Lake Geneva

Some relatives of Scott had their 50th Wedding Anniversary up in Lake Geneva last month so Scott and I went up the night before and stayed at a Bed and Breakfast. It was the perfect location...right on the lake and walking distance from downtown. The room was a bit comical though. I know B&Bs are supposed to be old and kind of "country-ish" in decor, but this place outdid itself! An older man ran the place and you could tell! The pillows were about 80 years old and the "Breakfast" aspect of the B&B was laughable. He served croissants (out of a can) with a piece of ham lunch meat rolled up in the middle of it and then warmed it up. It was gross. Even I could have made a better breakfast. Oh well....there could be worse things (like the bathroom in our room!

We walked along the path that goes all the way around the lake before we got settled into our room.

This is the most beautiful house on the lake. The woman who owns this is a single mom of 7 kids and used to wait tables to pay the rent. Then she somehow purchased a trucking company and is now a millionaire. She has a beautiful backyard with sayings on the railing.

The room kind of looked like a bottle of Pepto Bismol exploded everywhere.

The "Rose Room"

The bathroom sink was no bigger than an airline bathroom sink. This picture just doesn't do justice. You could barely fit one person in here and close the door.

Uhh, where's the counter?

I could hardly even wash my hands in the sink it was so small. Too funny!

All in all, it was a great trip. Lake Geneva will always hold a special place in our hearts since we got engaged there. We had beautiful weather and got to take a sunset boat tour of the lake for the anniversary party.

I'm still trying to figure out this Blog thing....everything is backwards. See my post below!

More images from our garden...

Purple Peppers!


We had TONS of cherry tomatoes! They were delicious!

Green Peppers. We were able to freeze BAGS and BAGS of peppers to use throughout the winter. Yum!

Our pumpkin. We set this out on our front step for Halloween and a little chipmunk made his home in here. So much for roasting pumpkin seeds!

Wedding Pictures

Hi everyone! We now have most of our wedding pics online so you can check them out! We still don't have our professional pictures back so we'll add those when we do. Enjoy!

http://picasaweb.google.com/scottandmelanie08/

Sausages

Every once in awhile, Scott likes to humiliate the dogs in some way or another (usually as I stand by cringing). This time, he decided to put some of his old shirts on them, and this is the result. It was really funny watching them because basically Sydney ate it up and loved being the center of attention as I was taking her picture (she's always the one with her tongue hanging out in these pics). Then there's Precious. You could tell that she hated every second of it and felt totally humiliated. She wouldn't even look at me to take a picture of her. She looked so sad. Just another example of these dog's crazy personalities! Also, we call them "sausages" because they are so short and fat (but really cute of course!) :)

This first picture is Precious on the left looking horrified, and Sydney on the right with a big smile on her face!



Again, Sydney looking happy, and Precious looking not-so-happy!



Guess which one is the happy one?



This is when Precious started getting really depressed. She wouldn't come away from the wall and I could not get her to look at me. Finally I did which you'll see in the next picture.


No animals were hurt during the documentation of this experiment!! (Although some might argue that Precious was emotionally hurt during all of this)

Shower and Bachelorette Party

My wonderful friends from College threw me a wedding shower and bachelorette party in Iowa City a few weeks ago. I had so much fun seeing everyone and it meant a lot to me that they came! We started out by having a "Fiesta" (in honor of our upcoming wedding in Mexico) at Makenna's house where we played a few games and ate some great food! I also got to open some fun presents for Scott and I to use in our home! Then we went out to dinner (where I had to open some extremely embarrasing presents!!!) and we finished the night out by bowling (while wearing sombreros and shaking maracas no less!)

Day Trip

Scott and I took the day and went up to Lake Geneva for some outdoor fun! It was the perfect time since the trees were beautiful colors. We stopped at an apple orchard on our way back and picked some awesome apples! We tried to make apple pie when we got home, but that attempt failed miserably. How hard can it be to make an apple pie?? Oh well, you live and learn! :)









This is a HUGE mansion on the lake. It used to be all one home, then it was sold and became a christian school (many years ago) and when that failed, it was bought and turned into condos. There are 6 condos in this building. It's beautiful!




There is a trail all around the lake so you can basically walk in people's yards. One home had a cool bridge that has tons of cool quotes on it. This is me next to a quote from my favorite musical, Wicked. The quote says "Take a message back for me...Tell them how I defied gravity...and no one that ever was or ever will be will ever bring me down!" These are lyrics from one of the songs at the climax of the musical!



So when Scott and I got to the orchard, they hand you a map and tell you which rows still have apples to pick. So Scott and I went on our merry way, and the first row we came to was this one (and for the record, Scott thought THESE were the trees we were supposed to pick the apples from) I did not see any apples to be picked but Scott insisted that we walk the whole row because THAT'S where the apples were!



Meanwhile...these are what the trees looked like one row over...hmmmm....looks like some good apple pickin' trees to me!! :)


Finally, we found the right trees!
















Scott wanted me to take pictures of the cows. Not sure why!!

Time for an update (for you Alissa!) Scott recently finished remodeling the main bathroom and it looks beautiful! He's been working hard on it for quite some time, and he did a great job! He pretty much gutted the whole thing and started over. At the time I took these, the shower doors weren't put in yet, but there are now glass shower doors.