects our patience and attitudes in less than pleasant ways too), like our Branson trip in the fall had been. We are still happy we had the time away to help us make the transition from the dominating "PLAN WEDDING" mindset, to one more focused on our relationship and having some time together before going back to everyday life. And the trip definitely wasn't all bad either, as you'll see below and in the posts to come!

Our first stop after arriving in St. Louis Saturday afternoon was Schlafly Bottleworks- a craft brewery well-known in the area. Before taking a tour of the facility, we ordered a few wares to try. We made a quick stop to REI afterward, where we bought a paddle and life jacket, meaning we are now equipped to take our new kayak out (hopefully this coming weekend!). :)

We arrived at Hotel Indigo a few hours after check-in, but we received a voucher for a free breakfast for 2 because of the "inconvenience" of having to wait at the front desk a couple minutes while they made sure the room was ready. (Awesome!)

As you can see, the room has a fun atmosphere, with some really swanky touches, like salon brand toiletries. I forgot my hair-pick though, and unfortunately the free comb I got at the front desk was not so high-end (took way too long to untangle my long hair).

We were pretty hungry when we left for dinner at The Hill (a designation for an area of town with lots of Italian restaurants- highly recommended for dining), but decided to risk the estimated hour long wait since it'd probably take just as long to randomly choose a different restaurant and wait there. Ended up being longer than that, so in addition to being cranky by the time we were seated, we weren't feeling too good either. I was worried we'd shock our barren stomachs, and while the food was delicious, our digestion was definitely a little odd the rest of the trip.... which you can find out about soon in the next post!

Senior Citizen in the driveway

It's official, Doris now qualifies for senior discounts! She hit the 100k mile mark on Battlefield St. while we were on our way to try out a little ice cream shop (no offense to Andy's Frozen Custard, we just wanted some ice cream). We hit 70,000 our first week here so that's 30,000 miles we've traveled since moving down to Springfield, not bad for driving back and forth to Michigan a dozen times. We haven't heard any odd noises or had anything catastrophic happen, but we're keeping our fingers crossed just in case...

Don't worry, I wasn't speeding!

Other updates:
The wedding, as you all know, is coming up shortly and as you can imagine, we're pretty busy getting all our ducks in a row.
Atalie has not had any work for the past week and it looks like she won't for a while, so we're living on my meager paycheck at the moment- yay!

Steel Creek Hiking

This weekend we took a break from the wedding planning to try and regain a little sanity. It was very welcome! The weather was chilly- mid-20s during the day and mid-teens at night- but we managed to stay (mostly) warm. The hiking itself was pretty hard due to the fact that we were carrying too much stuff and we haven't done it in a while, but the scenery made up for the sore and tired muscles.
(The pictures are all out of order because Blogger is crap and loads them in reverse order)

A beautiful Sunday morning hike out.

Atalie at an overlook of the Buffalo River. Right behind her in the valley is Steel Creek campground.
Patrick at the Steel Creek campground for a quick break- we ended up coming back here to camp Saturday night.
Just before we headed out Saturday morning.

The group on the trail.

Old news by now...

So this is probably old news by now, but to anyone who (for some reason) doesn't know this, we're getting married on March 20, 2010!
We have a website that we've set up through theknot.com where you can check out ALL the details. For those of you interested, we'll get it updated with registry stuff in the near future.

http://www.theknot.com/ourwedding/AtalieAlbin&PatrickWomble

We will try and keep the blog updated with more info and our mental states as we approach W-day.

Christmas Spoil

Atalie (left) at Christmas in 1989.

Surprisingly, Atalie won despite the two holes in the wall.

This is the dart board painted by Mrs. A. for me.

Mrs. A. made this for Atalie- it's an Aztec calendar that she mounted onto a small table.

Thanks to everyone for a great Christmas!

Back to the grind

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all (belated of course)! I hope everyone got as spoiled as we did over the holidays- our families were very generous! We, as most people around the world, started back to work this week so we ended up driving back to Missouri last Saturday. It turns out that we brought snow and cold back with us. We're bummed that we didn't get to see everyone we wanted to, but are happy we got a chance to visit with the people we did see. Just a short blog tonight, it's late and time to get ready for bed. We'll post pictures of some of the spoil later on this week (hopefully).

Also, wedding plans are kicking up a notch, so keep an ear out for more info... it might be sooner than you think.

Moving on...

It's official- I have completed my Master's Degree! I turned in the final printed versions of my thesis 8 minutes before the office closed on this past Friday afternoon. It is 131 pages long (215 with Appendices) and about 2 inches thick. The printed copies are unbound, so they will be shipped off to be bound by an outside company and then returned to the school in around 4 months where I am to pick them up.

After Christmas break, I'll begin looking for a job more aggressively and we'll get this whole marriage thing sorted out...

We hope to see most of you over the break!