Elia's Life

This year, when I went to visit Annette and Alita for Labor Day, they asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday. Well, after we all thought about it for a while, we remembered that I had yet to see the Grand Canyon. So that is where we went. It was AMAZING!!! I really shouldn't have been as surprised as I was. I've yet to go to a non-impressive National Park, but I still was. The Grand Canyon is just amazing, and spectacular, and grand, and a canyon. I mean, it's truly hard to find words to describe it. Lucky for you all, I took over 200 pictures. Not lucky for me, is I just spent an hour trying to whittle that number down a bit. It was horrible, much like trying to pick your favorite child. But here are the fruits of my labor. The following pictures are going to have very little words accompanying them, because I truly believe they speak for themselves. If any of them are having trouble, I'll help out. :) I do have more pictures, but I'm going to leave this par...

Another perk of my recent (okay, almost an entire month ago) trip to Reno was I finally got to see Lake Tahoe. Despite the fact that my dad didn't believe me, I had never really been to Lake Tahoe before. The closest I had gotten was Incline Village for Academic Olympic tournaments (and I actually think that was just once.) Well, the lake is beautiful. I still like Walker Lake better, but it was good to finally see such a famous spot. It was pretty hot day and I was feeling very unmotivated, so we mainly just drove around and looked from the road. But Dad did make me stop at a few particular overlooks. So here are the pictures from them. It really is a gorgeous lake. I hope you all enjoy the pictures, but please, no comments about the weird line. I am still trying to find out what that is.

I believe most of you who read my blog are aware of my attraction (some might say obsession) to cars. I sort of liked cars before my mission but after living in Detroit and especially after attending the National Auto Show, I have grown to LOVE cars!!! Well, this year when I was talking to a co-worker, he said that he'd always wanted to go to Hot August Night's in Reno. It was at this time that it dawned on me that I had never been to HAN, even though I've spent most of my life living just outside of Reno. So I decided that this year I was going to go. I called Dad, made plane reservations, and went to Reno for a weekend over the first of August. It was great, Dad and I had a ton of fun. One of the things we did was going to the National Auto Museum. We had been there once before as a family, but I think I was about fifteen and all I remembered was being really bored and wishing that Dad wouldn't take so long to look at every car. Well, I had an inkling that this year, ...