Day 217-- holy shnykies

I have been terrible about taking pictures and about blogging! Cole and I have been up to a lot. I wish I would have kept better track. It's been two months since the last post!!

Here's everything that's happened...

1) My parents and youngest brother came to visit us. They stayed in our house for the first few days, and then in a hotel in Waikiki for the second half. Based on their visit, a week is not enough!! It came so fast and made me realize how much I miss family. We had a blast. They all came scuba diving with us and were great sports. My mom kept floating to the top- good thing we weren't very deep- it was hilarious. Both my dad and my brother kept themselves down on the bottom :) Afterwards, Taylor asked if they were certified now. Pretty cute.

2) We went dirt biking on a big track they have up on the North Shore in a place called Kahuku. Why they put a track in the rainiest part of the island where the clay turns to glass when it's wet, is beyond me, except that it is so much fun when it's not wet!

3) Cole spoiled me for my birthday. Homemade ice cream cake, volleyball on the beach, dinner at my favorite restaurant, and gifts. My parents also took me to Cheesecake Factory for my birthday which was great.

4) One year anniversary. Cole surprised me with a dinner cruise to watch Friday Night Fireworks on Waikiki

5) We are planning to move to California to work in the Bakersfield office. The time frame is unsure, but since we have to be ready to move, we ended our lease, shipped 80% of our stuff, and moved in with friends so we could leave at a moments notice. This has been super stressful, but we finally got everything situated except for the move itself.

6) We went to Kauai for a weekend. Legit. It's so different there than here. THAT is the island experience. Although Oahu is fun, you don't find much peace and quiet. Cole and I went with our boss Blake, and it was difficult to get us all to talk much. We just relaxed and layed on the beach almost the whole weekend. Except when I made the boys go on a hike with me. It was the only thing I wanted to do there before we left.

7) I died my hair blonde

8) We are about to have the third 3 day weekend since moving to Hawaii-- and already we have scuba planned and dirt biking. I'm so excited!

9) My sister had the first grandbaby on my side!! She's adorable and wonderful and has a big dimple just like me :) She's so cute, I'm in love. ( and no, Cole and I aren't having kids yet or for a long time, lol, I knew you'd ask)

We're excited to potentially see a lot of our friends and family soon! We'll keep everyone posted.

Day 17

Since our last blog post was so ominous, I thought I would post this morning to let everyone know that we made it through our first camp out safely. It was actually quite interesting! Well the whole day was... hopefully I can get all the details right.

Last time I left you we had departed out of our hotel and checked out the campground (so-called) during the day and found a little spot where we would stay the night. After that, we set out to find a car and a place to live. Throughout the day we drove and drove and drove. First stop, was McDonald's--free Wifi!! Cole says we are living the anarchist life out here because we go anywhere that has free wifi, don't buy anything (3 trips to McDonald's yesterday without buying any of their food), shower with baby wipes, and live out of our storage unit and our tent. Win :) At McDonald's we called around about apartments and cars. After setting up a few things we went on to the next agenda item. The Vivint Solar warehouse in Waipahu, which is where Cole lived last year, was where we ended up. We loved that it is in Waipahu because it's an area that we already know. It's smack in the middle of Honolulu and North Shore so it's kind of a big suburb with a lot of nice area. We stopped in to talk to the head tech there, Blake. He was super nice and we talked with him for quite a while. By the end of the meeting, Cole had a job. Man are we blessed and lucky! He is going to be learning all the ins and outs of Vivint Solar with Blake and working really hard. A lot of manual labor at first, but we are so excited.  Well I think Cole is a little bummed that he has to start working already, but it's definitely a miner negative side. We will play a lot before he has to start (two weeks from yesterday).

