HAPPY 23rd!!!!

Happy Twenty-Third birthday to my hubby.. you rock!  You are my best friend and my greatest example.   

 Plus, you sure do age well :)

I love you babe!

XOXOXO

Sunday Lunch at the Beach

                                   lovin' the married life

Guess where we're at now!

Surprise surprise .. we have moved to a different office. Who woulda guessed?! The office we were working with in Alberta was, well let’s just say, very interesting. It was full of interesting people who couldn’t speak English very well, who wanted to live in interesting places with showers that didn’t work, with interesting plans to move 30 hours to where we had just come from. Needless to say, interesting things are not always good. After moving a couple times with the new office, the lead sales guy told us that their next plans were to drive 30 hours to Ontario Canada, which is in the direction of Winnipeg, our original city. He had also told us that he couldn’t promise us more sales in Ontario. Okay, NO BRAINER! So we decided that we were either going to go home and find different jobs, or go to Alaska.

We got the word that we could go to Alaska, and we were absolutely thrilled! The drive to Alaska was even further than driving to Ontario (33 hours), but it was definitely worth every second. It was such a pretty drive, we saw a lot of wildlife and saw lots of amazing things. My word of advice to everyone: If you are going to Alaska, do not drive, fly! Here is the reason: There is only one road that you can take to Alaska, the “world famous Alaskan Highway.” It is quite possibly the WORST road ever made. You know the feeling you get when you go off a really tall drop on a roller coaster and your stomach just drops? Imagine having that feeling over and over and over and over again for about an hour and a half. That is the Alaskan Highway. I think it is world famous for how horrendous it is.

I have fallen in love with Alaska. It is the prettiest place that I have ever been to so far and we feel so extremely blessed and thankful to be living here! We have a beach close by us and I have a feeling we might be visiting it a lot :) Alaska has always been on my list of places that I wanted to visit in my life, but I never thought I would get to see it until all our kiddos were grown up and moved out. I can definitely see myself living here and raising our kids here. I love Alaska.

 Here is a picture from our drive up to Alaska. B - E - A - UTIFUL!

{ Say What?! }

So you’ll never believe it, and we hardly believed it ourselves, but we are back in Canada. Who woulda thought?! Definitely not us. As you all know, we weren’t great fans of Canada. Our office in North Dakota wasn’t doing the greatest and we got a call last Saturday from Gabe’s boss that there was an opportunity up in Alberta.

With how much we despised Canada, we definitely didn’t want to go back to that country, but we were told the office was putting in 4 to 5 times as much as the North Dakota office, so that leaned us toward giving Canada another chance.  

We left the wonderful Grand Forks Monday morning hoping to get to Alberta Tuesday morning. It was going to take 13 hours to get to Alberta from North Dakota. Something unfortunate happened along the way, and we ended up having to drive 3 hours the opposite way and then back again.  So our car ride that was supposed to be 13 hours ended up being a 19 hour drive.

It was a “bumpy” ride.

We entertained ourselves by sharing stories about our teenage years, stopping to take random pictures, talking about cows and watching suicidal birds fly in front of our car. Alberta has been so much nicer than Winnipeg so far… what a relief!! We are in a traveling office so we will be living out of hotels the whole summer. I hope nice ones :)

We are in a small city for a couple days, and then we will be off to another city. We are so lucky to be able to see so much of the country, and another country, at our age. 

We are nomads

Alright, so I know I grew up being taught that, “hate is a strong word. Sometimes you don’t hate things, you just dislike them.” Well I think it’s fair to say that we hated Canada. Gabe and I were talking about it on our drive back to the United States and couldn’t come up with even just one little thing that we liked about Canada. Everything bad that has happened to us so far happened in Canada. Winnipeg was dirty, and everyone looked homeless and like they wanted to kill you. The city did not look like the pictures. The housing was horrible. It was rainy or cloudy and cold every day we were there. And that’s just being nice. The list of disgraceful characteristics goes on and on. I’m hoping that everything that happens in Canada stays in Canada. I’m sure, or at least hopeful, that all of Canada is not the same, but I just might never find out.

So the big news of the week is that we indeed moved back to the United States. And we are ever so HAPPY! There has been a lot of “work drama” between different offices within the last week. It feels as if we have been out here for like a month when it’s only been a week and a couple days.  Here is everything that happened in just 2 weeks:

Moved out of our apartment in Provo

Was homeless and lived out of our car for 5 days

Moved to Canada

Got bedbugs

Was homeless and lived out of our car for 1 day

Moved into college dorms

Got put in charge of a different office

Organized everything in the new office

Had position taken away and put back in charge of old office

Moved to North Dakota

Currently living in a hotel

North Dakota is great. I think that I could probably live here and be perfectly happy. It’s got green fields and parks and open land. Every place that you might need to shop at is within a mile. The hotel we’re staying in is actually really nice, and I am content living here. The only thing we don’t have that I would like is a kitchen. We get complimentary breakfast everyday (score!) and bring up extras to our room so we have snacks to eat throughout the day. Sigh…. I really miss cooking. I want a stove really really badly so that I can cook and have dinner ready for my husband when he gets home. I have been looking at cooking blogs and have made a list of everything that I want to make when we get a kitchen. I can’t wait.

