Rockridge!

Hello All!

This week, Jared and I have been spending time at Rockridge Canyon Camp in Princeton, BC. We are here for the annual BC Young Life Staff conference, so we've kept busy, but not too busy that we weren't absolutely stunned by the beauty of this place. As you probably already know by now, and are sick of me repeating, we don't have a camera, but I scoured the camp's website for these pictures because honestly, it takes a picture to fully describe this place. So here you go:

Ta-da! This is Rockridge in the summer. It is surrounded by mountains and overlooking a lake. The building you see in this pictures is Wolf Creek Lodge, which is sort of like a 5 star hotel at the camp. This is where we've been staying while we're here.

Of course, we're here in the middle of winter, and up here in the mountains they actually get snow. So our view is more like this:

The lake is frozen, the mountains are snow covered, but I'm not sure if that really takes away anything. It feels like we've stepped into Narnia :)

And we're definitely living a life of luxury here in Wolf Creek. Free hot meals 3 times a day (with dessert after each, I might add) and delicious snacks during the breaks, internet access, beautiful lounges and private rooms...I could get used to this. Here are some photos of the place:

Our bedrooms...

The lounge where I get to hang out when Jared is in classes and training

And this is just an awesome photo of the main dining hall. We've had our meals at the lodge because there are around 300 teenagers using this hall, but its still a pretty awesome place. 

In the summer they have a high ropes course, a zip line going over the lakes and connecting two mountains, a party barge, swimming pool...basically any teenager (and adult)'s dream. Young Life is a pretty cool organization. 

We return back to the real world tomorrow evening. We've met so many great people this week, and last week back in Langley too, that this place is finally starting to feel comfortable and real. And we've made some good friends across the border in Washington too, in case we need a fix of good old America :) 

Our Apartment!

Hello everyone! 

Here are the pictures of our apartment so far!

Starting in the kitchen:

We removed the door from this corner cupboard to create a kind of display area. What fun is having all sorts of new dishes if you don't get to show them off at all?  I love how it turned out.

Looking through these pictures, I just realized that almost everything in this next picture was a gift. Actually most of what we have in our kitchen came from our registry, so I guess almost everything is a gift.  It's fun to see generosity looking so darn cute though :)

My mom got me these canisters for Christmas from a vintage home store in Shipshewana. It is probably one of my favorite stores, the kind I will go into and buy nothing, because at some point it came down to buying everything or leaving empty handed.

And Jared's mom gave this framed photo to me this Christmas. She had found the frame at an antique store years ago, and decided to paint it for us. The photo is from our engagement shoot. You can't tell from the coloring of these photos, but its actually yellow.

And here's a sort of finale to how my chairs turned out.The paint got a little worn down in places during the move--some patches look just right, sort of antiqued, but others not so much. They may need to be touched up a bit :) Jared's mom found us one more right before we left, so that's waiting to be sanded, painted and re-seated.

Next up is the bathroom! We were kind of disappointed that the apartment has one of those glass walled showers, so our shower curtain was useless. When we were picking everything out, Jared and I had this idea that by living in apartments for the next couple years, we would probably develop a craving for trees. So we settled on a sort of park / nature theme.
One of my favorite things about the bathroom is the shower sign, a gift from my sister, Katrina, and her husband, Brent. I love it because it has a fun story behind it:
When Jared and I were first dating, he joined my parents and me on a camping trip to Platte River (near Traverse City, Michigan). They had these signs up for the showers, and we thought the little illustrated man's showering position was hilarious--sort of like he was doing a dance. We half joked about stealing the sign, but decided not to, and then lusted after it for the next couple years. This past summer, my family took a camping trip to Platte River, and once again, Jared and I almost stole the sign. "Almost" as in we actually got up in the middle of the night, snuck out with a screw driver and stood in front of the sign, about to act...but then our conscience got the best of us, and we resisted and went back to bed. Little did we know, as soon as we got back from the trip, Katie and Brent went online and found the sign. and then gave it to us this past month as a going away gift. We were thrilled!

This is one of the projects I was working on during the Christmas season. The two bikes are actually bikes Jared and I own, so it was kind of fun to recreate them in stitching.

Here's a close up of the middle panel. The quote is from "Oh The Places You Will Go" by Dr. Seuss (or as I put, T.S. Geisel--it sounds kind of more grown up than Dr. Seuss). The whole piece is kind of a reminder that we are here to explore, to see mountains and oceans and orcas, so lets do it. It also makes for good bathroom reading (hehehe).

And probably my second favorite feature of the bathroom is our trash can. It's so Oscar the Grouch, I love it :)

And moving on...The Living Room. This is the room that is the most incomplete. We have some mix matched furniture, and a borrowed, couch, so we're doing the best we can to make it our own. We bought a duvet cover from Ikea (only a half hour away--awesome! and potentially dangerous) to cover the futon, and found a couple rugs we like.

