We love Utah

Okay, so after some poking and prodding from people, I am here to update my blog. WE ARE HOME!!!! We got home ….. 3 days ago I think? But I have been so busy at unpacking and trying to make our apartment look nice that whenever I sit down I just want to sit, I don’t even want to type. Sad, I know. So we left Saturday morning from Fairbanks Alaska and it took us til Tuesday early afternoon to get home. It was a grueling 55 hour drive and we slept in the car for 3 nights. Gabe drove all the way, with the exception of me driving at the rest stop from where we pulled in to closer to the bathroom. Gabe is great, that’s a long drive for one person. But his deer maneuvering skills are a lot better than mine. Sleeping in the car was not fun whatsoever. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it, but Gabe got like $700 worth of audio equipment from a guy for free, so we took it home with us and it took up the back seat, so we could barely recline our seats to sleep. We basically drove until we passed out from exhaustion, so that we would be able to sleep in such an uncomfortable position. I missed our bed so much, it’s one of my favorite things we own. The last night we drove we looked at the GPS and it said if we kept driving we could get to Riverton at 7:00 the next morning and so we figured we could just drive straight and get there at 7:00. We needed a break in between all the driving so we started looking for a casino. We were in Montana, where even all the gas stations have casinos, and me being 21 hasn’t done any gambling yet. So we stopped in one of the towns and found one open. We put in $10 and played til we ran out of money. There was a really nice older lady that worked there and she kept bringing us complimentary sodas and snacks :) We found out we were in there for almost 2 hours eating snacks and playing a game together, so it was great! After a couple more hours of driving we started to get WAY loopy. We were making stupid jokes and laughing at things that weren’t even funny, so we decided we should probably get some sleep. We got home the next day and have been busy getting settled in and visiting all our family. We went out to dinner with his brother and sister in law last night and it was lots of fun.. I’m glad I have awesome in laws. We are living in BYU housing month to month for now. It’s not the greatest, but you know it’s so much better than living in a hotel. And.... drum roll please…. We have a stove!! I’ve cooked a few times on it already and I have the next weeks menu all planned out so I can cook dinner every night. I cannot wait!


We love Utah. Glad to be home.

Any day now!

We are so completely itching to head back to Utah. What a fun time we've had this summer, but we are ready to have a place to stay for longer than a week. We moved into 3 different hotels within the last week and we have to move everything from our car every time... lets just say we're a bit tired of it. You'd be amazed and how quickly it wears a person out.

I can't wait to:
Meet my new nephew
See all our family and friends
Cook big Sunday meals for my husband
Have a schedule
Sleep on our own bed
Set up our new sound system
Get my hair done
Have a freezer
Eat Little Caesars
Buy cheap food

And the list goes on and on and on and on...

Here's to crossing our fingers we can go home this week!!!

Off to the North Pole

Check out the fun weekend we had:

We took a walk around the block and went to a place called the "Fudge Pot" It was delish! They made blueberry fudge, my new favorite.. And then we ordered pizza to the hotel and watched a movie together

On Sunday we took a short trip to the North Pole :) Yes, that's right, the North Pole! There is a city in Alaska just outside Fairbanks named North Pole and its all decked out in Christmas decorations and most of the street names are Christmas and santa oriented. It made me excited for the holidays! 

And then... we met the reindeer! That was really neat for both of us, I don't think we've ever seen a reindeer before. One of the reindeer followed Gabe around and then he sneezed on his arm! ha ha it was pretty great

No way, jose!