After Vivint, we went back to McDonald's to look at more cars and apartments. We realized we were absolutely screwed when we were about to go look at a car we liked and wanted to go to the bank to get cash... surprise, there isn't a Chase bank here! We had to hurry and go open a bank account so that we can transfer funds. We made a trip to the storage unit and couldn't even find our checks and so we felt quite stranded. How could we get an apartment or a car if we couldn't get our money?? The apartment thing works out just fine because they'll take our debit card, but we can't get money transfered to our new bank account for a few days. Luckily, we found our checks in the storage unit this morning and so we are okay. We still opened the bank account, because obviously we're gonna need it!

With that problem solved we started looking at apartments again. After our experience with the camping ground and being stressed all day-- this was almost too much for me. We kept running into the worst possible ghetto. It was unbelievable. I won't even show you pictures because it would scare you. It sure scared me. Finally we found this really nice place, in a gated community thank goodness, that we like a lot. We submitted a rental application and put $100 down to hold it assuming our application comes back approved. We can still choose not to take the apartment if we find something better, so we have continued to look. Back again at McDonald's around 6, we were back on our laptops and iPad's. Man are we a couple of bums!!! I actually did buy a coffee there, so not a total loss for McDonald's I guess...

I started crashing around 8, and getting kinda loopy from being so tired. But we had an appointment to meet a guy for a car at 9:30, so I powered through and despite some incoherent comments about Cole not making sense and would he please try to speak clearly because obviously HE was too tired to complete his thoughts (not so--I would too tired to hear the completed thoughts) I got a second wind. At this point we had eaten granola bars, bananas, peanut butter and jelly and crackers all day so we were starving. We decided to try some Hawaiian food in Cole's old neighborhood. Let me expand on this part of the day!

So it may have been that we had been in the sketchy areas and stressed all day, but everything seemed way more trashy than ever before. Keep in mind, we're in the same strip mall right next to where Cole used to live, where we walked a million times. It's extremely safe! But we were just on edge. Everyone was looking at us wrong, or looked sketchy. A little old asian man yelled at me for not buying his bananas for sale because I was a liar and he had family stuff to take care of... well that was my last straw so we went into the little Hawaiian food place and got Chicken Long Grain, Salmon something, and Kalua Pork. The Pork was delicious, sorta, and the rest was well... it made my stomach queasy. So we left and Cole got two tacos from Jack in the Box (cat food tacos we call them lol, they are the best) and I ate yet another banana and some craisins.

After a less than delicious but fine dinner we went to go meet a guy with a Honda Passport we liked. We pulled up to a really nice neighborhood, relieved, and a guy from the mainland (Boston) greeted us. We looked over the car, the guy was a real talker but it was so nice to talk to someone friendly. Long story short, the car was a piece, so we left knowing we still need a vehicle.

Finally, it was the end of the night and time to go back to our campsite! We made the drive up to the trailhead and started putting together the gear we would need to stay the night. While we were packing up, the security guard from the state department building I told you about, came over. He asked us if we were the couple that was camping there, and we said yes. He asked if we'd scouted out a place, and we told him yes. He then proceeded to tell us about a better place further down the trail, and gave us little points that we could use to our reference to know we were going the right way. He was so nice! He was originally from Sacramento and he and his brother owned a private security company and he was heading up the part that was in Oahu. He had left his family back in Sacramento, and he seemed lonely. He kept talking and talking and showing us pictures on his phone. He told us about how he hunts wild boars where we were about to camp. But not to worry! If we stayed up high (which is where we were camping) we'd be just find. He said that the hunters just used dogs, not guns, and that they wouldn't bother us because they'd be down in the valley. He also told us that the boars would smell us and stay away from us because they would be scared. This nice man talked some more about his horses and family while we were packing up, and then we left him and started on our little hike.

I was nervous, not really scared but just really tuned in to everything around me. It was raining pretty good, and frogs (huge 6-8 inch frogs) were everywhere. Well we saw two, but it seemed everywhere! After about ten minutes we reached a stream we jumped, as we were told by our new friend. After about ten more minutes we reached a rope that was tied to trees on this steep portion of the trail and we used the rope to climb up. Finally, we reached a place where there was an amazing view of the valley and we could see the town below. There was a bench and a little place for our tent. So we set up and got everything situated and settled down listening to the rain. Unfortunately, I was too wired to sleep. Probably still nervous. I played on Cole's phone, and listened to the rain, and every other sound of the forest. I think I slept about 2 hours total. Well I know I did, because I kept looking at the time.

