I Think I might be getting fat

Is it just me or does this shirt look a little too small. I really hope it is not because i am getting fat or something like that. I think that my sister was supposed to send me one that fits because it is my favorite shirt. I do not think that this is that shirt, but it might be because this sister who said she would send the shirt is pretty responsible and does what she says she will. Now this shirt has shrunk so small that i have to give it away and am without my favorite shirt in the whole world. If only someone knew what happened to its replacement.

your mama's so fat she doesn't even have to fly south in the winter

It is sad but summer is coming to an end and school is just days away for Grant. We are ready for fall, or at least ready for it to cool down. I am a little sad however, we had so many things that we said we were going to see and do... And our summer was fun, even with a few curve balls thrown in, but over all fun. So today, the last day we both had off work together before school starts we decided to make the most of it. I wish there was enough time to do a quick trip to Moab, go camping, and then stop by Vegas for a night. Then we really could say that we did everything we had planned this summer, but it just wont fit in the three days left before school start. So we decided to honor my family's tradition of "saying goodbye to summer". In Idaho during the first weeks of school we would go to the beach, eat dinner, swim, and feed the birds one last time. We only have a smelly lake down here, and the smell would probably kill most people's appetites, so dinner and swimming at the lake were out. Instead we went mini golfing and then went for a bike ride to the duck pond on campus to feed the ducks. This is one of those situations where it is the thought that counts. The ducks are fed so frequently at the duck pond that they don't even fly south for the winter, so it's not like we won't be able to visit again until spring time. Today they were pretty lively and would eat the bread right out of our hands. There have been a few times that we have tried to feed them and they were so over fed they would only eat you bread if it landed close enough for them to reach it without walking.

Here's a picture of Grant hanging out with the ducks. They will stay through the winter, but we are not brave enough to go out in the cold to feed them so today is our goodbye until next spring.
Mini golf was also really fun. They had an outdoor and indoor course, we opted for the indoor course. Hooray for air conditioning!, it is just too hot to really enjoy anything outdoors. Good bye summer, let's bring on the fall!

Our travel log is almost done, we promise...

If I had any doubt about us not getting to do enough on vacation I take it back after trying to blog about it. Sorry for the gigantic posts that are a little travel logish.

At the end of our Fisherman's Wharf day we stopped by Ripley's Believe it or Not. They had a lot of cool stuff including this wax man who represented the largest man ever drafted. It said that he started growing like crazy when he was three years old and ruptured his growth gland. my favorite part of Ripley's was a Van Gough picture that was made out of toast, toasted/burnt to various shades. I would have put it up but pictures take forever to post. I'm a little annoyed trying to format and post them at the moment.

On our way home from Fisherman's Wharf the cable car stopped working. They let us know that the cable was down so no cable cars were running for a while, but they had called buses to shuttle everyone to the stop that was 7 blocks away. So we could wait 30 minutes for the bus shuttle, or we could walk the 7 blocks on our own. We chose to walk and ended up going right through China town. It was actually a great little detour. China town was much cleaner than we expected and seemed to have the only bargain shopping in the whole city.

Our last day in SF before we switched to our hotel in San Jose ( it was cheaper and had a more central location for the rest of our activities) we decided to check out the Golden Gate Park. We we able to see a lot of cool things including the flower conservatory. The park was 4 miles long and we were a little tired of walking ( we calculated that we had walked close to 20 miles during our site seeing the day before) so we drove through and stopped to check out all the interesting stuff.

The park dead-ended at the ocean. we walked around on the beach a little and had lunch at restaurant that over looked the ocean. It was nice to have a relaxing day after the craziness of the day before.

The next day in San Jose we went to the Winchester Mystery House. This was Grant's favorite part. At the house we signed up for a tour of the house as well as the behind the scenes tour. We got to wear these very cool hard hats on the behind the scenes tour so that we wouldn't hit our head on the ceiling that was 4 feet in some places.

After going on the tour we are convinced that the lady who built this house was CRAZY. But it was really fun to visit and we recommend it to anyone who goes to the bay area.


