Travelling Triumph!

My trip to Harrisburg was easily one of the most relaxing times I've had since moving to Manhattan. Staying with good friends always makes for an incredible time, but there is something about the homey-ness of someone else's family home - without the stress and constant frenzy of it being your own home, with its specific obligations, family members to see, and conversations to keep up - that makes visiting friends' parents homes my new ideal.

Add this to the fact that the home in which I was staying was newly-built and fabulously open and airy, and I had a Wednesday that felt as relaxed as an entire weekend in the country. I took the train out of and back into New York City and within 3 hours I was in the countryside, in the company of great friends. We spent the day on Wednesday touring the Gettysburg battlefields and receiving incredibly informative lessons that finally, for the first time in my life, made the Civil War start to come alive for me. Looking at the actual hills and spaces in which Union and Confederate troops clashed was truly eye-opening. Brought history out of the pages of the books, if you will. It's a shame that it took until I was 27 for me to have enough interest to find so much joy in this knowledge.

Nevertheless, with these pictures below I bid you adieu as I return to California early tomorrow morning to celebrate Christmas with my family, and squeeze a couple of friend-reunions in to boot. Returning to California is becoming consistently exhausting, mostly because I can't fly in under cover of night and not tell social contacts of my return to the west coast, since holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas are sort of givens for transplants' returns to their nests. Nevertheless, I'm sure I will have a wonderful weekend, and I wish you all joy and cheer if you celebrate Christmas this weekend as well!

 {What we looked out upon while making a breakfast of pancakes and bacon}

 {They have a pond on their property! With binoculars you could see little footprints traipsing back and forth in the snow on the iced over water}

{You can hardly see them at all, but there were wild turkeys that ran about and would stop to feast on what used to be an old soy bean field, before running off again}

 {These trees, just outside one of the living room windows, looked sort of elegantly creepy with their branches so bare and clawing towards the sky}

{As the afternoon continued on, the clouds continued to make beautiful streaks across the sky}