Happenings of our lives

Well I finally got someone to go backpacking with me other than Emily.  The Budd’s are our friends in the ward and I convinced Ryan to go with me on Dec 18-19.  It was pretty darn cold but we stayed warm enough.  We left after work so it was already dark.  We went to Hercules Glade Wilderness area and started our hike on the Long Creek Trail, taking the second right.  Halfway to the pilots trail, we set up our tent.  The next morning, we finished the loop.  It was fun but pretty darn cold.

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We woke up and went to eat breakfast. When we came back to our room, there was a really weird bug by our door, which was the first of many weird bugs I have seen since we got here. The first thing that we noticed about Nebraska that morning was that it was a lot more humid than Utah. We started driving at about 7:30 (central time). Oh, so here’s where we figured out that North Platte is not half-way. Jordan and I turned on the GPS, to put in the Springfield Hotel’s address, and it estimated our arrival at 4:30p.

We drove for a while and we saw this bridge over the freeway, so we took a picture. The bridge is called “The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument”, I don’t know any more than that. There was so much construction everywhere; I guess summer’s that time for construction.

Jared and I saw a sign for York county and we had to get a picture for our dad. He never has anything with his name on it, so now he does. The best part about it was that we needed to stop so we took a picture of the water tower and got a free pamphlet on York County. It was cold and raining most of the way through Nebraska.

We briefly passed through Iowa, and we barely missed the sigh, so that’s the picture of the sigh that you can hardly read. Then we got to Missouri. We thought the green sign was the state sign, but it was actually about a half mile later. Jared started to take a lot more pictures of the scenery. The picture of Menards is for Erica, she used to work there.

In Kansas City, we were totally stopped on the freeway. Guess what it was? That right, more construction! Traffic went from 5 lanes down to 2 then down to 1 then a bridge. I didn’t like being stopped on the bridge, especially because they were working on it. Jared took some pictures of Kansas City while we were on the bridge crossing the Missouri River. After the bridge, traffic got pretty bad, so we didn’t really take any pictures. When we finally got out of traffic, we started to move a lot faster (the GPS told us our ETA was 5:25).

As we were driving we kept seeing signs for Fantastic Caverns, not just a couple either, like one on each side every half mile. On a side note, we looked them up when we got here and they are really expensive (21 per adult). Oh, the funniest thing that we saw on the way there were these signs that said “Share the Road.” It’s not like we’ve never seen them, but usually they have a picture of a bicyclist, but these ones have pictures of a horse and carriage, it was pretty funny.

We finally got to Springfield and the Odometer said 155552. I really wanted to take a picture when it said 155555. So we did, when Jordan was driving. You’ll also notice the check engine light was on, never a good thing.

Jordan was so excited that there was a Culver’s in Springfield so we went and ate there. That was the only time we ate out while we were moving. We ate burgers for dinner. Jordan got a concrete shake chocolate something. I got a mint cookies and cream shake and Jared got mango smoothie.

After we were done eating, we drove by Jordan’s new work so we could see where it was. Then we went back to the hotel and slept.

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Ugh, moving, what else I can I say? I really don’t want to repeat it. It wasn’t that bad, I just don’t really like driving so much.

The first day we left at 8:30a. Jordan was driving the truck and Jared and I were following in the car. We drove and said goodbye to the mountains and got into Wyoming pretty quickly. Wyoming feels like it goes on forever, there’s not much to see there. We wanted to make it to North Platte by the first night because Google Maps told us that it was about half way and we made a hotel reservation there before we left. We figured out pretty quickly that it was not half way (thanks to our GPS).

Wyoming was…interesting… there really wasn’t much there. Jared took a lot of pictures of the wind-mills, and we kept seeing semi’s with windmill parts on them, but not much else. It was amazing how much the landscape changed from Utah. It kept getting flatter with less vegetation. The first part of the day was really nice; Jared took some really good pictures of the clouds and scenery in general. Eventually it got cloudy and started to rain, but it made it a lot less hot .

Jared took a picture of a weird Lincoln head in Wyoming, I’m not sure what it was for, but it was interesting. We got into Nebraska pretty soon after and it was so flat, and it just got even flatter. We passed by the Cabella’s and made sure to take a picture for my dad to tell him we passed it. There was even a water tower.

It was raining a little, but we got to see a beautiful rainbow. Only one of the pictures turned out okay (that’s what happens when you are trying to take a picture while a car is moving). So we didn’t get a picture of the double rainbow, but it was really pretty. After it stopped raining, the sunset looked beautiful with the clouds.

We kept passing signs for “Buffalo Bill’s Ranch” my dad kept telling us that we should go and visit there if we had time. Well, we kept driving and finally got there at about 9:45p local time (8:45 Mountain time). We checked into the hotel and went to sleep.

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Just in case you were wondering, no, Jordan and I did not take the pictures while we were driving, Jared did.

Just as a reminder, you can just look at the pictures by clicking the “Picture Albums” link in the upper left-hand corner.

