Happy New Year!! (part 1)

It is New Year's Eve, and I am sitting at Rick and Ann Pruden's house relatively early in the morning, as the rest of the family sleeps. We leave tomorrow morning to return to Arkansas, and given how busy it is upon return from these kind of trips, I figured I'd be best off updating the blog now.

We had a great vacation, even though both Hope and Beth had colds. Our travel went very well on this trip (at least so far), with good road conditions and no big vehicle surprises. We had a nice visit in Madison with Laurie, Mark, John, Jim, and Bob, and another fantastic dinner at Morel's. Hope had drawn Jim's name for the Bragg family gift exchange, and gave him the gift every consummate Badger fan needs this year--Arkansas Razorback gear!! That is a plastic Hogs hat he's wearing in this picture...



We arrived at mom and dad's house in Rhinelander to find virtually no snow, but the kids were able to have fun outside anyhow. Kenny especially loved playing in the sand. While in Rhinelander, we helped rewire some switches and outlets in the basement, and counter-sank some screws along their new handrail for the stairs leading to the basement. Mom joined us on a trip to the Houghton, Michigan area--Hope and I wanted to visit the area we met and fell in love with while going to forestry school (and in turn, fell in love with each other). This picture is of Kenny playing in some of the scarce snow they had near the Ford Forestry Center at Alberta, Michigan.


We saw a number of our good friends, including a couple (Jon Kort and Gabe Klotz) that I hadn't seen for a while--I hadn't seen Gabe since my early years of college! We got over to Eau Claire, and squeezed in a visit with our friends Eric and Mary Witt and their daughters Kia and Karissa (Eric was a buddy of mine from college).

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