Okay. Sorry this took me a little longer to get posted than I thought. I had a difficult time getting all the pictures on here. On that note, I warn you there are lots of pictures on this post. And probably lots of rambling about our trip. So if you want to skip over it, feel free. :) Our trip back east started Saturday, July 30th. We flew out of Denver, so we decided to stop by the Denver temple, since that is our new temple. It is beautiful, but it was super busy! I can see why they need a new temple in Fort Collins.

Saturday night we arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina. Stacey, Devon, and Devon's cute nephew Charlie picked us up and we went to Smash Burger. Yum! On Sunday we went to church, relaxed, and enjoyed a yummy dinner cooked by Devon. Monday, Steve and I took off to explore Charlotte. We spent some time at the Billy Graham museum/library. It was pretty awesome. We even got little cards to sign and carry with us to remember the day we were saved. :) Here's Steve walking out of the last room in the museum, and me in front of the main building.

Tuesday morning, Stacey and I went to get pedicures. I'd never had a pedicure before, and it was pretty great! We wandered around the mall, got her a beautiful dress to wear to the temple, and ate some yummy frozen yogurt. Then it was time to go back to their place to get ready to head down to Columbia.

Steve and I were lucky enough to drive with Stacey on our way down to the temple. We took this picture while we were waiting at the drive thru at McDonalds. :)

The Columbia, SC temple is beautiful! And very small!

Hey look! They're married!!

We got some group shots outside the temple, and Steve was photographer and took a few other great pictures of Stacey and Devon. After a few minutes though, we were all way too hot and decided to get back in the cars.

So we drove to Charleston and checked into our hotels. Side note here, our hotel was bad news!! It was not exactly super clean. And it didn't have a do not disturb sign. Which, apparently, we needed. When we were gone on Wednesday, we came back to find Steve's bag wide open. And when we were gone for only a little bit early Thursday morning, we came back to find 3 of our 4 towels had gone missing. Weird. Anyway, back to Tuesday night. We met back with everyone and Devon's mom treated us to TGI Fridays. It was yummy!

Wednesday morning was Devon and Stacey's ring ceremony. And it was on board a Carnival cruise ship. Awesome! We spent the hour before the ceremony wandering around the ship.

Then we attended the beautiful ceremony.

And ate a super fancy dinner in a fancy dining room.

Steve was even brave enough to eat his whole pile of creamed spinach stuff all at once. And this was even after baby Sammy had tried a small bite and made the funniest most disgusted face. I tried to take a picture of the dessert, but it turned out kind of weird. But it was SO good! Passion fruit goodness with berries and yummy juice.... and also super yummy cake.

After dinner, we were kicked off the ship so they could get ready to set sail! Thursday morning we were on our own. We started the day by running across this cool bridge over the Charleston Bay.

This is a horrible picture of me, but I am just showing that we really did run. Please ignore my crazy facial expression.

Then we packed up our stuff into Stacey's car (Thanks for letting us borrow it!!) and headed North to Myrtle Beach. On our way, we stopped at the Hampton Plantation. It was neat, but within seconds we were eaten by mosquitoes!! I think between the two of us we received at least 20-30 bites within about 5 seconds. It was CRAZY! Between the heat, humidity, and bugs, I don't know how slaves worked on those plantations. My heart goes out to them even more after experiencing just a few minutes there. As Steve was taking this picture, I was calling out for him to hurry up because mosquitoes were starting to find me again.

We kept driving and made it to Myrtle Beach. Our hotel here was still cheap, but SO much better than the one in Charleston! And the location... Awesome!!! This is the view from just outside the hotel. Perfect.

Steve got to experience the Atlantic Ocean for the first time!

And my feet were super happy.

We spent the rest of Thursday on the beach. Friday, we decided to do some exploring. We walked down to the main part of Myrtle Beach and walked through lots of gift shops. At my favorite one (The Gay Dolphin) we found many very random treasures. Including these magnets...

Cool huh!? They also had some from other states/cities nowhere remotely near Myrtle Beach. We spent the rest of Friday afternoon playing in the waves. I didn't really get any pictures, but trust me, it was great! Saturday morning we decided to get up really early to see the sunrise. We missed the actual rise part, but it was still beautiful!

Then we went for a barefoot run on the beach.

We left Myrtle Beach that morning, and headed back to Charlotte, NC to start our journey home. Unfortunately, our flight from Charlotte to Atlanta was delayed because of a storm in Atlanta. We finally made it, but when we landed in Atlanta, we found that we had missed our connecting flight... by 5 minutes. :( So we tried to get on Standby for the last flight to Denver that night. We started as numbers 40 and 41 on the standby list, and we made it all the way to 20 and 21... but we didn't make the flight. So, we made ourselves "comfortable" and got a couple hours of sleep.

*Note I'm wearing Steve's suit coat... it was FREEZING!* Our new flight was scheduled to leave Atlanta at 9:40 Sunday morning. But we were super lucky and were 2 of the 3 lucky individuals to make it on standby on to the 8:20 flight. We got home around 1:00 and napped the rest of the day. :) We had a super fun vacation, and I'm glad we were able to see Devon and Stacey, and also spend some time with just the two of us before school starts. :)