All throughout the night it rained, but our tent was so good! We stayed completely warm and dry. When we woke up... we woke up to this:

After we woke up, we took a walk further up the trail to see if there were any better camping spots -- none that we found. But we did find this cool cave!!! We didn't have our flashlight so Cole didn't explore it. I'm kinda glad, because I was still a little tense.

This morning was interesting because after we hiked back we were SO muddy. We started freshening up back at the car and realized that the wipes we bought hadn't gotten put into our Walmart bag :( So we went back to Walmart to buy wipes, clean up in the bathroom, buy a double car phone charger, and get some laundry detergent. After we were all cleaned up anarchist style, as Cole says, we made it back to our storage unit (where we found our checks today so we can buy a car) and changed our clothes and finished cleaning up some more.

Back to McDonald's we went! We had had a breakfast of protein shake and candy for Cole, and protein shake and granola bar for me. It was definitely not enough for Cole after our meager food yesterday, so he finally patroned McDonald's for two $1 burritos and a coffee, I also got a coffee and it was wonderful. 

We are off to more apartment showings and car searches. Hopefully we'll get in some snorkeling today!  Oh, and we saw this cool blue stop sign yesterday :) Side note.

Day 15

We have quite a bit to catch you up on!! By the way I'm doing this post from my iPad-- don't let anyone tell you that an iPad is just as good as a regular laptop. This is so awkward because I had to download an iPhone app to even get this to work and the keyboard is stuck in portrait mode. #firstworldproblems... Oh well.

So since last time. Cole and I have been super busy. Cole was sick and we were worried he wasn't going to enjoy Disneyland on Friday so we took him to a doctor that a friend of ours knows thinking he would give us a good deal. Well it was pretty hilarious what happened. So we drive down to his office and find out number one that the office is in a strip mall. As we walk in we pass this guy smoking and chatting it up with these two fat white trash chicks and the guy turns and is like, oh hey, are you him? Cole says... Ya I'm Cole. He says, Great, let me finish this smoke I'll be right in. Okay....

He doesn't have a staff so he signs us in himself. He's this loud talkative Jew and barely let's us get a word in. He asks Cole a million questions. And finally takes us back to the examining room. There is a doctor table with that loud paper on it so I'll give him that-- but also in the room is some old garage sale desk, a toolbox with his equipment in it and a scary barred up door going to the outside. Is this a real doctor? I'll get to that! He examines Cole and tells him he's not sure if he has anything bacterial but if we want he'll sell us a generic Z pack. In fact he says, since your moving to Hawaii and won't have insurance I can sell you a few of them in case you get sick there. Done! So we buy 4 packs for $20 each and get the heck outta there. We find out later that he once lost his license for over prescribing meds... Makes sense. But worked out for us!!! Cole took one of the Z packs and was healed so Disneyland was back on in full force.

Cole and I have been desperately missing our friends James and Megan so we had a little date over Skype. It was awesome. Just the fix we needed with our cute, dear friends. It was so nice to see them that we took pictures too. Hi James and Megan, we love you :)

The next day was Halloween and so the Smith kids dressed up and Cole's parents came down to make Chili in a Fritos bag and go trick or treating. I'm 27 and still on Halloween I eat way too much candy!! The kids costumes were awesome. Summer and Raven were these Monster High Dolls. Skyler was a zombie and his makeup was amazing. Sierra was Athena. Cole and I stayed up and watched a really really creepy movie. We couldn't even finish it and had to watch funny YouTube videos in order to fall asleep. Remember the Back It Up remix news story YouTube? That made me laugh and put me right to sleep.

