Home is an interesting word that carries a lot of meaning for many different people. For me, home is a family house on the edge of a park in Rochester, NY. My home consists not only of this family house, but also of the comfort and security that resides there.

This past weekend I was able to manage the eight hour trip east from my Grand Rapids apartment and head back to the place where the story of Aaron, the Aaron I am today, begins. Eight hours, two borders, and 3 coffees later, I arrived at my home with a sigh of relief. Sometimes it feels like the stresses and anxiety of normal life circumstances are somehow disengaged the moment I see the Rochester skyline. And as soon as I go over the bumps and pull into my driveway, time stops.

Going home is an important part of the journey that is my life. It is my new beginning… my fresh start. A place where, no matter what, I am loved and accepted. My life is a timeline and my trips home are the small blips that allow me to re-evaluate how I have changed as a person since my last visit. I love going home and look forward to a time when I can experience that feeling on a more regular basis.

I have always been looking for a WordPress gallery plugin that I can easily throw together and manage some images, galleries and albums on this blog. Well I found the perfect tool. It is called NEXTGen, and for anyone who is as geeky as me, it is sweet and lives here.

I uploaded some pictures from the Winter Wonderland trip that I took this past winter. We took a weekend and went up past Northport, to the tip of the pinky of Michigan. We stayed in a wonderful cabin called “Whispering Pines”. It was a small cabin that had 3 rooms (one of them a loft) a really cozy living room with a wood burning fireplace, and a hot tub on the back porch. It was located in the middle of a pine forest right outside of Leelanau State Park.

I should have uploaded these a while ago but I didn’t. I will upload some more pictures of other events soon. You can get there by clicking on the ‘Gallery’ link under ‘Pages’ in the navigation to the right. I will give a link in this post as well for anyone who gets these in their emails or RSS feeds.

Aaron’s New Gallery