When I am older and aloner I am retiring to Mendocino!

My family decided to have a family reunion of sorts back in July and so we drove out to California with all our camping gear and stuff to spend a few days at the beach. Now let me clarify...I drove the kids out to Cali and Jim flew out that night. Not my first 10.5 hr drive with them alone and certainly not my last! We went to the Mendocino/Glass Beach area of Northern California....the COLD ocean, even in the middle of summer! Needless to say, we had some fun, I remembered that I will do anything else in the world to avoid camping ever again, but the kids liked it. Except for the part where it was really cold, and DIRTY! and wet and we didn't bring enough clothes....and I don't like campfire smoke, and..... don't get me started :) but I wouldn't mind living in the town of Mendocino when I'm old, it's beautiful and right there at the ocean and just a cool place.

20th HS Reunion in NM

We took a couple other road trips in July. Including one down to New Mexico for Jim's 20th High School Reunion! We had a great visit with his family that lives in Albuquerque and met a bunch of his HS friends. One guy brought the Oscar he won for work on that "Benjamin Button" movie and let everyone take pictures with it. :)

4th of July Weekend (Part 2)

Next on our trip we of course had to go see the school!

1ST up we ran around the Snow building.

I showed the kids where I had many a humanities and music class.

Next we went to the Hart Gym

Good ol' Thor :)

Found these plaques of my old friend from my freshman yr.

Hall of Famer!!

Checked out our old haunts....

The ever craptacular Riviera apts.

The CAVE!!!!

The new and improved Craigo's....the pizza and breadsticks tasted the same :) Yummy!

Our friends old apts....Ahh Royal Crest and the Bunkhouse

We also toured around the new (to us) gardens.... it was fun but it was getting hot and we wanted to get home in time to watch the Thanksgiving Pt fireworks from our front yard...

All in all, a fun trip!

It was nice to go back and visit and be very happy we are done with school!

4th of July Weekend (Part 1)

July started with a long weekend for us and we wanted to make the most of it!

We kept talking about taking a little trip somewhere but it was really hot and we had limited funds and everywhere we talked about was either hotter or too expensive.

At the last minute Jim looked up some hotels and we were off on a whirlwind adventure north to the land of our meeting.....

REXBURG, IDAHO

We left kind of later in the afternoon and drove to Idaho Falls

{Idaho Falls, Idaho LDS Temple}

We took a scenic drive around town trying to remember where stuff was and seeing what was new in the last 15 yrs or so since we had been there last...

We swam in the hotel pool even though it was about to rain and cold and windy....and remembered how un-fun it is to travel with our kids :)

Everyone was getting ready for the 4th so we saw a lot of people camped out along the street for a parade and there were early fireworks that night as well.

The next morning we headed to Rexburg and made plans to meet up with Jim's bro Nathan who was living there at the time.

{Rexburg, Idaho LDS Temple}
This wasn't there when we were in school!

This was!! :)


We arrived just in time to catch the Rexburg 4th of July parade and found Nathan in the crowd. I love a good small town parade! They are so patriotic and festive! We got lots of candy thrown to us and even school lunch size chocolate milk cartons from one of the floats :)

Next we drove around Rexburg checking out the changes and boring our kids to tears with stories....

December Recap

A lot happened in December and I need to catch up with the NEW year... here's a recap with

A LOT of exclamation points:

the 1st part of the month we were all sickies and there was pretty much no Christmas Spirit to be found.

Then Sam was Santa's helper in the Jingle Jam at school.

Jim's brother Nathan came to visit on his way home from Rexburg

We made an INSANE trip to INDIANA for Christmas!!

3 days in the car, 4 days to visit, 3 days in the car.

Trip of a lifetime!

Never going to happen again!

Way too much family togetherness!

We found out Kansas is 1 of the worst drives ever!

Who knew that orange muppet was so good??

The midpoint in Kansas is a small town with a BIG name!


and in Abilene Kansas, they like our name and make some pretty good chocolate!


We drove right under this in St Louis

On Christmas Eve I turned 36 and took a pretty bad picture with Max



Max really enjoyed himself with the cupcakes

Our Christmas was pretty good but no pictures were taken to prove it.

We had good weather during the whole trip and no snow which made the drive a little more bearable. We spent a small fortune on new videos for the kids to watch in the car, but totally worth it! I am really glad we have that thing!

We got home to a couple feet of snow in the driveway but were so happy to be out of the car it didn't matter.



Our New Year's Eve was quiet except for the ROCK!

We had to try out the new Guitar Hero we got for Christmas.

Tomorrow is Sam's Birthday.

I am having a lot of trouble with Blogger.

I am CAUGHT UP!

Happy New Year!

Postcards from Alpine Loop

Sunday after Conference we took a drive up the canyon to see the changing leaves. We had heard the Alpine Loop was the best place to see the color and it did not disappoint. Apparently everyone else knew it was probably 1 of the last times to see the leaves before everything is covered in snow because there was a ton of people. And as you can see in some of the pics, because of the storm we had all weekend, there is already snow on the mountain tops. Oh joy! (in a very sarcastic tone) See if you can spot us in any of the pics(oh that's right, you can't! I was taking most of the photos and the kids were either asleep or it was too cold to jump out and take pics.)

PS did you notice all 3 posts today start with "Sunday"?