We had a wonderful trip to Illinois for Christmas this year spending time with family and friends whom we don’t get to see often enough. We decided to break up our trip into a two day drive thinking it would be easier on both us and Brady. In hind site it may not have made that much of a difference since he opted to sleep most of the way.
We were fortunate to have wonderful weather while we were away. The drive up was uneventful with the exception of a small stretch of fog as thick as split pea soup. We had our white Christmas receiving about 2 inches of snow on Christmas Eve. While driving around up there I was beginning to think every truck sold in Illinois comes equipped with a snow plow attached.
The kids had a great Christmas and received more bounty than a pirate could wish for on his best day. This made for a very crowded ride home which we were made aware of multiple times from Ariana.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to go out and take as many photos as I would have liked to. Mostly because I was enjoying just hanging out with family and friends, partly because of the kids, and a little bit because it was really cold.
The following shot was taken in Marriott’s Courtyard. I spent 4 days wanting to shoot this before I actually made the time to do so. Thankfully the holiday season is the slowest for hotels and I was fortunate that nobody disturbed the snow before I could get out there. The night I shot this is was 9º outside. Granted that is with the wind chill, but it sure is cold when your waiting for you 30 second exposures to fire off.
Marriott's Courtyard
This shot was put together using Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. It was composed of 7 images. A larger copy of this image can be seen here.
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