We went to visit Jordan’s parents Memorial Day weekend and stayed for a week. We had so much fun, we went swimming and hiking almost every day.  Here’s a digest of what we did each day:

Saturday-May 24

We left Provo with Justin and Julie at about 7am and drove to Orofino. This trip seemed to go faster than the trip at Christmas. When we got there Robin and Joel were there with their kids. We didn’t stay up too late because most of us were tired from the long car trip. All the kids went swimming almost as soon as we got there. Jordan went swimming too. Two really funny things happened that night.  Jordan and I got switched to a room with two full sized beds (Jordan’s parents sold our room, and we have a queen sized bed at home). Those of you that know Jordan know that sometimes he sleep talks and walks. Well, we went to sleep in the same bed and when I woke up the next morning it was to Jordan saying, “where are you? why did you leave me?” Jordan had gone over to the other bed in his sleep! The second funny thing that happened was my fault. Jordan and I were getting ready to go down to his parents’ apartment, and we were looking for our key. We couldn’t find it anywhere, so we proceeded to go outside. Well, when we opened the door, the key was still in it, oops.

Sunday-May 25

Sunday was an interesting day. Jordan’s parent’s big washer broke so Jordan, Jordan’s mom and I went to a laundromat in town and did laundry for a couple of hours. That night we had pulled pork sandwiches on homemade buns, they tasted phenomenal. Jason and Ella came to the motel that night. We played Scatagories and had a ton of fun. The best part was that Ilana and Taylor were getting more words than the rest of us, no joke.

Monday-May 26

Monday we did more laundry and went swimming. Aspen and Ronan played in the sprinkler (mostly Aspen). Jordan and I went on a really pretty hike at Big Eddy near the dam. There were so many wildflowers and mushrooms and it was so green! We found a little peninsula beach that is usually covered by water (you can tell from the pictures that the water is really low this year).  Jordan went swimming (sort of, he pretty much walked out into the water and came back).  We saw some really scary spiders that blended into the sand really well (if you look at the picture that looks like sand, there is a spider in it). We made pizza with everyone on Sunday. That meant that everyone got to put what they liked on their pizza.

Tuesday-May 27

We went swimming with Justin and Julie’s kids and when Aspen was sleeping we went on a hike with the older kids. There are railroad tracks behind the motel and we decided to hike to the tressel. Jordan ran back to the hotel when we were about 2/3 of the way done with the hike because we didn’t remember if we locked Justin and Julie’s room (we saw some people playing with the kids’ pool toys when we walked by). He ran all the way back and we (Emily and the kids) kept walking. When we finally got there it was so pretty. We stayed a while and hung out in the shade (the track has no shade).  We started to walk back and we caught Jordan, so we walked back to the tressel. We had steaks for dinner. I (Emily) ate a whole steak and felt pretty cruddy the rest of the night. We books and runs that night and Julie pretty much creamed all of us.

Wednesday-May 28

We went swimming pretty much all day.

Thursday-May 29

We went on another short hike with everyone. We drove a little away from the motel and hiked on more abandoned railroad tracks. All the kids had so much fun. Jordan climbed on a bridge that was broken and got a bunch of slivers in his arm that hurt and were really hard to get out.  The water was so pretty and it was so green. Just a note, Jordan and I hiked this before, during Thanksgiving 2007, and it looked so much different. The best part about the whole hike was seeing the cows after we got back to the cars, they were so cute! After we were done with the hike, we drove on the scenic loop that goes up the mountain. You can see the entire valley when you get to the top, you can even see the motel. Later that afternoon we went to Big Eddy and played at the picnic area and playground with the kids. The water is so low right now (you can see a picture with buoys in the album and another from last summer to compare).  We had so much fun with everyone there. The kids had a great time playing on the playground and really didn’t want to leave when we needed to go home.

Friday- May 30

Friday we decided to do the same hike that we went on Monday. This time all the older kids, Justin, and Julie came too. It was great, this time most of the wildflowers that we saw on Monday were gone. We went to the same beach and played in the water. When we were walking down to the beach we saw a snake (Taylor and Benson were really excited about that). Forrester said that he didn’t want to get in the water so he was playing by a rock and we saw some bugs that we thought were getting eaten by a dragonfly, but the dragonfly was actually coming out of the bugs! It was really exciting, we watched it for about 10 minutes. We hiked back and enjoyed the beautiful scenery.

Saturday-May 31

We went swimming and had a lot of fun. ( I can’t really remember what we did this day).

Sunday- June 1

We drove home.

Hey, sorry about the lateness of this post. Two weeks ago I went to Guadalajara for my graduate research. I am figuring out the source of degradation of folic acid in micronutrient fortified tortillas. My professor has been working on a project for a while to fortify tortillas in Mexico like they do here with wheat products. In Mexico, we ran a bunch of tests with a couple of different premixes and took samples at different times, etc. I came back with 100+ samples and the past couple of weeks I’ve been working 70+ hours each week to analyze the folic acid in them. Below is some pictures.