Only about a month left in Alaska and then we're headed home.. Its way crazy to think about because I know its going to go by super fast. It'll be good to get home and see our family though, I just hope we'll be able to jump back into our regular schedule quickly.
So yesterday we drove another 9 hours to a new area. It's gotten to the point where a 9 hour drive isn't so bad. As long as its not above 20 miles, the drive doesn't seem that long. It's pretty funny I think. So last night around 10:00 pm we get to the new city and its like this tiny podunk town in the middle of nowhere and me and Gabe are looking at each other going "what the freak?!" and we arrive at the motel we're booked to stay at while we're here and it was like an old long school portable that some handyman put up walls in, looked like it hadn't been decorated since the 70's and was just in super bad shape. The first thing I think about are bed bugs, there's no way we're going through that again! There were pipes coming out of the walls, different colors of shag carpet in every room, and painted on faux wallpaper borders. Gabe and I had a room in another building that you had to get to from the outside, after climbing up a rickety old staircase. Not to mention our first impression of the place - we walk up to the main building to check in and there's 4 grungy lookin guys standing out front by their truck and as we walk up, a kid with one front tooth looks up at us and says, "sup homies!" and gives us a half chuckle, half snorted laugh. After a bunch of complaining from everyone, it was decided that we needed to find a different place to stay. We stopped by another "hotel" and asked for recommendations on where to stay and she recommended a bed and breakfast place, so that's where we're at right now. Its a cute place! Right now we're just a group of 3 sales guys and 2 technicians and we're staying in a big house away from the "city." We woke up this morning and the couple that owns the place made us biscuits and gravy and hash browns. Whats ironic is that the dumpy motel we were going to stay at is the same price as this super nice bed and breakfast. It seems like we all just took a big long road trip and are staying at one of the guys aunts house. Its quite the adventure... Quite a bit different than I had expected. The drive up here was really really pretty and we got lots of cool pictures. I love that we have a camera and are able to document everywhere we've been. Here's the pictures we took of comparison of the two places:

If you can on the one below, zoom in, their faces are priceless.

     

 Bed and Breakfast:

Time for a trip to Walmart!

I opened the fridge today and laughed. The Pepsi has taken over our hotel fridge! We should probably go to the grocery store....

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Sunday we decided to go explore. Gabe was told by a couple customers that there is this one spot in Alaska where it opens up and if you go there at dusk and look out you can see moose and bears and all kinds of wildlife. We haven't seen any bears in Alaska yet, so we decided to go on a bear hunt. We went with a couple other guys from the company and made them drive so it would be more enjoyable for us :) We found a couple campgrounds and stopped to look at the bulletin boards to see if they said anything about bears in the area. We knew if we found a bear warning on one of them then it would be a good place to start. And we found one! The paper on the bulletin board said that there was a "problem bear" that had been recently sighted in the area. I just wanted to find a nice cuddly bear, not a problem bear! That just sounds like trouble. We wandered around a bit (I left the car door open, just in case) but all we ended up seeing was a moose across the river. There was a couple trails that you could take up the mountain, but we saw a family getting out of their car and the guy was taking his gun with him. Naturally, I chickened out and decided we weren't quite prepared to meet a bear. 

We left and drove out to the end of the road and found a cool beach spot. We wandered around and looked for interesting things in the rocks. Gabe actually found a glass bubble that had formed from lightning hitting the sand. That was an awesome find, apparently those are really rare.

Isn't it cool?

Something new is that I finally have something to do that'll keep me busy. At least for just a week. The office manager out here had to leave town and so I'm helping out and taking her place for the week. It's a fairly simple job. All I have to do is text the techs when a job comes in and scan the paperwork. And I get paid a couple hundred dollars to do it. So it aint too bad of a gig I'd say.
Work is going well, Gabe is still doing AWE-SOME. Every install he goes to he has the opportunity to sell the customer some "upgrades" or extra equipment and he gets money for what he sells. Right now he is #2 in the company for upgrades! And its not a small company, that's for sure. So proud of my husband for his hard work.

We spent a little "Wii time" together

At 11:30 at Walmart last night I gave in and this was the result:

I’m still not too sure how I feel about it:

I vowed I would never ever own a game system, but here we are. Gabe has been talking about getting a wii for a long time and so he got it as his belated birthday present and it made him pretty darn happy!

We’ll see how it goes..