We are so happy to be back in the United States. We practically kissed the ground when we crossed the border. If you have any suggestions for beating the boredom, please feel free to let me know!

“Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!”

As you might have guessed by the title of this post, we got cursed with bedbugs. And we kissed our apartment goodbye.  So here is the story. We had been living in our apartment for just a day or two and I started to notice little blood spots on our sheets here and there and then Gabe noticed that it looked like he got bit by something. We figured it was just a spider bite. But then there appeared more spots on the sheets and Gabe had more and more bites all over his body. So we asked around and decided that we had bed bugs. We called in our landlord and told him about it and he was pretty pissed off. He said that that had never happened to him in all his years of renting. He told us he had been renting out places for like 20 years and has about a hundred rentals, so I found that very unlikely. We took the mattress off the bed frame and the frame had bed bugs crawling all over it. We felt he was lying to us about the situation and he tried to blame us for bringing in the bedbugs from somewhere. He took us to the laundromat and paid for all of our clothes to be washed and told us he was going to have an exterminator come and spray the apartment the next morning. We were at the laundromat ALL DAY long. It was pretty horrible. We threw away all our luggage and put everything we had in big garbage bags. We decided in the laundromat that we were not going back to live in that apartment. Since the place wasn’t getting sprayed til the next day, our landlord took us to the fanciest hotel in Winnipeg to stay for the night. Apparently it’s where the queen stays when she comes. He paid for us to have breakfast at the hotel the next morning and he gave us all the cash out of his wallet, $80, and told us to get a nice dinner. We had about $25 left over from the laundry money he gave us as well, so we went down to the hotel restaurant and had us some expensive burgers. We ordered hot chocolate and cookies to our room a couple times that night. We wanted to get his money’s worth, of course :) The most humorous part of the day was carrying our stuff in garbage bags into the fancy hotel. I felt like a homeless bum. I was really embarrassed. Now it’s been a couple days since then and Gabes bites are just getting worse. The picture below should explain it all. He looks like he has the chicken pocks. They bit him all up his hands and arms, his back, his belly button, his legs and knees, his feet, and as of yesterday realized his face too. We have been back to the apartment a couple times to remove some of our stuff and I get the heeby jeebies every time. No more sleeping in previously owned beds.

Officially Foreigners

So, we're here, we finally made it to Canada. We got to Canada Friday afternoon and have been busy setting up our office since then. We left Utah late Tuesday night and stopped at a couple places to site see on our way up. We decided we would sleep in our car for a couple nights to save money, but a couple nights was enough of that. We have a little 2 door honda civic and had all of our stuff packed in the back seat so we couldn't recline our chairs hardly at all so we had to try sleeping sitting up. I think I got an 1 and 1/2 hours of sleep at the most that first night. It wasn't the most comfortable to say the least.. Gabe climbed in the back seat the second night and layed on top of all our boxes to sleep so he could stretch his legs out :) We got ready in rest stop restrooms in the morning. We had a blast! Here are some pictures of our trip and the places we stopped to see:



On our way into Yellowstone National Park. We got there at like 6:30 am Wednesday morning and got to see everything before it got very busy. It was cold up there and started snowing on our way through. It snowed and rained pretty much our whole trip, and now Canada weather has been rainy every day. Not what I'd call spring weather!



There was TONS of buffalo in Yellowstone. The first one we saw was way cool but then as the day went on we'd seen so many that they weren't that interesting anymore. I was hoping to see a bear up there, but I guess we just weren't in the right spot..



Here we are in front of the grand Mount Rushmore. I thought that was just awesome being there. Its so much different being at places then just seeing pictures of them.





They had workers that would send tourists up in buckets to the top of Mount Rushmore so they could stand on top of their heads. I thought that would have been pretty cool. Although, it didn't look like the safest thing...



This is in front of the Missouri river. We stopped cause I thought that the bridge looked cool so we stopped at a park and took pictures. I love my husband.

We decided that the best way to record everywhere we've been would be to take pictures in front of all the state border signs. We got the idea after we hit Idaho though, so we'll have to get that one and a couple others on the way back home. We're hoping that we can hit all 50 states before we get to old.









The next picture is of me crossing the border on my birthday. I'd say it was a pretty good birthday present to have made it through! The guy at the border was pretty intimidating, it was scarier than I thought it would be. But now I'm here so no worries.



Gabe started work on Saturday and is doing an awesome job getting his office all ready. It's been pretty hectic and he's been working hard to get everything worked out. We're praying that his office picks up within the next little while and that it will start to get busy. Housing is still up in the air, we've got a cute apartment to live in right now, but we may be moving to a different place within the next couple days.

Looking forward to what's next!