Washington, Week 1

^^This is how we travel to and from Grenada. We have a tiny little airport over here, and there's only ever one flight coming or going at a time, so we get to walk onto the tarmac and use stairs to board our flights. It's actually really magical. 

^^Jared helping to put up lights for Roy and Imogene, our adopted Washington Grandparents (they're a cute couple who live in Jared's family's ward)

 

^^For Jared's birthday I arranged a Segway tour of the cute town of Edmonds, WA. We were the only two on the tour, and we were guided by this hipster high school student named Chaz who was like, "Uh, here's am abstract statue that a town in Japan traded us for a bunch of smoked salmon. We haven't heard from them since...." Best tour ever. It was actually really hard to get the hang of riding the Segways for the firs ten minutes, but after that it was so much freezing cold fun! We rode up and down a little section of Puget Sound coastline. After the tour, our guide let us zoom around an empty parking lot until we couldn't feel our fingers anymore. We felt like mall cops.

^^On our way home from our Segway tour we stopped at the nearest grocery store...and it was an IGA. IGA is the little grocery store we go to on our island. We're so glad we have it, but it's never fully stocked, the prices give me ulcers, and there's alway plenty of rotten produce to be found there. So I almost started crying when an IGA was the first grocery store we visited in the States. Except this one was really fancy and fully stocked with lots of quality American foods.

(I'd like to apologize for the ugliness that is Blogger in this post. Any long-time Blogger user out there can attest to the site's occasional formatting difficulties. I'm hoping it's just a fluke, because I have lots more posts to publish this weekend.)

We spent Christmas in Washington with Jared's family this year. And by "Christmas" I mean Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Years festivities, the 16 days leading up to Christmas, and the 13 days following Christmas. We essentially showed up on their doorstep begging, "Feed and clothe and entertain us for the next month?" And they happily obliged. Being med-school nomads isn't so bad when you have Lamberts and Haineses taking you in. 

More posts to come soon with more details about our break. But not too many details. Those are recorded in journals. Sometimes I don't know how to balance the information I put into blog posts, my personal journal entries, and the weekly family newsletter I email out to family members and close friends. Do I repeat the same info and stories in all of them, or no? Still working on that balance, but for the sake of playing catch up I think these next few posts will be picture heavy and story light.