The next day we drove up to Los Angeles to hang out with Charles. Sort of his grandpa. We took him to lunch and talked with him for a couple hours before Adrienne, the boys, and Barbara met us up there to go to the BYU girls soccer game against he school right down the street. Most intense soccer game over!!!! The teams were very evenly matched and the goalies were amazing. Especially theirs because we had three times as many shots on goal and the score was 0-0 the whole game. The game was a tournament game so they went into overtime and still no score. During the second overtime BYU scored and won!!!!

We went to dinner with Charles after the game and had the best stuffed Marsala chicken with a big price of chocolate cake for dessert. That night we stayed at Adrienne and Tyler's and then the next morning was Disneyland!!!

We made it to the park just a few minutes after it opened. The first place we went was California adventure. We got fast pass tickets to the new cars ride which was for 4:30-5:30 that night!! And we got tickets for world of color. We rode screamin, Hollywood tower of terror three times, soaring, splash mountain, the railroad roller coaster that I can't remember the name, buzz twice and i got my best score ever of 125,000 and Cole got 175,000. We totally cheated and looked up online how to get the most points. We also did star tours twice, space mountain, splash mountain, the haunted mansion, Snow White, whinny the pooh, madderhorn, we watched the Michael Jackson 3d movie, pirates of the Caribbean twice, and I know I'm missing some but you get the idea that the day was super successful. Of course we went back to ride cars with our fast passes and had to sprint through barricades as there was a parade happening and got road blocked and almost didn't make it in our window. But we ran! And got there at exactly 5:30. I'm so glad we did because the ride was awesome!! We then watched world of color and that night after some more rides we watched Fantasmic. We were so tired and almost fell asleep on the way down to cole's mom's house but we made it.

I forgot to tell you the delicious food we ate!! You probably don't care but at least know that we got the best ice cream!

Saturday, Adrienne cut our hair and then we went down to Amanda and Matt's for a picnic and hike. That night we hung out at the house, repacked all our luggage and ate Skyline 3 ways. And then pizookies for dessert :)

Sunday morning... We flew away! The day was going great. We flew in, got our bags (7 big military bags that we were able to check for only 170 bucks!!) and grabbed our rental car. We drove to where our campsite was-- the area at least-- and bought a storage unit. We put most if our crap in there and then made a Walmart run. Walmart makes you feel like home wherever you go. After Walmart we met up with a friend and hung out with her for a bit-- mistake because now it was dark and we hadn't been to our campsite yet!!! We were so tired by 8:30 with the time change that we just wanted to set up our tent and go to bed. So we drove a half hour to where our campsite should be.... When we got to where the guard shack should be we couldn't see a trail and no one we asked knew what we were taking about. The trail we found, went alongside he chain link fence by this government building. It wasn't much of a trail. A guy told us to make sure that we left our names so if we got lost they could send search and rescue. So we were already scratched out. Not to mention the big signs that said Beware! Hunting Grounds!! And lots of other signs. 

Well we were out of options so we going to hike in anyway. We got out of the car and started grabbing our gear when a very clear and big wild animal started running around in the trees beside us. I was out. I jumped back in the car and started looking for another place to go. We ended up finding a deal for a hotel in downtown Waikiki about a half hour away. We drove there, and our exhaustion had really set in. We finally pulled up and Cole went to go check us in. He came back about 5 minutes later swearing and yelling about the fat guy who couldn't check us in because our reservation hasn't arrived from Priceline. So I called Priceline and was on the phone for about 20 minutes be we finally got it all cleared up. Cole had to parks 4 blocks away... Poor Cole was about to have a melt down he was so tired. I dragged all our stuff up so that Cole could walk with out luggage and we finally got settled in and to bed.

Surprise it's actually a pretty great room we got at a steal and we survived our first night in Hawaii.

On to more adventure!

*Update! I hadn't posted this yet and I wanted to let you know that we went back to that campground in the daylight and staked out where we want to stay tonight. It's much more acceptable at day time (this is where the picture came from above). The other idea I had if this place didn't work out was to go back to the rental company and get a truck and just pop up the tent in the bed of the truck every night!  Luckily for now we won't have to do that. AND thank goodness for McDonald's wifi and my lap top. I finished this post using my mac instead of my iPad--SO much better.

