Mmmmm….tacos….

The story of my trip to Joshua Tree this spring is being told in a very disjointed fashion on this blog. I’ve given you a tiny preview that didn’t show the park at all, and an image from a Wal-Mart parking lot. Now I’m going to show you a handful of images from the drive home, none of which are from inside the park itself.

Behind the scenes, of course, the photos from that journey are being made into a fabulous multimedia production. Which you will be able to acquire, if you want it, eventually.

Most of the pictures below were taken from inside a moving RV, so any smears or splotches you see are probably bug guts on the windows. The top picture is from the end of our first restaurant meal after we emerged from the park. This was at a Thai restaurant in the town of Joshua Tree. After spending five days in a windy desert, it felt very strange to eat in a restaurant.

Which one of these fortunes do you think I got? You can post your guesses in the comments. The first person to get it right wins a copy of the Joshua Tree trip dvd when I’m done with it. Which will be soon, I promise!

I hope your heart center is feeling soft and open today, because I’m about to throw some love at you. 19 photographs of it, in fact! But don’t worry, they’re optimized so they should load pretty fast. Just keep reading while that’s happening.

Emily and Matt got hitched at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph in San Jose, a stunning place to launch into married life if ever there was one. That place is gorgeous. We were worried about the light, wondering if there would be enough, since we couldn’t use flashes during the ceremony and wanted to avoid using them anyway (we are big fans of natural light). As it turned out, the light situation was challenging but not impossible. We got plenty of great shots just working with what was there.

The Red Bats had the pleasure of following these two throughout their wedding day, starting at 7 am (yes, we will get up early for our clients!) and ending up at the Capitol Club in the afternoon. It was a small wedding, just the family and some friends, and this made it easy to focus on the bride and groom and their delight in every detail of getting legally wed. They were so happy about the whole thing, so sweet to each other and everybody else, that they made falling in love and getting married seem like the only logical thing for anybody in their right mind to do.

It was easy to see they both felt they’d hit the jackpot in the romance department. Working on their photos later, I kept getting teary-eyed looking at the two of them together. (Have I mentioned yet what a cheeseball I am? Well, now you know for sure.) I’m not including the most touching photos here because some moments are too private for a blog post.

But I will reveal, in words anyway, that the bride’s father cried during his first dance with his newly married daughter, and almost everybody in the room cried too (including me) and I am sure the ones who didn’t were either not paying attention or holding it in. I told you these were some sweet people.

Congratulations, Emily and Matt!

It’s that time again…time for a review of the previous month via low-res photos from my cellphone. You can see my January set if you click here. February was an intense month, though the photos don’t necessarily show this. It was a month of hard work, plus lots of internal growth and change, and I’m very glad it’s over. Just keep pondering the ineffable as you look at these photos, and you’ll get the gist of February.

And yes, that is chocolate-covered bacon in the photo above. They are not kidding.

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