Winter Wonderland!

So as I mentioned yesterday, it snowed.... and snowed.... and snowed. It started yesterday morning on my way to work and continued until I arrived home. I think we ended up with about 4-5 inches. We even got to leave work early! Brad was home by about 4pm and I arrived not long after. It was the first time I had driven in snow so it was a little scary, but I found most drivers to be pretty careful. This is what it looked like when I arrived home:

The weird thing was how light it stayed last night. I guess it was the reflection of the clouds and the snow, what ever it was the results were very eerie.

Flagstaff & Football

You may think that these two things have nothing in common.... Flagstaff, a town in Northern Arizona at an altitude of about 7000 ft and about a 4 1/2hr drive west of Albuquerque... and Football (the Australian variety of course). But in mid November the two combined and we made the trip to see it!

The story actually starts when Brad found out that his football team Collingwood were coming to Flagstaff, Arizona for a week of high altitude training. Now for those of you who don't know, Collingwood is my least favourite team, so I was less than thrilled when Brad suggested we leave at 6am to make the 4 1/2hr drive to Flagstaff to watch the guys train! But being the fantastic wife that I am we went (hey, that was some quality knitting time in the car)! We arrived to see the guys training. Here are a couple of pics:

These are about the best two photos. Brad sat there complaining about the quality of our camera the whole time we were there. It wasn't until I took a photo that came out crystal clear that we realised that his hands had been shaking because he was so excited!

After we left the boys (who I have to admit were pretty nice), we drove down to Sedona. The scenery we saw on the way was beautiful, not quite what we expected to see in Arizona!

Sedona itself was a gorgeous town. It reminded us of Santa Fe but had a much more scenic back drop:

We spent some time exploring Sedona and the following morning we headed out to the "Out of Africa Wildlife Park". If you ever get a chance to visit this park, I highly recommend it. While we were there we got to see some amazing animals up close and personal!

All in all it was a great trip (even though we did see Collingwood instead of the Bulldogs).

By the way, it has snowed all day here (about 3-4 inches). I should have some good pictures for you all in my next post!

Carlsbad Caverns

We've been doing quite a bit of travelling of late. One of our recent trips was to El Paso to see the Rolling Stones who were awesome. I've got to admit, Mick Jagger wasn't bad for an old guy. I only hope that I have as much energy when I'm his age. He ran around that stage non stop - doing some pretty freaky dancing of course. The same can't quite be said for some of the other members of the Stones. Like Keith Richards for example - I think the description we used for him was "death warmed up". He looks like a guy who has had a very hard life (I guess it hadn't been that long since he fell out of the coconut tree either).

So any way, we stayed in El Paso for the night and I got to see Mexico for the first time across the Rio Grande. The following day we returned to Albuquerque via Carlsbad and saw the Carlsbad Caverns which were really beautiful. Here's a couple of happy snaps:

If you ever get to visit Southern New Mexico, I would highly recommend seeing the caverns. We would have liked to spend more time there and visit some of the other caves (you need to book ahead though).

In other news, it has turned COLD! Last week we even had a dusting of snow. So to help keep me warm, I have knitted myself a pair of hand warmers!

I have been wearing them everyday! I prefer to wear them when I drive, since I can grip the steering wheel better than when I when I wear gloves (although my fingers still get a little chilly)!

The pattern is "Fetching" from Knitty.com and the yarn is the same as specified. Although it's not cheap yarn (approx. $8/ball), I only used one ball to make the pair. The only modification I made to the pattern was to knit an extra couple of rows after the thumb to make them a little longer. I also used a regular bind off instead of the picot bind off that was called for.