In Which I Bear Scary Resemblance to a 'Twilight' Extra

It has been absolutely lovely here the past week or so, and we decided to take advantage of the colors by driving up the Alpine Loop and hiking around for a bit.

My main objective was to take pictures of Blue and myself with a backdrop of fall leaves.  I did not anticipate that it would be muddy on the trails.  If I had, I wouldn't have worn my nice, mostly new tennis shoes.  You can guess what happened when I was looking up at the scenery taking pictures and not down at where I was placing my feet.  I also did not anticipate forest rangers going around leaving fee envelopes on cars.  Blue insisted that the fee was optional, as they didn't have anyone taking money as we entered the loop and they didn't have any way of tracking us down or forcing us to pay.  But it felt like a ticket to me, even though it wasn't.

These occurrences put a large damper on my fun.  So naturally Blue took a picture of my "I-am-not-amused" face, during which I was talking about how happy I was at that moment:

Witness my dark and sinister side.  My pale skin + dark hair + freshly reddened lips + the strange look on my face made me look somewhat vampirish.  

Blue though it funny, and in retrospect, I do too.

Thankfully I did cheer up, and we did manage to get a few nice shots.  Like this one. :)

And it wasn't too difficult to donate a few dollars to nature or to remove the mud from my shoes.