Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Smokies

We took a little 24-hour jaunt down to the Smoky Mountains. Since it was just one night, we decided to live it up and stay in a really fun hotel with an indoor pool, which Lea went a little crazy for.



Unfortunately, the weather was a bit nasty, so our hiking was limited (although we did make it to one waterfall and one cool trail with overlooks, for a total of maybe 5-6 miles of hiking, some of it wet).







The best part of the hike was having a picnic lunch, complete with Lea's first time eating a sandwich that hadn't been cut into tiny pieces. She's so big!


Did I mention that our camera broke?

Well, now it's replaced, so it's time to catch up.

First of all, I took these pictures with the old camera, but couldn't even get them loaded onto the computer (the camera wouldn't even turn on). So, for all who have been dying to hear about Barack Obama's visit to my hometown, you're in luck! Luckily enough, he chose Downingtown as part of his whistle-stop tour through Pennsylvania, which just happened to coincide with a weekend we were up visiting. We got there a few minutes late and couldn't find parking, so we essentially missed most of the stump speech, but Jenn and I heard the end of it and it was awesome to just be there among the crowd. It was such a diverse group of people, I about wept. There was something really powerful about standing there among people from the community where I grew up (and recognizing many of them), and seeing pretty much every face intently focused on this message of unity and progress. Very cool. We stuck around to see the train off (and, helpfully I'm sure, pointed out that they were actually heading back towards Philly when they pulled away, despite the plan to travel to Harrisburg next. Of course, they were just backing up so they could switch to a different track, but we still felt like we had contributed).