Tramway to Heaven

So this is the first time I've ever written a blog, woohoo!!! Sorry if I'm not as funny as Kevin, but moving on: As Kevin said, we're currently on shoes! I have to say you probably wouldn't know it when you met me but I have a special place in my heart for shoes, especially boots, heels and Converse. Boots are one of the few reasons that I look forward to winter. And Converse are just plain awesome.

Another reason I love shoes is it's the one place in which my being short comes in handy. I wear a size 6 - 7 in women's sizes which means around a 4 or 5 in men's sizes; this means that I can often fit both adult shoes and kid shoes which means I have a lot more selection that I can choose from :) So when we went to Journey's the other night looking for shoes for my Valentine's Day gift (cause my husband is awesome) I knew that if I wasn't definitely sold on the things in Journey's we could always go try Journey's Kids! However, I ended up with the shoes I first noticed and actually only tried on one pair. Wonder of Wonders,  Miracle of Miracles!!! This never happens because either they don't fit or I'm not sure about how they look; however, as you can see, these were apparently meant to be mine cause they have Wonder Woman on them, they fit really well, and the colors work really well with most of what I wear (jeans and a T-shirt usually.)

Also, they match the dinner plate I made at Color Me Mine:

Now I have to talk a little about other shoes. There are some shoes that only work with certain clothes and at certain times and seasons. For instance: even though I really like heels they are not the most practical shoes to wear sometimes, but you look good in them! The biggest exception to this is when it's icy and/or snowy outside, then you just look ridiculous as you fall all over yourself; just do yourself and everyone else a favor and don't. It is for this reason that I generally like boots a bit more; the ones I like tend to be a little more comfortable than heels and yet they look nice too. I may love shoes but I'm much too practical to not realize that most shoes need to be somewhat functional and you have to be able to wear them for at least a few hours. (Note from Kevin: Jess may be practical, but that doesn't mean I haven't seen her salivate over boots with heels on multiple occasions). However, I must point out that not all shoes that CAN be worn for a long period of time SHOULD be worn for a long time and not all boots look good; far from it.

No offense to anyone out there who thinks otherwise, but Ugg boots are one of the worst fashion mistakes EVER! I've always wondered if the designers realized what they did when they named them (Ugg...does that stand for ugly?) I have no problem with them at home....where no one can see you! However, these should not be worn out in public because they may be comfy but they don't really look good with anything (unless you are a baby; that's completely different because babies can get away with anything.)

(The black bar was added to protect the identity of our secret agent.)

The biggest problem with Ugg boots is they are generally worn with sweat pants and a hoody and they make you look like you just got out of bed and threw on some shoes and left the house. NOOOOOO!!! (By the way, that was a link. You need to click it for this blog post to take its full, awesome effect).

Why would you do this?! We've all been there: you're late cause your alarm clock didn't go off so you're going to be late (or more likely your alarm did go off and you just kept pushing the snooze button.) However, this does not mean you should just go in your pajamas no matter what you're late for (unless it's a final exam, and then no one cares cause they're too busy trying to remember all the stuff they crammed in their heads at the last minute.)

Now, I have to admit that your shoes can't always look good. There are times when you have to go with practicality over fashion: like when you're hiking or working in the garden or working on the farm. It's at these times that the fashionable ones are those who were smart enough to wear something that won't give them blisters. I've learned this the hard way. Growing up, my family went camping and hiking quite often. When we would go hiking, my Dad always wore hiking boots and the most hideous socks I'd ever seen; they were thick wool socks that came to his knees and were red and a dark, baby-poop green (actually he wore some pretty hideous things when we weren't hiking too, like socks with his sandals.) However, I really didn't like socks that were much taller than the no-show socks, so when we would go hiking often my tennis shoes would rub the back of my foot off since my socks would slide down below the edges of the shoe. You see, we didn't do the wimpy 10 min trails; when we went hiking we started around sun-up and went until sometime in the late afternoon, which was hard stuff for us city kids.

