Summer 2K11 Part I

Well it has only been a little while since I posted last.  It has been pretty crazy here at our house lately.  Jaren and I both started school at Utah State again.  Jaren is a senior majoring in Political science and is getting ready to apply for a bunch of law schools here in the next couple of months.  I am heading into my fourth week of Nursing school at the Weber/USU cooperative program.  I made it through the first and second week breakdowns and managed to get a fairly good grade on my first test.  I have been studying basically every spare moment, so hopefully it will continue to pay off. I am taking a guitar class. I am pretty bad.

I am going to recap our summer a bit.  Mostly for memory and scrapbooking sake.

May
We got back from Washington DC at the beginning of May.  We were pretty proud of ourselves that we made awesome time: 2 days to drive across basically the whole country.  We both took alternating 5 hour driving shifts.  I should have never let Jaren know I was capable of driving that long.  Now he makes me drive more on long trips.  We got to see some of the flooding that was happening along the Mississippi River as we drove through.  It was pretty intense.  We stayed at my mom's house in Brigham City for a couple days until we got all of our stuff moved back into our apartment in Logan.  Everything seemed so wide open compared to Washington DC.  I was amazed that 2nd east in Logan would probably be a 6 lane street in DC.  (Ok probably not that many, but it seemed HUGE!)  We love that there are no speed humps here.  LOVE.  It was so great to be home and to see our family and friends again!  We got to meet Andrew James Moncur who was born just a few days before we made it home.  He is so cute and we love him! We both started back at work full time and were lucky to both get our previous jobs back.  That month we played a lot of sand volleyball with friends.  Jaren went undefeated for at least a month and was pretty proud of himself for it, but don't worry he lost a few times once his streak was broken.

Goodbye Washington DC!

Towards the end of May, Kaitlyn graduated from high school.  We all celebrated by going out to Olive Garden for dinner.  She is now going to Utah State as well!  We love having her so close!

 For Memorial Day weekend we went camping at North Fork with my Hanks family.  Its tradition.  (Although, a crazy one.)  We got there and pitched our tents and played with Dalyn's airsoft guns while more of the family arrived.  A big moose kept walking through the field and through the trees just across from the campground.  Dalyn and Jaren got some pictures of it and Moe had to run down to make sure they didn't get too close to the thing. I can't remember for sure, but it seems like we had somewhere between 50-60 people up there all together.  The first night, it was SO COLD.  Impressively cold. But we woke up to yummy pancakes and hot chocolate to warm us up.  That day, some of the cousins and I started playing soccer in the field and soon after we had a pretty good game of soccer going.  It was so fun because the youngest player was probably 6 and the oldest was 24 (Jaren).  Everyone was actually pretty good!  We had a lot of fun!  Aunt Sandy brought her Consecutive Reader boards for everyone to make.  What a great idea!  Saturday night, was even colder than the first night.  It was raining so Moe and Jaren set up a shelter under the shade canopy thing and we all sat by the propane heaters to try to get warm.  We even roasted marshmallows over them to make s'mores.  Jaren and I borrowed an extra sleeping bag that night and we stayed a lot warmer than the night before.  About 2 hours after we had fallen asleep, I woke up to Jaren calling out, "Hello?  Who's there?!"  I was instantly terrified.  And confused.  Our nice new tent was gone and we were in some tiny tent that was very close to our faces.  But then Jaren realized what was going on.  He started to hit the sides of the tent and something started to slip off and fall to the ground.  He started laughing a little because it was snowing and the weight of the snow made the tent twist in on itself and collapse enough to where it was just inches from our faces.  We were awake about every 1/2 hour the rest of the night to a collapsed tent and had to keep hitting snow off the tent.  Needless to say, everyone who was still there in the morning began to pack up and head home early.  Bethany and Dave left during the night with their kids and their poor tent was destroyed by the snow.  The poles had snapped under the weight of the snow.  My mom's shade canopy was completely mangled and everything was a soppy, muddy, snowy mess.  The funny thing is this type of weather isn't an abnormal occurance for us.  We have had our fair share of awful weather at North Fork over Memorial Day.  After 20 years of carrying on this tradition, I think people are finally realizing that perhaps another time and another place might be in order.  But rain or shine ... or snow, we have had some great times and have many memories at North Fork!

