retreat highlights

earlier this week i shared a little bit about the women's retreat i went on last weekend with my church. 

i don't even think i've completely processed all of it - our speaker, paula rinehart, was right on point, her knowledge of the Bible was unbelievable, and everything she had to say i felt was directed right at me. 

and i was in a room with 85 other women who were all thinking the same thing. 

and, not only was the "study" aspect great, but the extra curricular stuff was awesome too! 

here are some of the fun things i discovered over the weekend...

apparently michael jackson is alive and well in montreat...

... and he and his sister janet still have some sibling rivalry going on...

the colors were amazing - and this is not something i've just discovered. i used to live in boone for a time, but it has been a few years since i've been up to the mountains during the fall season... i didn't realize how much i'd missed it until last weekend. 

fun discovery #4: i'm not as young as i used to be.
never has this felt more apparent than when i went on the saturday afternoon hike with about 20 other girls, most of them younger than me (which has never really been the case until just recently). i thought i was doing pretty good, but then realized a lot of people had passed me.... so i decided to stop and take a picture (read: catch my breath)...

and this is what we saw when we got to the top of the mountain... blue ridge mountains, oh how i've missed you.

another fun thing i learned???
keep my huffing and puffing to a minimum when there is a woman in her 8th month of pregnancy hiking up the same mountain... jenny, you totally rocked it!! :)

couple of things i didn't expect to see when we reached the top - ladybugs (they were everywhere, and there's one on this girl's shirt), and a verse tattoo... it's 1 corinthians 6:19-20.

more beautiful colors on the hike back down...

after i'd showered and was on my way to dinner, i stopped and got this shot - a picture of the "enormous mountain" i'd climbed earlier, only to find it really didn't look like much of anything from this angle.
but trust me - it was a beast.

last but not least, i discovered that when the speaker of the women's retreat personally asks you to take some photographs of her talking (because she doesn't have a whole lot of them, and she'd "just love" to have some for her website), you should jump at the chance and take as many pictures of her as you can. don't worry about being a distraction to the others, or fear that your camera's shutter sound will be too loud. just stand up, move around the room and do it. because if you don't, you'll leave the weekend with only 1 - and i really mean only 1 - image of her. and you'll wish you had a whole slew of them to send to her. :(

dear paula - i'm so sorry i couldn't provide you with more images.... but i was a bit captivated by what you were saying, and really had a hard time thinking about anything else, much less photographing you. i do hope you understand. love, miranda.