From green hills to the frozen tundra

We are back home in Indiana. I apologize for the delay in posting. It's taken us awhile to get back into the swing of normal life again. Now the massive post to make up for my delay...

We had such a great trip, there is a lot to talk about. Thanks to everyone who left comments and sent emails with cool places to visit in San Fran. We only wish we had had more time so that we could have gotten to more of them. Thursday morning and early afternoon, Corey and I spent in Chinatown, checking out all of the cool groceries filled with things we'd never seen before.



The smells and sounds were so interesting. We are SO into that kind of stuff. There were very heated card games going on in the park in Chinatown. The men and the women were segregated and there were many games going on at once.





Next we went down to Fisherman's Wharf. We shopped around and waited for our night tour of Alcatraz.

This gull was a very willing subject for me to photograph. I love the way this one turned out.



The Alcatraz trip was really neat. The audio tour was great and it really pulled you into the whole experience . The nighttime ambiance made the whole thing quite spooky and creepily awesome.



The next day, Corey and I went back to San Francisco and visited the Ferry Building (filled with cool gourmet food stores) and the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. The Academy of Sciences was unbelievable - it is a rainforest, aquarium, natural history museum, and planetarium in one - all under a living roof. So cool.



So many of the tanks in aquarium were muli-layered. You could view the tank in the photo above from underwater as well.

The living roof on top:



There was a neat greenway near Lily's Nanny's house. We took Lily over there a few times to swing on the swingset. How nice it was to walk around without a coat!



We had a chance to finally meet my Flickr friend Virginia in person! Her hubby and baby are just adorable, as well. We had a nice lunch and now it is their turn to visit us in IN ;)



Lily and Oliver seemed to like eachother...



The last evening we were there, Christina and Chris had a little dinner party so we got to meet more members of our ever growing family! Here is a photo with Lily and her birth great-grandma Loretta:



Serving up the wonderful meal that Christina prepared for all of us..



The evening ended with us all dancing to Beyonce. You can't beat that, can you? While we were all dancing around the living room, Christina asked me if looking back, I would have ever imagined such a thing. I can't say that this is anything I could have expected, but here we are, 10 months later and a whole family richer. They have opened their arms and accepted all three of us into the family. It makes me teary to think about.



Lily wasn't really sure about her grandpa Chris. I think it was the facial hair she had trouble warming up to...



A photo of Tiger who has grown like a weed since we saw him last..



I shot this last photo out the window at the airport as we left. I think this is my favorite of all of them.