On our final day of vacation we stopped by Big Basin state park to see the Redwood trees. They were pretty impressive, but the drive there had a lot of twists and turns. Grant definitely felt a little sick, and even I felt a little gross by the time we got there. I don't think I've been car sick since I was 5. Even with the sickness the trees were cool enough to make it worth it.

... and our final stop on vacation, Santa Cruz beach boardwalk. We had lunch, saw the sites including a free Chinese acrobat show, but passed on the rides. We didn't want to test our stomachs any more than they already had been that day. Vacation was great, we are so happy we went and definitely want to go back when we have kids someday.

Livin it up in " THE CITY"

Everyone has probably heard about my desire for nearly three years for Grant and me to go on a FUN vacation. Until recently all of our "vacations" have consisted of the 11 hour drive home to CDA, and then a week long stay being juggled between family. We really do love you all, and the time we get to spend together, but every once and a while you have to switch it up and see the sites outside of North Idaho...

So I finally wore Grant down and got him to agree that if we were going to go on a vacation before real jobs, kids, and real life set in we needed to do it this summer. With hardly any notice, and tiny bit of planning we did it and successfully went on a FUN vacation to San Francisco a.k.a. THE CITY. We were able to find some killer deals on on hotels with hotwire.com. Anyone who has ever booked through hotwire knows that its a little bit of a gamble, they won't tell you exactly where you are staying until you commit to book the room. Over all it worked out great for us. We actually got a decent hotel in SF for under $100 per night, this is amazing considering we were there during the peak tourist season. It was in an "interesting" area, close enough to walk to all the touristy stuff, but we also got to experience the "city experience " walking to and from. If you are wondering what qualifies as a "city experience" I will say that I saw my first ladies of the night, and we also saw a bum steel another bum's baggie of cereal while he was sleeping. There were things to see no matter where you were ;-) . Over all we felt safe and were always ready to crash when we made it back to the hotel each night.

This is a picture of some of the big buildings in SF. We bought a new camera right before the trip and Grant was so excited to get pictures of everything. He was really cute as we were getting close to the SF, he saw Oakland and though that was our destination. He wanted me to start taking picture of the "SF skyline", a.k.a. Oakland. I took a few to make him happy, but said I would wait to take really good ones of SF's skyline because it's much more impressive, one minute later we were heading across the Bay Bridge and the real SF came into sight, Grant was a little speechless. (our pictures don't quite capture it all)

A little out of order, but here is a picture of us as we left our driveway at 4:30 am to begin our adventure. We left hoping to miss traffic in SLC and SF that night. I had been to SF for one day before and all I could remember was the traffic, luckily we missed it all this time.

Here is a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge. We have a more impressive panorama shot but it was too big to put on the blog so this is what you get.

This is the cable car that we took to get to fisherman's warf. It is a cable car and not a trolley car which the locals were quick to correct us about. also it is not recomended if you do not like roller coasters. We really did enjoy the ride though.
This is a pic of alcatraz, we were not able to get on the island but did see it and learned about it as we took a cruise of the bay.

We also went to the aquarium at the bay, this is a huge school of fish that swam over our heads as we went in a walk through tunnel. We were also able to touch a shark and a few other cool sea creatures while at the aquarium. That was pretty cool.

These are the sea lions that you can see from pier 39. They were awesome. My favorite part was when they would wrestle with each other as one was trying to get on a dock and the other was trying to stop him. It was pretty funny. We will write about the rest of vacation later.

Here it is...

So, after checking out everyone's blogs for the last six months, we finally decided that we are interesting enough to have a blog as well. Not really, you can expect our posts to be pretty random. We'll try to keep them somewhat regular, but no gaurantees. I am so bad at journaling, I remember when Grant and I were dating and engaged I kept thinking, I really should be writing some of this stuff down, but here we are three years later and I can't keep most of our cute stories straight any more. I'm not going to atempt to back track, but maybe this will help us do better at keeping track of memories, ya know things like riding dinasours at the dinomuseum, and help keep up with family and friends.