Seattle + 9 Years

Dave and I spent our actual 9th wedding anniversary apart.  It's cool, though.  Our anniversary was on a Tuesday and Tuesdays are notoriously crappy days at work for Dave.  He came up to Coeur d'Alene super late that Friday night and on Saturday, we headed to Seattle for a little getaway and celebration of 9 freakin' years of marriage.  Crazy.  I don't feel old enough to have been married for 9 years.

The drive over to Seattle was so super pretty and we stopped off in Cle Elum for some pretty epic Taco Bell.  It was great (for real, I'm not being sarcastic).

Our trip was short, but so great.  I love Seattle.  We moseyed around the piers, ate Beecher's grilled cheese, drank a bunch of retro sodas, went to the market, took a nap, listened to live jazz in our hotel lobby and enjoyed our complimentary ice cream sundae or root beer float each night!  It was super fun and the weather was phenomenal.  Couldn't have planned it better.

These were a couple of our favorite sodas we tried.  The vanilla one actually has a "fat free" version.  I didn't bother with it, though.

The piers:

These next three photos are the very sequence of me thinking I just got pooped on:

No poop, just my grays.

We played around with the new lens a lot, trying to figure out the distortion, etc.  Here's some distortion for your viewing pleasure:

Cute, right?

OK, now I need to talk nerdy for a minute about this lens.  If anyone that ever reads this has an interest in photography, I need you to know that this lens has the craziest image stabilization (IS) I have ever seen!  Depending on the lens I'm using, I typically can't get a hand held (without a tripod) picture without camera shake unless my shutter speed is 1/125th of a second or faster.  This lens, though, was taking pictures HAND HELD with minimal to no camera shake with a shutter speed as slow as 0.3 seconds!  IT'S AMAZING.  Since I know you care, I'll share the shutter speeds of the pictures where it shows the IS off.

Cool fountain Dave took this picture of.  (1/15th of a second shutter speed.)

The market.  I love the market.  (0.3 second shutter speed.  Seriously?!  Hand held, people!)

There was a tour going on.  (1/20th of a second shutter speed.)

The first night we were there was the seafarers parade.  We walked past it on our way to the hotel, but that's about it.

To market, to market to buy a fat pig.  All of these pictures are with the wide angle lens:

He may be dead, but he's still hungry.

This is where I switched it to the 100mm macro:

Buzz buzz.

On the ferry:

We were wuuuusy Texans and were cold and got hot chocolate on our ride.  It was so yummy.

Both of these skyline pictures were taken at 0.3 second shutter speed on a moving boat.  I mean, seriously... unreal.

To sum it up, I'm sorry for gushing so much about the new lens and Seattle was so fun and Dave and I have been married for 9 years.  That's almost a decade.  Pretty crazy, but I'm so glad we've had each other through all the ridiculous and crazy life changes (living in Houston/Dave's job here has been pretty nuts) we've endured all these years.  

Here's to you, Dave, and to Amsterdam.  Love, Ash.

P.S.  I found a 100 dollar bill on the ground (no joke) but Dave lost it.  That sucked, but we were none the poorer.