Date Night!

 Yesterday we were invited out to dinner by one of my new colleagues (Thanks Rick!) so Ange and I decided to turn it into a full-fledged date night! 

We started out the evening at a lovely local Italian place called Panighetti's Eatery. The food was delicious, the conversation was great and we very much enjoyed ourselves. 

After that we decided to head over to Bidwell Park and check out the Chico Community Observatory! I'm telling you, Chico is AWESOME! There is so much to do here and most of it is FREE. We just can't get over it. 

We got to the park a little early so we pulled into one of the many, many parking lots to watch the sunset. It was of course amazing, and it's shocking how fast the sun sets around here. We could literally see the sun move behind the mountains in mere minutes. 

We also so a lot of crazbos going out for bike rides. Besides the topography, it was getting dark! It's a giant park and has very rough trails. We could not figure out how this seemed like a fun and successful recipe. In addition, someone got bit by a rattlesnake on the disc golf course earlier in the day so that further cemented into our minds that these people were taking the Crazytown Express to danger. Suit yourself peeps. 

We finally decided that it was dark enough to go over and start enjoying the stars! And boy oh boy did we. 

As soon as we got there the volunteer astronomer lady had already set up one of the big telescopes to look at Saturn. Ange and I could not believe it was actually Saturn! No joke it looked like a stencil. I google image searched it and seriously this is what it looked like:

So we took turns looking through the ginormous telescope and having our minds blown that we were actually looking at Saturn.

There's always some time for supermodel poses. Smart and sexy!

And just at the point where we were being overwhelmed by screaming children with non-disciplining parents we went outside to check out the smaller telescopes that were pointed at the moon. Also very cool!

After the moon viewing we decided to brave the screaming masses again so we could look at some different colored stars and an exploding nebula.

After that we went outside and sat in the planetarium viewing area and just enjoyed the cool night air and chatted for a while. All in all, it was a perfect evening!