Day After Part 1

We celebrated Brian's upcoming 30th birthday in the morning during the hotel breakfast. Some of the family members had to get driving home to northern Minnesota, so 9 a.m. breakfast was the best time. (Whew, and it wasn't too easy getting up and going the next morning!)


Rick, Kate, Dottie and Uncle Tom enjoying the birthday breakfast . . .

Brian with his aunt and uncle, Amy and Jeff and cousins Nathan and Dustin and Grandma Dorothy.

Our second breakfast with the Smith fam.

Charissa and baby Morena. She has a cute Oxford University baby onesie on!

The Smith clan before parting for the day.

Good thing we had two breakfasts to stock up on nutrients before we headed to the Ohio State football game tailgate. Ohio State is #1 in the nation, so it was going to be a big one!

Rick & Kate Wedding Day

All the groomsmen and groom before hopping onto the party bus to pick up the ladies, and take them all to the ceremony.

The gorgeous couple right before the ceremony!


Brian, Rick and sis Dottie before the ceremony - what a good looking fam!

And now with their significant others . . . even better looking! :)


It was a wonderful outdoor ceremony, followed by walking up the hill to the reception location with dinner and dancing. There was an enormous back deck from the main room, and it was a beautiful spot to overlook the small lake and have cocktails and snacks before dinner. It was also a nice escape from the loud music if you needed a break from cutting a rug! Kelly danced with cousin Dustin, and Brian visited with some long distance relatives on the Smith side of the family (grandpa Smith's brother Ken and his wife Donna.)

Brian giving the Best Man speech to his bro Rick and Rick's new wife Kate.

The dancing went to midnight and got pretty wild with Rick's crew (no big surprise there!) But everyone made it home to their hotel rooms afterwards and continued the partying!

Photo credit: Pictures 1, 4 & 5 are from Rick & Kate's photographer John Hanson (wish I could say they were mine!)

Day Before Wedding

The girls (here are Kate, Dottie, and mother of the groom Jackie) had a fun morning getting mani/pedis (manicures and pedicures) together, along with a massage. Great way to start the day! The guys went mountain biking . . . you'll have to ask about when they hit a wild turkey!


Kelly and Kate getting beautiful toes!


This is the rehearsal for the outdoor wedding ceremony. Rick and Kate had her hometown pastor from Minnesota fly in for the wedding. Brian was Best Man and Dottie was Maid of Honor.


The photogenic Bride and Groom at the rehearsal dinner in their fave Mexican restaurant.



Cousin Carl and his wife Charissa and their new baby girl Morena just flew in from Seattle in time for the dinner. They are so excited to have Rick and Kate moving to Seattle!


Here's a great pic of Brian and Rick with their dad Tom and his partner-in-crime Karen!


Cute pic of Kelly and Dottie all dressed up.


Parting shot of the evening, Bri with his shades before heading out downtown with the guys. Kelly stayed back and enjoyed some Leinenkuegel's Honeyweiss back in the Smith party room.

Trip Back to U.S.A.

I realize I won't have time to write in so many details from our trip back home, so I'm going to let the photos do the talking and I'll add captions.



We had a lovely 12 hour layover in the Toronto airport on our flight over. So Kelly is trying to get some ZZZZs on the floor, while Brian is chilling out to some tunes.


The main reason for our trip home was for Brian's brother's wedding in Columbus, Ohio. We caught a ride with Brian's folks Al and Jackie to Ohio from Minnesota. Here we are the first night (Wednesday) in Ohio and having dinner at Champs with some of the early arriving wedding guests. Brian's bro Rick is on the far right and the other guys, Lyle and Nynas are really good buddies of Rick and Brian's from high school in Two Harbors, MN. Molly is Nynas's girlfriend.


Here's a cute pic at Champs with Brian's sister Dottie and her new fiance Andrew. They live in Denver and just got engaged a few months ago. This was the first time Brian and I, and Rick and Kate got to meet Dot's man!


Can you tell they're brothers?!! After dinner was a bonfire at Rick and Kate's house. The weather was hot and muggy for mid-September and Brian and I loved it! I had to go buy some capris as I'm used to bundling up for the English weather. We were celebrating one of the last nights hanging out in Rick and Kate's backyard, as they are currently in the process of moving to Seattle for a new job for Rick. Can you believe it's just after we left Eugene, Oregon?? We're so bummed! But super happy for R&K since we know they'll love the Northwest.

Bettina's Birthday

My good friend Bettina (in the pink shirt) just turned 30 this past weekend. She invited friends over for snacks and drinks from 5-7 on Sunday. Bettina just got engaged this summer in Paris (so romantic!) to her fiance Stefan and they are getting married in May in his hometown in Germany. So obviously Stefan was at the party along with another Newcomer friend we knew (Frewayni, on my left), along with a couple other Oxford lawerly types they are both friends with. Bettina just passed her exams to become an English solicitor (lawyer) as she was trained in Germany. Stefan lectures and researches in International Law at St. Anne's College at the University.

Here is a pic of some of the ladies at Bettina's party on her back garden patio.

Oxford Beer Festival

Okay, so I have a legit excuse why I'm still slow in updating. We were having some difficulties downloading photos to our iPhoto program since we had video clips on our camera as well. And some bug was preventing all the photos to download since there was a prob with the video part working with Quicktime Player. Anywho, I finally found a patch to fix it all up, so in the near future, I'll be able to include video clips on the blog as well!

In the meantime, here is what we were up to this past weekend in Oxford. Friday night was the 10th annual Oxford Beer Festival. It was held down in the city centre at the Town Hall. It was pretty much the same situation as the Eugene Beer Fest and I'm sure countless others. We paid 2 pounds to get in, 2 pounds for a 1/2 pint tasting glass (we could keep) and then another 5 pounds in tickets to purchase the different kinds of beer to try out. It was all still good 'ol warm flat English beer. But I do have to say that the smaller brewers in the area still brew very tasty warm flat beer with a strong flavor. So we did enjoy the tastings and it didn't take much to get a mean buzz going on!

We had met up with a number of Brian's colleagues from his office. There are a set of them who are the beer guzzlers of the group and of course they were mostly all there. Brian's advisor Ian was also along for a bit. I was the only WAG for most of the time, until Gemma arrived later on.

And as I usually close my posts by saying we ended up at the pub for a pint, I think we had enough pints at the Festival so we passed on the pub and stumbled home after getting some cheap chips (fries) to snack on the way!

Ghetto BBQ

The Sunday before we left for the States, we hosted what we termed a Ghetto BBQ in the gravel parking lot of our building. Since we don't have any nice patch of grass/garden/lawn to call our own, we just decided to plunk down our kitchen table and chairs in the middle of the parking lot, not far from the rubbish bin (garbage dumpster) and bike rack. Therefor it was pretty ghetto! But it was nice evening, and we had our American friends/neighbors, Matt and Donna, Matt's mom, and their two girls down for the BBQ. The girls Eva (5) and Ruby (3) along with their grandma made this cute homemade pinata which we strung up from our window and they took turns giving it a good whack. We grilled chicken (of course) and had nice potato salad and green salad to share. Much wine was going around and it was just nice to chill on a late Sunday afternoon with decent weather for once. Especially knowing it was going to turn fall and colder really quickly!