On the Road Again!

It's been exactly one month since we've been on the road! We didn't plan it that way. Our original plan was to leave much sooner but life got in the way. Holidays, birthdays, surgeries, house stuff. You name it. But we finally left. We aren't even the least bit disappointed to have stuck around though. We had such a good time being at home for the last month. Got to spend some quality time with our families, which was fantastic. And we had our first married Christmas in our home together too. Some of our highlights from the holidays...

My big courageous brother, who despite having a herniated disc, managed to have a smiling face for his family at Christmas. He had surgery this week to correct it which was very successful.

My beautiful parents opening up their presents on Christmas morning. They got hit hard this year (in a good way, of course). They got a gorgeous family photo on canvas and all their home videos converted to DVD from VHS.

My lovely sister-in-law. This picture is awesome. A true 'point and laugh' caught in the act! My mom got us each these little potato pistols for Christmas. You stick them in a potato and out comes this little pellet. You squeeze the trigger and the pellet is propelled into the air and smacks your target. It was awesome. It also made our Christmas dinner over and hour late. But it was well worth it. Might be a new tradition at the Ressler house...

I love this picture. This is one of those moments of pure joy that's evident all the way to the eyes. So much joy that the facial muscles have difficulty smiling big enough. I think he just shot me with the potato gun.

Our first Christmas tree. In true Charlie Brown fashion.

We celebrated New Years with my bro and sis. We had poppers.  So much confetti...

We went down to Rockville for Juliann's birthday to go climbing at Carderock. It was such a great day!

Meet Josh's brother, John. This is a classic John pose :)

Josh took fun pictures this day. He set up the toproping site and anchors for us to climb and then worked on his photography skills. He has a Brownie camera from the 20's that he got film for and practiced using that. 

And then just this weekend, we got to see one of our favorite kids get dedicated at church :) 

And now we are on the road again. We drove roughly 550 miles today. We left yesterday afternoon for Josh's parents' house to drop off a few things and hang out for a little. Then drove for as long as we were awake enough to. Which wasn't far. Then today we started out from Gainesville, VA and are currently somewhere just past Knoxville, TN. The states got longer. So did the accents. We are officially in the South. We encountered everything from closed roads due to ice, torrential rainstorms, beer sold at gas stations to 60 degree weather! It's been and odd sort of travel day.  We took a slightly scenic route to drive part of Skyline Drive in Shenendoah State Park.

View from one of the overlooks along Skyline Drive. This is the Shenendoah Valley. Very pretty.

The thermometer reads 60 degrees! Yeah baby!

We took some time last night to plan out the rest of our route because we only have a short time to be gone for this leg of our journey. We were sad to discover that we just don't have the time to make it the whole way out west. No California, Oregon or Washington for us :(  But we WILL see those states at some point. Maybe in the Fall...We have our work cut out for us for our route. I think we'll probably sleep for a week when we get back. But here we go with part two!