Anna and Adam commissioned Adam's grandpa to make us this beautiful bookshelf. The top folds up to make a secret (well, not so secret anymore) compartment that the people helping us move in said was perfect for a gun....probably not so much :)

And I also got the national parks calendar I was talking about in a previous post for Christmas, so we've cut those out and are planning on mounting them on canvas. We also bought a bunch of frames to make a photo border, so even if we're far away from home we can still be surrounded by our family and friends.

And this is the entry to our bedroom. Jared made these panels for me for my birthday by modge podging pages out of books onto canvas, and then he painted on the letters.

We also have one more room, but to be honest it's a little bit shamefully messy. I'm sure we'll make it cool soon here, it'll be our office and work space, so it will get a lot of use, and I need a clean space to be productive. 

Well I hope you enjoyed our little apartment tour! It was definitely worth the wait. 

Love from Langley!

We're here!

This will just be a short update, mainly to say....we have made it to Langley! After a nail-biting trip from Wyoming, including an afternoon spent driving over and through the Cascades in a snow storm, we arrived in Langley on Wednesday night. Everything went great at the border, we both officially have work permits, and best of all (for me), we have an apartment!
Sadly, upon unpacking we discovered that we still do not know where our camera charger is...so no pictures yet. We did, however, just get awesome new cell phones with cameras probably better than our old sony snap and shoot anyway. So as soon as I get my tech skills up-to-date with those (hopefully later today) I'll try to post some pictures.  Because, to be perfectly modest, our apartment is awesome!
It's a relatively chilly day here in Langley, the high forecast is 3 degress Celsius (that's around 38 to all my fellow Fahrenheiters). But rumor has it this is nothing compared to some slick freezing rain back in Michigan. So far its rained every day we've been here, which is apparently pretty standard for 6 months out of the year, but to our delight the temperatures have stayed pretty much north of freezing. I guess I can live with rain if it means I won't freeze :)
Hope everyone is doing well, I'll try to post pictures asap. But right now, we're venturing out to check out the local library. My fingers are itching for some new reads :)

Adventures in Sheridan

After five wonderful days, we're approaching the end of our visit in Wyoming, and anxiously getting ready for the second half of our trip! I'm writing this post with one eye on Jared's nephew, Parker, who just may be producing something stinky for us to tackle. Jared and I are doing a little babysitting this afternoon while his brother, Brandon (Parker's dad) picks up his wife Alycia from the airport two hours away. So far it's been a little more weepy than we had hoped, but we're trying every means of distraction we have up our sleeves to keep the tears off his cheeks. Right now...he may be winning, but we're still giving it our best shot :)

We've had a great time in Wyoming so far. I must say, Sheridan has been nothing like what I expected it to be. Jared and I are slowly learning that each time we visit a new place, we're surprised. Each time we travel we have this picture of what it's going to look like, of what we'll do there, and every time we're wrong. Whenever Sheridan was described to me in the past, I pictured this tiny little town with one coffee shop, two good restaurants and a Walmart. Naturally, when we pulled up to the exit last Wednesday, I just knew we were in the wrong spot. There were too many lights! But as it turns out, Sheridan is just bigger than I expected. As everyone here points out, it is the third biggest city in the state. 

Jared's brother has kept busy caring for Parker and trying to entertain us while we've been here. And fortunately the weather has been cooperative for some of the things he had planned.  On Thursday we took a hike through Tongue River Canyon. The trail we were on followed a really cool ice covered river, and fortunately our boots held up pretty well against the slush covered ground. Here's some photos from the hike...

That Friday, Jared and I were on our own to explore town. We checked out some buffalo kept in a wildlife preserve in town. It seemed fitting, in a state where statues and pictures of buffalo are everywhere, to actually see some in person--even if not in the wild :)

Our "Mascot" for the trip out west :)

Then on Saturday, we were able to take a trip up the mountains to do some snowshoeing. Neither of us had snowshoed before, and we had a great time!

We stuck to a packed trail most of the time, but naturally the boys couldn't resist off roading it into some deeper snow. 

And here's me looking on disapprovingly from a distance :) I did join in soon after that though, and it was a lot more fun tromping through thigh deep snow than walking down a packed path.

But possibly the best part of our trip has been meeting our nephew, Parker. He's nearly six months old, and it had been killing us the whole time that we hadn't met him yet. He's such an awesome little guy! We soon learned he can guzzle down a bottle faster than we thought possible. 

Here we're cautiously feeding him his first bites of real baby food--peas. He wolfed that down pretty quick too.