Day Ten

Today is officially day ten since we left Utah. It's been a great little vacation so far--because it still feels like vacation! That's going to be nice until reality sets in I suppose.

Since last week, Cole and I have done quite a bit. Thursday, the next day after going to Universal Studios. Cole and I hung out with Adrienne during the day, but then once she went to school, it was just Cole, me, Thatcher and Truman. Look out. We took the boys to their school for trick or treating. Thatcher was a karate kid and Truman was a soccer player.

We walked them around from class to class to get their goodies. The sad part was--no one gave out any candy!!! Everyone gave them toys or little activities.

We consoled them by taking them to McDonald's for dinner and they ate and played on the big toy. Truman was starting to crash by 7, so we hurried to take them home and put them to bed. It was so much fun hanging out with them and they were so good all night, but putting them to bed was super fun. We read them stories and tucked them in.

The next morning, Cole and I got up early and went to Magic Mountain. We went two years ago and the lines were so long that over the course of the entire day we only rode 2 rides!!! So this year, we went on ten to make up for it. By far my favorite ride is the X2. Cole's also. It's not just the best ride at Magic Mountain, it's probably the best ride anywhere. 

Most of the lines we waited in were under 15 minutes. We had to wait an hour for this bad boy, but it was worth it.

We celebrated the day by going to eat at our favorite Mexican restaurant nearby. It was perfect. We then went back to Adrienne's to pack up our things, we drove down to Mission Viejo to drop off some things, and then on to Oceanside to crash in the guest bedroom of Matt and Amanda. 

We've been in Oceanside since that day. Saturday we woke up and went to watch Skyler play soccer. His team was on their way to winning the tournament that weekend with 3 wins and 0 losses that Saturday. After soccer we all went to eat at Famous Dave's BBQ-- mostly because of the corn bread muffins!

On Sunday, Cole and I went out to breakfast at our favorite restaurant Beach Break. We had the best meal of a Sante Fe omelette with Chirizo and home potatos. We get this because our favorite meal doesn't come with a side of coffee cake and the coffee cake is a must. Then we get banana crunch french toast. In case you can't see from the picture, there are little pieces of crunchy rolled or honey bunches or oats or something. Then topped with bananas. 

After we hung out on the beach for a bit, we came back to the house--and I can't believe I didn't take pictures. Barbara and Scott came down and we had dinner, but the best part is that we made some epic carmel apples. The first layer was of course carmel, but then we could add about 5 different candy/nut variations and choose melted chocolate as well. We really should have taken pictures of that night.

By Monday, a cold that Cole had been fighting took over. We hung out around the house during the day. Amanda and I went running, which was so nice! I love that California is still warm. By evening--it was time to eat dinner and carve pumpkins. Amanda made the best barbeque chicken salad I've ever had in my life. Always put bbq sauce in your dressing! And garlic. Not to mention the crispy onion fries she put on top. Cole hasn't stopped raving about it!

After dinner we all started carving pumpkins. Skylar completely independent, got his pumpkin done pretty fast. Sierra was busy teaching us the newest and coolest vocabulary: everything was tot's hilar, and tot's awesome. Raven didn't get help for a while, but once she got her pumpkin gutted and a design drawn on hers, she took off. Summer was hilarious and completed her pumpkin complete with heart designs in the cheeks. Here are the final products (Cole and I are super proud of our pumpkins. He did Batman, and I did Bane)

Today, Cole woke up sick. So after Amanda and I went running we took him to the doctor and got a Z pak. Yay! No more sick Cole. After that we went down to San Diego to look at the seals.

The little blonde seal totally reminded us of a stuffed animal :)

So for the rest of the week, we are going to a girls soccer game in LA, then to Disneyland, then doing one more day with the whole family--and after that it will be Sunday and time to take off to Hawaii!