Memories and Melodies: Summer 2012 | Personal

It's been looking a lot like this around this blog lately...

But I've decided to dust off the cobwebs (ha!) and give you a fun little recap of my summer.

  We met up with friends a few times for frozen yogurt...



Took a trip to Texas...







  I got this great big wonderful Texas-sized mug when we were there. I love it!











  I made a grand mess in the kitchen putting together two apple pies for...
  The Fourth of July!


We had some dear friends stay with us for a couple days in July, and took the opportunity to make this scrumptious recipe.....ohmygoodnessgracious it was so good!


Rachel had never been sightseeing along the Coast, so we decided to remedy that. :) We had a delightful time showing her all of our favorite places, including the Triplett-Day drugstore in downtown Gulfport, the small craft harbor in Biloxi, and the quaint little downtown of Ocean Springs!





















We had lots of birds visiting all summer, including this (hilarious) cardinal who wanted to take a closer look. :)








The view from Snodgrass Hill at the Chickamauga-Chattanooga battlefield is one that I will never forget.


  Or the view of Lake Junaluska. It was so good to see it again!





  The sky was black with storm clouds for a couple of days in August...

  But, praise the LORD, we were safe and sound and Hurricane Isaac didn't affect us too much.

  We've seen some gorgeous sunsets this summer...



Celebrated a couple birthdays (both of my parents)...

  And kept a close eye out for hummingbirds! This year we had several who stayed around our feeders, and they're almost too quick to be captured with a camera lens...so I was thankful to get these shots!






(These aren't edited in the least, by the way. The light was that gorgeous!!)

  Sarah and I have enjoyed attending a dear friend's volleyball games...





  (Not edited, either. It was amazing...)



And now we come to the other part of this post. Music!! Those of you who know me personally know that music is a very big part of my life. Photography is just a hobby in comparison! So I was so.so.so.excited when a friend from church loaned me this mandolin!



  Hunter Hayes was absolutely right when he said that mandolin players spend half their time tuning and the other half playing out of tune...but it's so much fun to play!!!



(In case you're wondering...that's a Kawai piano, Rogue mandolin, Yamaha acoustic, and Washburn classical. I play all four...not equally well! But I love all of them!)
One of the things I love about summer can't quite be captured in a picture. It's getting in the car and driving down the road and turning the radio on. If I'm not in the car, then it's going on YouTube and listening to song after song after song.
So here are some of the songs I've enjoyed this summer!
First of all, I'll start off with my favorite "summer" song...it takes over my brain for about three days every April or so, right before summer gets here and I just want it to hurry up and get here so bad:
Til Summer Comes Around by Keith Urban (shot at the Santa Monica Pier in California - is that a gorgeous place or what?!)
If you follow me on Pinterest you may have noticed a lot of this guy's stuff:
I won't talk your ears off but suffice it to say...as a musician, music teacher, and lover of music in general, I think he's the best thing that's happened to the music industry in a long time. Hunter Hayes is genuinely talented. Look him up on YouTube or read about him online if you want. I'm not one of his biggest fans (dubbed Hayniacs) but I have a very great appreciation for the talent and hard work he puts into everything he does.
Worth a listen....he wrote this song for the movie Act of Valor:






In June we discovered the lovely Jillian Edwards, who's engaged to Steven Curtis Chapman's son Will:


  Speaking of SCC, I absolutely love his rendition of the hymn Morning Has Broken:
  And I've been listening to these songs a lot lately, too:


  That about wraps things up for how my summer was!
The air is finally a bit cooler (it actually didn't get over 80˚ on Monday!!) and it's starting to feel like fall. Well, what little "fall" we get down here. You northerners are fortunate when it comes to fall weather, that's for sure. :)
I've made some wonderful memories and enjoyed some wonderful music the past few months. God is so good. So faithful. All that He is and all that He does will never cease to overwhelm me. I hope that you are as thankful as I am for His grace and the memories you've made and the music you've heard this summer!
Because of Jesus, Rebekah

Summer Vacation, Part 3 | Personal {North Carolina and South Carolina travel photography}

Here's Part Three of our summer vacation photos!


