Showing posts with label Trips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trips. Show all posts
As promised, here is the video I put together of my parents' visit to Grenada. If nothing else, definitely watch the first half so you can see a huge leatherback sea turtle lay and burry her eggs. They go into a sort of trance during this process and so you can only use red light to see them because red light doesn't bother them in their trance. We got to touch our turtle, and our good friends Kayla and Evan were volunteering that night so they got to be the ones to catch the eggs and record all sorts of numbers and measurements for research. Turtles are so rad! And these ones are the raddest because instead of a shell, they have rough, leathery backs. They're like legit sea dinosaurs.
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| Jared, Me, Caitlin, Chris, Jordan, Tim |
Last weekend, Jared and I made a quick trip to Utah for my brother Chris's wedding. I was hoping that this post would be my most visually appealing yet, showcasing my spazzy family outside the Salt Lake temple, the gorgeous copper dress I wore to their lovely greenhouse reception, mine and Jared's engagementversary overlooking Utah Valley on pi day, and video footage of the whole thing. I rented an excellent camera and a seriously gorgeous lens for the weekend (for my photographer friends, it was a 50mm 1.2L lens---I KNOW), but upon arriving home in Grenada, I was devastated to discover that the memory card I used all weekend had failed.
I tried a variety of recovery options, called the camera rental place for advice, and even took the card to Jared's school's staff photographer for him to work on it. No luck. It's all gone for good. On the downside, soooo many good pictures and videos gone (thankfully I wasn't the official wedding photographer or videographer), including a video shoot of my friends Sally and Trent in their wedding clothes for my portfolio. On the upside, I'm really glad I learned this lesson before I start taking paying clients. From here on out I'll invest in quality cards and use a camera that can write to two cards at once, just in case. Have any of you had this happen to you before?
Despite the pictures being gone, I still wanna write a post about our weekend back home. I haven't journaled this yet, so it may be a long one. On Friday, Jared and I nearly cried when we went through a Wendy's drive-thru because, holy moly, America and value menus and convenience and CUSTOMER SERVICE. The girl at the window even smiled at us. Do you realize that customer service isn't a thing in many places outside the US? You'd think that having visited home so many times during our Grenada adventure we'd be over it by now, but we're not. And I hope we never are.
That evening, Jared went night skiing with my brothers for Chris's bachelor party, and I went to Texas Roadhouse with my mom and grandma. Again, AMERICA. Mom was a bit on edge because our wait time was nearly an hour and the restaurant was pretty loud, but I was all smiles because our wait time was only an hour (that's like 10 minutes in island time) and my water glass was kept full the entire time and I can't even remember the last time I had a good steak before that day. And then that dry Utah air and vivid Utah sunset walking out? Oh gosh. I felt like a newborn baby, experiencing the world for the first time.
Saturday was the wedding. The whole day felt like the Home Alone airport scene. Chris and my parents left early, so my brothers and Jared and I were in charge of just making it to the wedding on time and driving Omi (our grandma) there. Well, as we got in the car to leave in a very timely manner, it came out that Omi had forgotten her temple recommend. She lives about 15 minutes form my parents' house in the opposite direction of the Salt Lake temple, so we were going to be cutting it reallll close if we ran back to get it. My speed-demon brother Jordan was driving though and he took this as a personal challenge. We made it to the sealing room exactly three minutes before the wedding, even with Jordan being pulled over for a ticket a block before we got there. All hail Jordan.
The wedding was lovely. My Uncle Al was able to do the sealing, and the weather outside was perfect for pictures. Chris looked so dapper with his scruff and his emerald green tie, and Caitlin was so pretty in her knee-length lacy white dress. Jordan, Tim, Jared, and I were alone in the party van for the drive home. We stopped at a Chick-fil-A (more weeping was involved because America and frozen lemonade and a girl taking our order while we waited in the drive-thru line because heaven forbid getting our food take us longer than 3 minutes!), and then sped on home because Jordan's ski rentals from the bachelor party were due back right then.
Jare and I went along with him, hoping for some relaxing Jordan time, but we wound up taking several flustered-sounding calls from Chris and running last-minute reception errands. When we finally finished those we had about 3 minutes of time at home to change into our dinner/reception clothes and dash down to the reception center. The dinner/reception was held in a nursery. Everything was green and pretty. The food was excellent. We killed it with our toasts. And there were Italian sodas and cobblers served at the reception! Jordan's girlfriend Amanda met us there with supplies to decorate/suran wrap the getaway car. And then we embarrassed ourselves so hard in the flash mob dance that we had rehearsed like twice. We're so happy to have Caitlin in the family now! Yay for finally having a sister to offset all the testosterone at family functions.
The next day was our last one in Utah. It was filled with church and family time and watching old family home videos. It was really odd saying goodbye to everyone and all our things this time around, knowing we'll be back for good in just two months time. These past two years in Grenada have gone by entirely too fast and entirely too slow, all at the same time.
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| ^^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. |
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| ^^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) |
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| ^^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. |
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| ^^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.
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