October Adventures

I guess I have been seriously lacking in blogging area of my life, because I have been informed that it is time to update it. October was a really busy month for us, especially towards the end. We were both swamped with mid-terms and papers and assignments. I still don't know how Steve kept up because the guy had zero free time. But we made it out, alive and well!

We both had Columbus day off and decided to head up to Salem for the day. It turns out Salem is really only 45 minutes away! It was a fun day! Salem is a cute small(ish) town that totally reminded me of Stars Hollow (The made up town that the Gilmore Girls is set in). We walked around most of the day, and saw the "historic" sights. Historic is in quotations because the sights were mostly old houses/churches that had been turned into witch museums and charged an arm and leg to go in a see them! When we looked online, most of the museum reviews we saw were bad so we tried to avoid the tourist traps and do the free stuff! We did end up going into a monster museum, it was pretty entertaining and best of all cheap-- which is why we picked that tourist trap! It was a museum full of the prototype monsters that make-up artists use to create horror film characters. Some of the big names were, Beetlejuice, Frankenstein, the doll from Chucky, and lots more that I didn't recognize. All in all, Salem was kind of hokey and really touristy but we did enjoy spending the day together and now we can say we've visited!

There were photo-ops like this EVERYWHERE. I had to BEG Steve to let me take this picture, he felt silly I guess!

I love the musical "Thoroughly Modern Millie" with Julie Andrews. I loved this store too.

The Witch House- One of those tourist traps I was telling you about :) It looks like a witch house though, don't ya think?

There was a free garden in the backyard of some mansion, so we stopped by. It had gorgeous flowers and a HUGE tree...and it was like totally empty which was great!

A couple of weeks ago the weather went crazy! It had been like 70 degrees on Saturday and then Sunday it was SOOO cold, and in the afternoon it SNOWED! This wasn't a wimpy storm either the snowflakes were enormous. The pictures don't do them justice, but we tried anyway. We went for a walk in the snow. I'm not going to lie, I was totally enchanted by the snow falling. I can't say that's ever happened to me before. I guess after 3 years of almost never seeing snow fall will do that to a person :) The snow didn't stick for very long, the next day was like 60 degrees. The weather here is CRAZY. The day after the snowstorm (aka a Noreaster), I was chatting with one of my professors who said she's lived in Boston for 30+ years and it has never snowed so early. I hope this isn't a sign of the longest winter ever!

This is just ONE snowflake. Crazy huh?

Giant Snowflakes!


Two weeks ago Steve had a couple of days off of school and I never have class on Wednesday or Thursdays, so we decided to take a little leaf-peeping tour of Massachusetts. On Wednesday night we drove all the way across the state to the north western corner and stayed the night. Thursday morning we go up and started driving! We made up our own route, it was kind of fun actually. We had a map and basically whenever we came to a junction we looked at the map to where that road would take us, and if we thought it would be good we turned! We ended up seeing some really beautiful areas. I FELL IN LOVE with New England fall colors. I was absolutely enchanted with the trees. There were some that had the most brilliant colors it was incredible. Sometimes we'd round a corner and there would be a hillside full of beautiful fall foliage. I wish I could describe them and do them justice, but I can't so I'm not going to try!

All of the pictures above are from Chesterfield Gorge, Steve's favorite place to fly fish out here. We stopped there for a few hours to enjoy a forest walk. It was so beautiful!

I took this picture of the car window- It was some random bush by a bank or something but I thought it was pretty awesome. It looks like birds feathers or something!

And our last stop before we got home was Walden Pond. This is such a beautiful place. The pond is crystal clear and surrounded by beautiful trees. I think you can see why Thoreau set up his camp here.

This last weekend was our stake conference and Elder M Russel Ballard was here presiding over it. COOLEST THING EVER! The Friday adult meeting was held in the famous Trinity Church in down town Boston. There are no church buildings here large enough to house our whole stake, so we had to meet in a different church. But, they are building a $14 million stake center in Cambridge near the church we currently attend, but it won't be finished until this May. Anyways, this church was so beautiful, and the acoustics were awesome. Elder Ballard has a great sense of humor: Before he started his talk he invited the stake president, temple president, and the mission president and his wife to bear their testimonies from the pulpit so they could tell all their friends and family that they had preached from the pulpit of the Trinity church :) It was a really great meeting, I am so glad we had that opportunity to hear a living apostle preach the gospel to us. His message was basically 'Don't let your world spin so fast you don't take time do the things that matter' especially daily meditation in a quiet place with the scriptures. I was truly touched by his message. After the meeting was over, Steve and I got to SHAKE HIS HAND! He probably took at least 30 minutes shaking hands with and meeting the people in our stake, what a guy! This was really cool for me because I've never had the opportunity to shake an apostle's hand. I was like giddy with excitement! Our Sunday meeting was also really amazing, it was held in a Marriot hotel conference room in down town Boston. I can't say I can remember going to church in crazy places like we did this weekend. During the meeting, Elder Ballard acknowledged that Mitt Romney was there. That was cool, but what was more cool was that I SHOOK HIS HAND TOO! After the meeting, Mitt Romney was shaking hands and meeting people too, (I've heard he used to be in the Stake presidency of our Stake but I'm not for sure) and so I waited for a while and debated whether I should try to shake his hand, I decided not to and we started walking. Then like 3 minutes later, he and his wife were immediately behind us, I couldn't help myself... I, being normal awkward self turned around, looked straight at him and asked "Can I shake your hand?" He was like sure, shook my hand and told me "Have a nice day". How cool is that? It was like Mormon celebrity weekend for me!