The sky above the cross at Lake Junaluska (see previous post)


We were close to the bustling (during tourist season, that is) mountain town of Waynesville, and we three girls had the.best.time.ever browsing in all the little shops. This was one of our favorites- can you believe those drawings are done in colored pencil?!?


Sarah and I got this ENORMOUS donut at a bakery on Main Street- seriously, the picture doesn't do it justice. And it was soooo good. :)


A couple of days we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway for a couple of hours...














Thank you, rock wall, for holding my camera! :)


It was no fun driving through clouds...and with bicyclists all along the road, too! A little scary.


(Whoops, this wasn't from the parkway- it's actually the view from the house of the friend of my grandmother whose family built the open-air house the pictures from which are in the previous post. WHEW!)  Can you imagine waking up to a view like this every morning?!?


Cute car. :)







YES IT WAS COLD OUTSIDE! Well, not really. :) We were used to 90˚ at home, with 100% humidity. So it felt really good. Yay for having to wear jackets in the middle of August!!





Okay. See how there are three little dips, so to speak? The one farthest away- on the horizon, basically- is Lake Junaluska.


We have an almost identical picture from 7 years ago and thought we'd re-create it. :)






This absolutely gorgeous place is the Balsam Mountain Inn! The campground we were staying at is just down the road from it, and whenever we'd go to and from we'd see the sign. So one afternoon we three girls decided to check it out...and ohmygoodness what a beautiful place!!











We all GASPED when we looked over and saw this.

















A hammock in the bathroom? Of course! Actually, when they brought the old inn back to life, they took what once were 3 rooms and made them into 1 suite- bathroom, bedroom, and sitting room. So they needed to do something to take up all that extra space. :)














You may recognize this place: the Biltmore Estate, America's largest home! Daddy graciously paid for Sarah and me to explore it one day (the tickets aren't cheap!) and we had so much fun.


It's a gorgeous place!!


Chicken salad croissants are the best lunch ever. :)


Thank you to the lady who took our picture, whoever she is! She and her friend asked if we'd take their picture, and said she'd take ours, too. Funny thing was, it was like my brain and fingers instantly forgot how to take pictures and I stood there fiddling with it like I have no clue how to work a camera!


Photography wasn't allowed in the main house, but I had to get some pictures of the grounds. Beautiful!





Since we'd been spoiled by the cool temperatures up in the mountains, it felt terribly hot walking around outside in the bright sun. We really appreciated the FREE cups of ice water we could get at multiple different places!


We split a chocolate fudge brownie sundae....oh wow. It was soooo good!


The front of the house...absolutely magnificent! With a bit of Southern charm to it, too. :)


Here we are the morning we left the campground- a bit sad to leave! We had some really sweet neighbors and had so much fun visiting with them every afternoon- so they took this picture for us. :)


When we were on our way to South Carolina to see Daddy's family, we knew we'd be ready to eat lunch somewhere near Spartanburg. We begged Daddy to take us to the famous Beacon Drive-In and he obliged us!


The Beacon is famous for its unhealthy-but-so-good food but mostly for its sweet tea. We figured out what makes it different: regular sweet tea with a bit of lemonade!





We spent several days visiting Daddy's family in central South Carolina, and we knew we couldn't leave without baking his dad a carrot cake. He loves it! (And we do, too!)


My grandmother is who Sarah and I get our musical genes from...she wrote this lullaby for us when we were born! We were SO excited to find it in the piano bench- we didn't know she'd actually written it out. She sang it to us all the time when we were little. :)


Here we are!! They are doing SO well in their assisted living apartment (you may remember, Sarah and Daddy were up there for 5 weeks this spring to help them move in, right when our grandfather was recovering from back surgery). It was so good to see them!!


We stayed in their house, even though most of the furniture is gone and it's for sale- and we took walks around their beautiful neighborhood in the evenings. We always stopped to see two sweet Labs...this one is Tiger (his family are Clemson fans :))...


...and we don't know what this one's name is, but we've always called him Bear. He's huge but SO sweet!    

And that, my friends, wraps up our trip! Hope you enjoyed the pictures!

Because of Jesus,

Rebekah