Freezing temps + Good food + Friends + A LONG drive home = Our trip to Toronto!

This past Friday we went to Toronto, Canada for the first time!  Dan (the pastor of Restoration Church) and his family invited us to come along with them to spend the day in the city.  Buffalo is only 1.5 hours from Toronto, which is super exciting.  Toronto is such a cool city!  It's really big and has a New York City feel to it.  The only downside of the day was that it was unbearably cold (temp in the 20s, wind chill much worse), so walking around outside was not something we wanted to do a lot of.  I did, of course, take lots of pictures though.

Here is one of our "warm-up breaks" we took in random stores as we walked around the city.  This was a mattress & furniture store that we warmed up in for a bit.

Then after more walking, we went to Allan Gardens, which is a botanical garden/greenhouse downtown.  This is the outside, and please notice all the snow!

Allan Gardens was definitely beautiful, but probably the best part about it was it was about 80 degrees in there!  It was glorious and we stayed in there for quite a while soaking it in.

Here is a shot of the Trippie family - Dan, Gina, Sam, and Nick.

Gina and I with the cacti:

After that we wanted to head to another part of the city, but were pretty tired of walking.  So we found a cab that would let all six of us get in together!  Wes got shotgun, so he took this pic of all of us squished into the back seat:

Of course we had to have some afternoon Starbucks!

We went inside one of the huge, beautiful churches to look around.  It reminded us of Paris and London!

For dinner we went into Chinatown!

We ran into a local and asked him where we should eat, and he recommended a place that turned out to be sooooo tasty.  Check out our spread:

Here I am trying to work the chopsticks.  This was the first and only bite I had with them - way too much work.

Group shot at the restaurant with one of our servers under the lovely orange(?) tree:

We had a really great day.  The end of the trip went a bit awry though....  So like I said earlier, it's only 1.5 hours from Toronto to Buffalo..... however..... it ended up taking us almost 5 hours to get home!  Dan was driving us, and on our way home we were going to make a stop at Ikea.  He got off at what he thought was the Ikea exit, turns out it wasn't, so he got back on the highway.  Then ME of all people - the most directionally challenged person in the car - noticed that we had been driving for about two hours and hadn't even gotten to the U.S. border yet.  So I mentioned this, and everyone kind of started wondering as well.  We stopped at the next exit and the guys went in a restaurant to find out that we had been driving west for over an hour instead of south!  We were almost to flipping Detroit!  We had already been driving for two hours, and now we had almost three more to go to get back to Buffalo.  Well, we had a lot of laughs about it - made lots of fun of Dan - and finally made it home.  Boston was not happy with us, but all was well.  We're also very excited to go back to Toronto when the weather is warm!!

Non-Valentine's Day '09

Last week for our small group we went to hear Nick Vujicic speak at a large church in Buffalo.  Nick is from Australia, he's 26 years old, and he was born with no arms or legs.  He is a Christian, and he has decided to dedicate his life to going around the world and speaking to people about Jesus.  It was a really amazing and uplifting night.  Nick has a great personality - he's really funny making all kinds of jokes about his situation - and he is able to present the gospel in a real and touching way.  Seeing how he gets around and how much he has been able to do with his life makes you want to never complain about much anymore!  If anyone is interested, you can read about him and his ministry at www.lifewithoutlimbs.org.  Here is a pic from the night.

So of course this past weekend was Valentine's Day, but we usually don't really do anything for it.  We think it's pretty much silly to spend a lot of money on flowers, cards, or gifts just because the holiday says so.  Plus I'd much rather get flowers or a card on any random day!  Anyway, Wes played another show at Merge Restaurant on Valentine's night, so some of our friends came out to see him and we all had dinner there before he played.  It was a nice way to spend our non-Valentine's Day.  This is Adrienne and Patrick:

And Nicole and Jeff:

And everyone:

Here is a close-up of our fantastic table art:

And us being cheesy/sweet making a heart:

Wes doing his thing:

And a pic of us and a beautiful rose (given out by the restaurant of course):

Life Lately

So we have a new look for our blog. We like it. Anyway, we've been having some fun times with friends from church lately. Our small group went out to dinner one night for our weekly get together and had a great time. We're going to try to do this once every month or two just to get out into the community. This was our first time, and already we had a chance to share about Restoration Church because our waitress asked us what our group was doing!

 

For the Super Bowl, Dan (the pastor) invited people from the church to their house. There were around 25 people there, lots of food, and it was a great time to get to know some new people. Here are a couple shots from that night:

This past week I (Leslie) have been busy working on a project. One of the local churches here has been kind enough to let Wes, Dan, and Alex have the use of one of their vacant offices. This has been great for them since our church does not own a space yet and it gives them the opportunity to work together a few days a week. Anyhow, it was a bit bland and they wanted to warm it up a bit so they asked me and Gina (Dan's wife) to fix it up. We only had a budget of $100 and we needed paint, paint supplies, window treatment, a rug, decor, and accessories. We did a lot of shopping for bargains and although we didn't have enough for a rug, I think it's definitely an improvement!  Here is the office BEFORE:

Here is a DURING shot:

And here is the office AFTER: (It's not the best pic, but you get the idea)

We still have lots and lots of snow everywhere. We're not gonna lie, we are ready for some spring weather! This picture is of our front yard and it was taken yesterday:

No joke, our front yard has looked like this since December.

Here is our street:

It just never gets warm enough for long enough for any of these mounds of snow to melt. We're hoping we will start to see grass at least in March!

Now THIS is the most exciting thing that has happened in a while... We have found a good Mexican restaurant in Buffalo!! We've been pretty sad because there are not many Mexican places here, and the first one we went to was less than stellar. Well, we came across El Palenque and our lives have been changed. They have a great white cheese dip and really good food like we're used to.  We went last night and it was delish!

As you can see we're pretty excited.  After we ate there, Wes played a show at a restaurant called Merge. It's a very cool place that just recently opened up downtown, and it's about 5 minutes from our house.  He did a fabulous job as usual, and here is a shot of it:

So that's what's been going on with the Walters lately. And hey, if you're reading this, leave us a comment why don't ya!?