A Bit More on our Atlantic Trip

Like I mentioned before, we took a little trip to the Atlantic ocean the weekend before Valentine's Day. We both felt like we needed to get out and go somewhere so we booked a hotel that was a short block away from the beach, which was really cheap because it is winter. I would say it is a little over a two hour drive out there but it was a fun drive. We got to cross the huge bridge that spans the Chesapeake Bay. (I think... I would look it up, but our internet isn't working right now.) It was huge and way cool. We both enjoyed the open-ness once we got out of the city. There were tons of cool houses with interesting architecture and lots of farms and stuff on the way out there. We stayed in Ocean City MD that is right on the border between Delaware and Maryland. The city is basically built on a peninsula and at most times you could see the ocean on one side of you and the bay on the other side. There are TONS and TONS of huge hotels and condominiums lining both the beach front and the bay front. We got in pretty late the first night and just relaxed and watched some TV in the room.

The next morning, I woke up and saw a weird orange light strip on the wall. I jumped out of bed and saw the sun about halfway up over the Atlantic Ocean. I got excited and yelled for Jaren to come see. haha. He thought I was a little mean for waking him up, but as soon as he saw it he was a little happier. :) We snapped a few pictures and then crawled back in bed for a while. After breakfast we drove down a ways to the Ocean City boardwalk. You can tell that in the summer it must be just crawling with people. We got there early enough that none of the little shops were open. It was almost creepy to see everything looking so deserted. There were a bunch of carnival rides that were also closed down for the winter and deserted looking. We walked out onto the beach and touched the water so we could say that we have touched the Atlantic ocean. Then we spent a couple of hours taking tons of pictures of the pier and the beach. It was pretty windy and cold, but not too bad at this point. A little later on, we walked down to the rocky point at the end of the beach and there the wind was howling and bitter cold. Our faces were both numb after a few minutes of picture taking so we started walking back towards the boardwalk and the car.

By this time, some of the shops and restaurants had opened up. We stopped in a few of the shops but didn't see anything we had to have. The smell of french fries in the air won us over though. We stopped into a little burger place. I got some cheese fries and Jaren got some chili cheese fries. They were EXCELLENT. :) By this time, our camera battery was running a little low so we headed back to the hotel to grab the extra battery. Then we headed out in search of a lighthouse. Jaren had seen one online that was supposedly pretty close to our hotel. ....About 30 miles up the road we had come to a State/national park (not sure which) and decided we would check it out. As we were driving through, we saw another huge concrete tower that we had seen all over the place and decided to check this one out cause it was close. Apparently it was a World War II lookout tower that was erected to protect the waterway between Delaware and New Jersey. It had a long spiral staircase inside and you could walk all the way up to the top of the tower and look out over the park, the ocean and the bay. It was gorgeous but SOOO windy and cold. From the top of this tower, you could see that there were two lighthouses a little ways off. So we went to find them.

We drove a little ways further and had to hike over a bit of sand to get closer to the lighthouse we had seen. It was a pretty little red brick one. The wind was so cold and strong at this place that it was blowing sand in our faces and we felt like we were going to get blown over. Jaren gave me his beanie cause my head and ears were cold, but after that I was actually pretty warm. We went looking for crabs but decided that they were all hibernating or something. We did find some HUGE crab shells on the beach here though. I wouldn't want one of those coming after me!

After the lighthouse adventure we headed back towards our hotel. We had someone look up the lighthouse that was supposedly by our hotel and discovered that it was, actually only like 2 blocks away from our hotel. It was just on the opposite side we thought it would be on. It was really random and wasn't even close to the water. We were both glad we had found the other lighthouse further up the road.

That night we spent swimming, going out to eat, and going to a movie. We slept in the next morning and just relaxed until it was time to check out and head home. We had fun talking and taking in the scenery on the way home. It was a fun trip. :)