Epic Road Trip, Day 3

After several days in the mountains with no cell service, we finally found a friendly Starbucks in Great Falls to update our blog.  So far we are loving the trip, although it has been rainier, windier, and colder than we ordered.

Day 1: Flathead Lake
We stayed at a gorgeous little campground right on the lakeshore.  The weather was perfect!

Day 2: Glacier National Park
The next day we drove up and through Glacier on the Going-to-the-Sun Road.  The scenery was stunning but the road slightly scary.  There was construction all along it with construction workers wearing full climbing harnesses!  At the top of Logan Pass, it was sleeting, so we headed down quickly and pitched camp at Rising Sun Campground, which was cold and wet but protected from the wind by some trees.  It rained all night and into the morning, but we learned that our tent is so amazing that even when the tarp underneath collects a puddle of water, we stay dry!

Day 3: Moving toward Yellowstone

Since it was still raining, we decided not to hang around any longer and packed up in a hurry.  On our way out we stopped for some hot showers to cheer us up.  Since then, we've been driving through alternating storms and sunny weather toward Yellowstone National Park.  We'll be there a couple days, probably without service, but we'll update after that! Feel free to look at our Picasa web album. The link is on the right under "Picasa Photostream."

Epic Road Trip!

We don't even know where we're going! Actually we have a vague idea for the first week that puts us in Boston. We'll hit Glacier, Yellowstone, Mammoth Hot Springs, and the Badlands. But we'll try to blog throughout the adventure, assuming we can find internet. There's a cool widget on the right over there that should tell you where we are. Also, we hope to be uploading photos throughout, and you'll be able to see all of them by clicking on Picasa photostream. It's on the right column, too. I try to put a photo in every post, but I can't think of anything relevant. So here's a brick being thrown into a dryer:

We're back!

It's been over a year since we've updated this blog. You didn't miss TOO much. We spent another Summer in Rosario where I did my research.

Fresh Cut Improv was a major project of ours over this last school year, and we're proud of how it's been going. We spent Christmas in Baja and Spring Break in Las Vegas.

I wrote and successfully defended my thesis, "Temporal patterns in preening of Glaucous-winged Gulls." I graduated with a Masters in Biology while Heidi graduated with a Masters of Arts in Teaching. And lastly, I learned that when you click on the Comments button below you are bombarded with Obscene Amounts of Orangeness.

So where are we now? Heidi has some tutoring jobs lined up in Washington, DC, and I've applied for several jobs over there too. I'm REALLY hoping to get one of them. We had to move out of our house since we graduated, so we've been hanging out with family the last couple weeks. But if we're going to DC (and it looks likely), our families will want to know what we're doing, which is why this blog is going to be updated more frequently. I promise.

Seattle Trip

Last Sunday Sean and I drove to Seattle.  We had two objectives: to have fun and to find some veggiemeat.  We’ve been kind of struggling without Stripples, Big Franks, and FriChik, specifically.  How do people find such food if they don’t live in Walla Walla or Loma Linda?

So for our first objective, we went to the Seattle Center to go to a museum with exhibits on music, sci-fi films, and Jim Henson’s Muppets.  On the way there we saw a big festival complete with amusement-park rides, cotton candy, balloons, and music.  It looked like fun so we wandered over innocently.  As we were walking, I vaguely heard something about “pride,” but kept walking.  All of a sudden we saw a group of about 6 guys wearing nothing but spray paint and tennis shoes and dancing in a fountain.  That moment of shock awoke us to the unusual outfits, behavior, rainbow theme, and lots of public indecency all around us.  We turned to go back the way we’d come, and saw a rather frantic woman trying to lead a group of elementary kids on a tour to the museum – apparently she failed to check the calendar to see what was planned for the day! 

After that we went into the museum, walked downtown, did some shopping, watched the fish-throwers, all the normal things you do in Seattle.  After a long but fun day our feet were sore from the miles we walked.  We decided to head home and grab some FriChik on the way.  We were certain that Fred Meyer would definitely have it, so typed that into our GPS.  The first building we went to looked like a bank, so we decided that wasn’t promising.  The next one was further out of the way, but bigger and normal-looking.  Turns out they don’t carry any food or grocery items.  I’d never heard of a Fred Meyer without food.  Disappointed, we drove on.  I called ahead to the third Fred Meyer and confirmed that they did indeed carry veggiemeat before we stopped.  When we finally found it, there was some Morningstar stuff, but the rest looked very strange.  It was then that I realized how gross veggiemeat looks, especially veggie bacon strips.  We took what we recognized and one new thing to try, and left for home.  And so ended another eventful and exciting day in our lives.

Our House

For anyone that was wondering, I thought I’d put up some pictures of what our house looks like. It’s college-owned, so it’s less than a block from school, which is awesome. We get to walk everywhere! This is the attic/game room/den/my sewing & music room. This is our semi-creepy basement, which I avoid except to do laundry.

More rooms, you can guess what they are. Now to the outside: Door to the outside world, complete with rain boots just in case! The yard and my row of lilac bushes, blooming right now :). Just to give you an idea of how close we live, our house is on the left and the college is the white building on the right. This is the perfect house for us, we just love it.

Victoria Adventure

The weekend of Valentine’s Day was a long weekend for WWU, so just for fun Sean and I headed off to Victoria, BC, for a weekend adventure. The border took forever to cross, so we missed the ferry we’d been planning on and ended up at our hotel at 2:30 am! Luckily we had no plans so slept in that day to catch up on sleep. We spent plenty of time just wandering in Victoria taking in the sights. Among the highlights were a ballet performance, a 70’s-diner-esque gelato shop, a store run by a tiny Chinese man selling, among other things, cassette tapes to listen to when suffering from constipation, stroke, and diarrhea. We didn’t buy any. All in all, it was a perfect weekend. I’m excited for many more such adventures. We’re thinking maybe Yellowstone next time... This is us, excited to get out of the fog for a quick break. Darth Vader playing the violin! We really saw him! How much cooler does it get? This is a garden gnome bigger than either of us! We would have bought it, if they would have agreed to accept about $1000 less than the asking price :) This is me right after something changed about me. Bonus points if you can figure it out. Where’s the Hayes? Victoria, BC, in all it’s glory.

Human Shampoo Dispenser

 

So I was washing my hair in the shower this morning when I tilted my head back to rinse shampoo off my face and I got shampoo up the nose. Lots of shampoo up the nose. Head and Shoulders that Tingles when You Put it on Your Scalp shampoo. Up the nose. It hurt so incredibly bad. I couldn’t figure out what to do until Heidi poured water down my nose. It worked really well, and I spat out bubbles.

Not cool. Except actually it was kind of cool.