This Crazy Beautiful Life

I just want to thank everyone for allowing me to share this past Wednesday, and to thank you for all the words of love and encouragement. I am confident that this Wednesday I will have a very different feeling, as I will have had two more job interviews under my belt! Yesterday I traveled into Washington to interview, and went into it with courage and confidence, knowing that I was surrounded by all the support and prayers of my amazing family and friends. And in about two hours I have another interview with a different company in Abbottsford. I promise to provide updates with the results of both interviews when I can!

Bright and early tomorrow morning (as in 5:15 AM--yikes, that's earlier than I've gotten up all year!!) Jared and I will be boarding a van, a bus, and two ferries as we travel with a group of Young Life kids to a camp called Malibu. This place is super remote--here are the driving directions from their website: "There are no roads to Malibu." But to give you an idea:
Our starting point, Langley, is not on this map. It is a bit to the right of Surrey (on the bottom right hand corner). From what we can gather, we drive by van to Horseshoe Bay, take a ferry to Langdale, drive by bus to Edgmont, then take another ferry up to Malibu Landing. We're already planning on bringing lots of Dramamine for me and any other queasy ferry-riders :)

But we've been assured many times over that the trek up there is well worth it. We'll take lots of pictures while we're there, but here are some previews from around the web of what we're looking forward to:

Basically this place is right on the ocean, but on a protected inlet too. We're taking a group of around seven kids from Langley (it's they're spring break) to a work camp, where we'll join campers from other areas and help prepare the camp for the summer. It should be a lot of hard work and late nights, but we're both really excited for the trip.


Jared and I have gotten the chance to explore quite a bit while we're up here, it's been a lot of fun! Recently, our travels have been thanks to our friends Jared and Elise. Jared is a native resident of Langley, but his wife Elise is originally from Colorado, so we're all having fun getting used to the tiny cultural differences between US and Canada. Last week, Elise and I drove down to White Rock (a town about 20 minutes away) where there is a beach. So far Jared and I have focused so much on the mountains, we almost forgot about the ocean :) But here are some pics I took to prove it is there:

It was a cloudy, rainy day in Langley when we went, but apparently there are always blue skies in White Rock :) It felt so great to get my face in the sun again!


And on Saturday, the four of us traveled up to Cypress Mountain. It's a ski resort just on the north side of Vancouver, and it played host to the freestyle ski and snowboard events during the 2010 Winter Olympics. We had a blast on their tubing runs--it was really icy snow, so we went really fast! It was incredible how quickly we drove into snow too. In the city of Vancouver, flowers are blooming and spring is definitely here. But just 20 minutes out of the city and up into the mountains there was tons of snow. Here are some pictures of that too:

This is overlooking the city of Vancouver

Being from Michigan, we're pretty accustomed to lots of snow and tubing. But what we're not used to is being surrounded by mountains while we tube, and looking out to see the ocean too. It was pretty spectacular.

Oh and just to make everyone aware of some new features of my blog, there is now an easy way to follow this blog through email. Just enter in your email address in the "Follow by Email" box and you'll receive email updates each time I post.