There and Back and There Again. Overwhelming Busyness

I've beend doing a pretty crap job of keeping up with the bloggage lately. I haven't been too too busy, but here's the short version of what's happened since the last time I wrote a significant update on the goings-on in my life as part of this summer's four-way-cross-country trip. Here's the route we took:



Along the way we saw 5,265 miles, nineteen different states, six different hotel rooms, and countless bits of roadkill. Fun.

When last I wrote about this little adventure, we were in Petaluma for a week or so. After that week we flew back to Seattle for the second of our three wedding receptions. I tried to avoid billing it as a wedding reception for several reasons, but with the venues and the menus and the dress and the cakes and so on, it's hard to call them anything else. I'll post again about the Seattle party when all of the pictures come back, so for now, here's a picture of one of the two cakes:

Ana had it commissioned at Mike's Amazing Cakes. They make just about anything you can think of in the form of a custom cake. In this case, Ana was trying to come up with something that was uniquely me and, while plenty of people have stormtrooper armor or sailboats or snow dogs, mine is the only chrome Miata in the world.

Anyhow, once the party was over we spent the next day waiting for Ana to recover from her hangover while I loaded up the car. Somewhere along the way I spotted a little stowaway:



The following morning, after doing a dog count and making sure we were actually leaving them all behind, we were on the road again:



And finally driving into California for the first time this year:



We arrived in Petaluma and I set to work getting ready for the third of three wedding receptions:

(trust me, that picture makes sense if you were there)

A few days later my sisters arrived:


After a slow night of drinking and catching up, we all went our separate ways to prepare for the following day's festivities.


There's a lot of pictures I'm still sorting through from the Petaluma Party, so stay tuned.