It takes two to feed him with a spoon--otherwise he grabs for the spoon with his chubby little hands, and then gets mad that he isn't being fed fast enough. 

Tomorrow we're heading up to Spokane, WA.  We're both so excited for the next part of our trip!

A journey of 2419 Miles...

As most readers know...the time has finally arrived. Our belongings have finally been sorted, organized, and lovingly packed into approximately 45 boxes of various sizes and shapes. Then those boxes, along with our humble array of furniture, have been successfully packed into 7 feet of a shipping container. And now, that container is on its long journey to Langley, where it will meet us in approx. 7 days.

The goodbyes have been said, our little Taurus packed...and we're on our way. It was hard to leave, very hard, but as we climbed into the car and waved our final goodbyes, I found great comfort in the knowledge that we were accompanied on our journey by the love, hope and blessings of our incredibly supportive family and friends.

The first half of our journey has gone ridiculously smoothly. The weather and traffic on the way to Chicago was stellar. We left Rockford around 3 on Tuesday, plugged our friend Chris's Chicago address into our trusty GPS, and arrived safely in Bloomfield, Chicago by 6:30.

Unfortunately, about an hour into our trip, when we tried to diligently photograph our journey as promised, we discovered that our camera battery was dead. Completely dead. And the charger had been diligently packed away in a box in our shipping crate. It's a very frustrating feeling to know exactly where the thing you need is (in box 19 I believe, labeled as "Camera Cords and books) but also knowing there's nothing you can do about it. So far, we've bombed this whole taking pictures thing, what between this and our honeymoon. I always have these notions that "oh, I should take a pictures of all of our boxes mid-packing" or "I should photograph this project step-by-step", but unfortunately when I'm actually doing something, pausing to grab a camera and snap some photos isn't in my nature. I guess I'm just not the photo taking type. Maybe that should be part of a new years resolution. Anyway,  I guess if having no camera battery is the worse thing that's happened on our trip, we're pretty lucky. We did try, though! We ended up with some extra time in Chicago, so we decided to stop at a Best Buy.  There, we toyed around with the idea of buying a battery charger, and were even tempted to just buy a new camera, but frugality and rationality won over those ideas and we decided to just go photo-less until Wyoming. So this post, which I'd originally anticipated being full of photos of us and awesome scenery, will instead be words words words. My apologies :(

Anyway, we stayed with Jared's old roommate Chris in Chicago. We enjoyed the opportunity to visit him and see his little Chicago apartment. Unfortunately, we also spent a restless night listening to the three trains zoom past his little Chicago apartment :) So when 6:00 rolled around on Wednesday morning, we were awake and ready to go, right on schedule! Our goal was to reach Sheridan, Wyoming by that evening so that we could see Jared's sister-in-law Alycia, who was leaving for a conference the next morning at 6.

Our GPS navigated us through the Chicago traffic smoothly, and we then traveled trough Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota on the way to Wyoming. We enjoyed seeing the rocky structures in Wisconsin near the dells, and saw tons of really pretty barns and farms. Wisconsin was much cooler than we had anticipated. I took over driving somewhere near Minnesota, and we were in awe as we crossed over the Mississippi and saw unexpected mini-mountains and some frozen waterfalls. But we drove out of that landscape really quickly, and it was pretty much flat land from that point on.

Anyone who's traveled down I-90 probably can remember seeing the exact same things we did--all the signs for Wall-Drug (it was closed by the time we got there!), the corn palace advertisements (that was tempting), and at one point I was surprised to see some strange old-west sculptures scattered throughout a field, including this one:

I found this photo online, it was a pretty simple search to find it. Apparently I'm not the only one who's somewhat baffled as to how a dinosaur fits into the old west theme :)  It was pretty entertaining, and I actually find the rolling, empty fields in South Dakota very peaceful. We saw what seemed like two hours of a spectacular sunset. Sometimes, I think God gives us flat, clear lands like these to remind us of the glory of his skies. It was beautiful. Unfortunately, once the sun had set, it got dark very soon, and was pitch black by the time we reached the badlands. It was kind of frustrating looking into the darkness and knowing that something interesting was out there, but not being able to see it.

We safely reached Jared's brother Brandon and his wife Alycia's house in Sheridan by 10:05, right on schedule. We got to peek at our nephew Parker briefly last night, wrapped up tight like a burrito sleeping in his crib, and this morning we're anxiously awaiting his return from day care for a proper visit. We're excited to experience all that Sheridan has to offer over the next couple days. Right now, we're anticipating leaving on Tuesday or Wednesday, and are really looking forward to taking the next half of our journey slow. It's actually quite overwhelming to try to consider all of the country we've covered so far!

So with that, we send you lots of love from Wyoming!