Funny story of one of our hiking adventures: one summer my family went to the Sandia Mountains during our yearly summer trip. My parent's chose this particular place for several reasons but the one I remember was it has one of the longest tramway stretches in the world (it's 3rd according to Wikipedia.) We all wanted to ride it but it's rather expensive, especially since we have a rather large family so we all talked about it and decided that we'd ride the Tram up and then we'd hike back down. We talked to a guy at the top and he said that people definitely did it and that it wasn't too bad a hike "Only 9, maybe 10, miles" is what I remember him saying.....yeah, you remember Kevin's comment about people in Franca, Brazil having a different interpretation of distance? Well we're pretty sure this guy had some of the very same issues.

Well, we get on the tram and leave the docking station and immediately my younger siblings start freaking out. As you can see from pics like the one above, the cable car is rather large and it hangs from the cable several hundred feet in the air and when it stops (which it did so that technicians could get out and do some maintenance work) the whole thing sways. It felt rather precarious; kind-of like a roller coaster in slow motion only you're standing up and there's no seats-belts, or seats. We had someone take a picture for us and in the picture my little brother is smiling (he's pretty photogenic) but his hands are together like he's praying with every fiber of his soul that we not die. The whole way up we were trying to convince the 2 youngest to come look out the window but they just sat huddled in the middle of the car whimpering; I felt a little bad but that didn't stop me from laughing a bit to myself. And so began our adventures.

We got to the top and looked around at the museum/shop thing but we didn't stay too long because I don't remember being super interested and it was getting later in the day. We found the trail and started down. We've been on some pretty nerve-wracking trails but I think this one takes the cake for all of the ones I've been on. The trail wasn't much of a trail; it was only about a foot to maybe 2 feet wide path and on the one side was a rock wall, at times it was just a cliff who's top was somewhere in the clouds above us. The most terrifying part was the other side though; for the first few hours of our hike the other side of the trail just dropped off and we were high enough up in the mountains that there were clouds below us so you couldn't see much more than 10 feet down! As soon as we started hiking, my younger siblings begin to cry and they just sat down and wouldn't move for fear of falling off the mountain. They also wouldn't go back up either because they knew that just means riding on the cable car of death. (Another note from Kevin: if you're a fan of the Fray you should turn on the song "Cable Car" as you read this. Here's a link:.)  



We eventually convinced them that they had to start moving or we were going to pick them up and carry them down (at least that's what I remember telling them, if it had really came down to it I don't think anyone would have been carried cause it was hard enough just keeping our own feet on the trail.) So we slowly began to make our descent. The best part being the fact that my 2 youngest siblings went the first mile or more on their rear ends! They were so terrified that they wouldn't let anyone touch them, not even my Mom.

We finally made to a more level part of the mountain and were down below the clouds and I remember thinking "Finally! Now we're getting somewhere!" Well we hiked for the rest of the afternoon and got to the bottom of the mountain and couldn't figure out where we were. The trail we found on the map followed the one we were on somewhat when we were on the mountain but it was definitely not the same one at the bottom. The parking lot was nowhere to be seen and the terrain was very hilly. So we started walking toward the highway and toward where we figured the parking lot was and we ended up in these hilly fields at the back of a neighborhood. I remember thinking that it seemed really creepy because the houses seemed deserted because the whole time we walked by them I never saw a single person outside of my family.  Not to mention the fact that driving to the park, I hadn't even realized there was anything but mountains and grass anywhere near the mountain. But we eventually found this trail that ran along the backs of these houses,  probably created by other hikers that got lost on the way down the mountain like us, and we walked......and walked some more, but unlike pioneer children I don't remember doing much singing. By this time we were all beyond sore and it hurt to move so we were all hoping and silently praying that the parking lot would be just over the next hill top.

After at least another hour, we finally found the edge of the parking lot. I could practically hear the Hallelujah choirs singing. After trudging through the parking lot (think of zombies', hobbling and groaning) we crawled into the car and drove back to where we were staying. I remember that it hurt just sitting in the car and getting jostled by the van's movement as it drove down the highway. But we were all laughing and smiling on that drive back, just happy that we made it off the mountain alive. When all was said and done we figured the whole hike was probably closer to 15 (long) miles of rocky, hilly, really beautiful terrain, not the "9 or 10 miles" we'd been told at the top.