New York Pictures

http://pictures.thelauves.com/nyc0710.html

With the St. Thomas sand barely shaken from our shoes, we headed off to the Big Apple for Laura Beth and Ben's wedding. We arrived on Friday just in time to eat lunch at an honest-to-goodness New York pizzeria before heading to the rehearsal. The rehearsal dinner was great, with fried chicken, asparagus, and some incredible cornbread, all in the beautiful setting of Ben's office which doubles as the home of his manager. Their ceremony was beautiful, with lots of personal touches and Irish traditions. We had a great time meeting Laura Beth and Ben's friends but also truly enjoyed the time we spent with the Browns and Jeff & Julie Boneau. On Sunday, October 7, we attended mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral and Brandi lit a candle in honor of her Dad's birthday that day. We then saw two great Broadway shows (Spring Awakening and Spamalot), and visited one of Brandi's old haunts, Scruffy Duffy's, where we watched the Yankees' only postseason win. We ended the night walking through Times Square and stopping to share another slice of pizza. On Monday, Brandi spent some time shopping on Fifth Avenue, while Daniel made a purchase from Rupert Gee, ate a street gyro, and watched the Columbus Day parade. Then we took the subway to Central Park and spent some time at the Natural History Museum. Stegosaurus is Daniel's favorite dinosaur, but Brandi can't be too far behind. After the museum, we went to Italian restaurant that was surprisingly expensive (and probably once hosted a meeting of the Five Families) and then headed to the airport. It was very important for us to make it to New York, because it holds a very special place in Brandi's heart. Next stop on our Take Your Spouse to Your Favorite Places Tour? Washington, D.C.!

Honeymoon Pictures

http://pictures.thelauves.com/honeymoon.html

"Our flight tomorrow? It's at 8:00 in the morning," said the newlyweds to anyone who would listen on the day after their wedding.

There was a lot happening on Sunday, so much that we forgot to pack (or even check our flight itinerary) until about 8:00 that evening. When we finally checked on our flight, we discovered that it left at 6:00 in the morning. We packed until about 2:00 Monday morning, set an alarm for 3:30, and were like zombies the rest of the day. We played the newlywed card to gain entrance to the American Airlines Admiral's Club (rather than surrender 60,000 frequent flyer miles), and we slept for about four hours of our six-hour DFW layover. We arrived in St. Thomas late Monday evening.

We awoke Tuesday to an absolute paradise, and we immediately went parasailing, had a nice swim, and just generally took it easy. We went shopping, made a trip over to St. John's (including some time on the world's 10th most beautiful beach), had an incredible snorkeling excursion, and went on a sunset cruise on our final night. All in all, it was a wonderful honeymoon, and it was a little tough to get back to the real world.

Banff Pictures

http://pictures.thelauves.com/banff.html

We jetted off to Calgary for a stay in Banff National Park on December 1, 2006. Brandi went first through the metal detector, and when we both were through it she turned around to me and said, "You didn't beep?" Little did she know that I was deathly afraid of setting off the alarm and someone finding out what I was hiding in my pocket. From the sled dog adventure to an amazing fondue dinner to the proposal, this was the perfect start to our engagement.

Welcome to our new blog!

This is the first post of what will hopefully be many posts by Brandi and me. You may notice the presence of several older posts already on here--those are from my old SportsHistory blog. I want to make it clear to the two readers of the SportsHistory blog that the semi-regular entries you have grown to love will not be going away; they will just be supplemented by the occasional travel journal, some pictures, and whatever Brandi would like to post about, presumably her frustration with trying to go clothes shopping with Daniel. (In my defense, I missed all of the Texas game and half the A&M game, so I think that justifies a little orneriness.)

In setting up this blog, I've had to migrate everything over to WordPress from Movable Type, so expect there to be some growing pains, and I should customize things a little better once I get used to the new digs. For those of you thinking the header image is a bad Photoshop job, you're wrong, only because I didn't use Photoshop at all. I used Paint, which I wouldn't recommend. The image of the two of us is taken from a very nice image from our sunset cruise in St. Thomas--a great picture, but unfortunately not good for a banner image. So I did my best to find a similar ocean sunset. We both do actually have faces, but we'll keep you in suspense for just a little bit longer.