September Marathon Travel

Stephen and I just got back from a long, busy weekend with family.

On Thursday, we traveled to eastern Washington to visit my grandparents and my sister, who is currently living with them. After a 6-hour drive, we arrived at their house about 10:30 and spent an hour and a half chatting with them until we all hit the hay.

On Friday we traveled 2-1/2 hours up to Coeur d'Alene to spend a day at Silverwood Theme Park, part 1 of our anniversary. We started with a nice, easy ride--the log ride, which is a slow, gentle float down a man-made stream, followed by one hill and drop before the end of the ride. After that, we decided we were ready for a more adventurous ride and went straight to the Timber Terror, a roller coaster that had me screaming for all 2700 rattling feet of it. We were rather shaken after getting off it, but Stephen enjoyed it enough that he went on another (albeit nicer!) roller coaster. I think my limit is about 1 roller coaster ride per visit.

Stephen also went on the Panic Plunge, a ride I refused to go on with him. It lifts you up 140 feet into the air and then just lets you go. In spite of knowing just how it worked and that he would come to a gentle stop at the end, Stephen left the ride with muscle soreness from tensing up so much as he braced for impact with the ground!

We went on Thunder Canyon and got our shorts and shoes soaked in 79-degree, partly cloudy weather, but it was a fun ride nonetheless. It's actually my favorite ride there, and I would have multiple times if 1) it had been warmer and 2) I had worn quicker-drying clothing than denim! Silly me.

We also did bumper cars, and a ferris wheel with a twist that scared me WAY more than I had expected! This particular ferris wheel balances at a 45-degree angle from the ground, so unlike normal ferris wheels, there is NOTHING between you and the ground--or, in this case, a man-made lake used for bumper boats. The ride was very smooth and gentle, and would have been truly enjoyable if I'd only been able to stop thinking of myself plummeting into the lake below. I clung to Stephen for dear life on the down-turn and just prayed to the Lord that we wouldn't get stuck at the top when the ride came to an end.

After all the rides, we each got GIANT "single scoop" ice cream cones that were delicious, but impossible to finish. We ended up throwing half our ice cream away but eating the waffle cones. :) After ice cream we took our time walking toward the exit, stopping in several of the fun shops along the way, including one to get Stephen some coffee and me some tea. We also walked by "Old Tyme Muggs," a place to get old-fashioned dress-up photos taken, and couldn't resist the temptation. Silverwood's theme is the Old West, so we dressed up saloon-style. I have to say, that was by far my favorite part of the entire day. I adore playing dress-up. Finally, we stopped in a gift shop and I bought myself a very pretty necklace that I will probably wear a lot.

We arrived back at my grandparents' house at 10:00, hardly earlier than the day before, which was sad. Again we all talked for about an hour and a half until Grandma and Grandpa retired to bed, and then spent another 2 hours talking with my sister. :) It was a good thing for all of us, I think.

Saturday we took it easy and spent most of the day with the grandparents and my sister. At 7:00 My old youth group friend Beth was getting married to the love of her life. It was nice, simple wedding. The wedding was outdoors, and the reception was indoors at the church Beth attends now. They served dessert and we all ate way too much sugar. There was dancing, which was an intriguing thing to watch, because half the crowd there was from the Nazarene church that Beth and I grew up in, and Nazarenes don't dance. It's no longer forbidden in the Nazarene manual, and much of the younger crowd has taken it up, but it's strongly discouraged among my grandparents' generation, and just not done in my parents' generation. I wondered very much how the traditional Nazarenes were feeling as they watched the non-Nazarenes and non-traditional Nazarenes dance. Stephen and I joined briefly but found we were very rusty!! It's been a long time since we danced, and we mutually decided we really need to pick it up again. :S

After the wedding and reception we got some "real" food from the local burger joint, which is still, in my opinion, the best burger place ever. :) The evening was spent in our usual way--talking, joking, telling stories. We normally play games at least once while we're home, but all 3 nights we were there, we were just too tired! It's a shame--we'll have to do that next time we're in town.

Sunday we went to my old church that I still love. It looked so empty! It was rather alarming until I realized that it was Labor Day weekend, and a lot of families were probably on vacation somewhere. After church was our usual Sunday dinner eating out--my family has done that for as long as I can remember! Usually it's Shari's, or IHOP, or some restaurant like that, but we had just eaten at IHOP the day before and went for fast food instead. Sadly, Stephen and I had to leave shortly after lunch to drive 6 hours across the state to his parents' home. That hadn't been in the original plan, but Stephen's brother and sister-in-law were home, and we never get to see them, so we decided to make it work. The drive there and the drive back brought our travel time up to 1500 miles in 5 days!

We took it really easy with Stephen's family. The most exciting things we did were to walk down to a creek together and go to a farmer's market. :) It was good to see Tim and Mary and everyone again, though. We learned that Stephen's dad's parents will be in town next month, the weekend right after our anniversary, so we will be doing more marathon traveling at the beginning of October. And then it's time to figure out the holidays... Oh boy. I'm starting to understand why years go faster as you get older.

Our final leg of the trip was 3 hours long, and we unfortunately had to drive straight to a meeting with some people from our church about a service we have begun for Saturday nights. Thanks to a miscommunication, we were an hour late, but we still got to eat some food and throw in our thoughts about possible plans for the service. Then we at last drove home to quietness, our kitty, and our own bed. Oh how nice!

I am too tired to write anything more, and looking much too forward to that nice bed... So I bid you good night! Perhaps I'll wrap this up better later.

East Coast, Part II

Let me just say, I love the Pacific Northwest and have never been so glad to see it as when I exited the Sea-Tac airport on Saturday. One blast of that crisp cool PNW air and I was definitely back home where I belonged.

Friday we packed everything up and left New Jersey in our rental van to head for Lancaster, PA. Steve's (my father-in-law) GPS wasn't working and it took longer than expected to get there, but on the way I got to see Amish people everywhere, a people I'd only heard about from my grandma and mom. I didn't know anything about them and was surprised when I first saw a young lady in a white bonnet, a white apron and a stark black or brown dress. In my ignorance, I thought to myself, 'Oh cool, they dressed up in historic clothing! Must be some kind of special event going on.' Then I kept seeing more of them and it dawned on me that this was Amish country. After I realized that, it was kind of astonishing every time I saw young boys in suspenders, white shirts and black pants riding on bikes or working in the fields. The experience just left me with a feeling of: I'd have to spend a lot more time in Pennsylvania to fully understand why and how they choose to live that way.

Once in Lancaster, we drove around visiting houses, schools, stores and churches that Steve remembered from his childhood. Cari and Stephen were our designated photographers and probably took 2000 photographs between them over the entire trip.

We also ate at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord, a huge buffet-style restaurant with a gift shop on the bottom floor. We all ate way too much at the smorgasbord! But I got to try shoofly pie and corn fritters and a giant Pennsylvania Dutch sweet 'n' sour meatball. Afterward, Stephen and I went to the gift shop to buy some chocolate. Nate went to the gift shop too, but we forgot that he had, and the six of us nearly drove away without him! I was horribly embarrassed for forgetting him--but everyone kept a good-humored attitude about it, and Nate wasn't even fazed. :)

We stayed in a beautiful hotel, Hampton Inn and Suites. I'd never seen a hotel with fluffy white bedspreads before! Stephen and I were settling into the room, preparing for bed, when I found a tick on my stomach. I guessed I had gotten it from sitting in the grass by a covered bridge earlier. It kind of freaked me out and I called my family and Stephen consulted the Internet and his family to find out how to get rid of it... I killed it first with hand sanitizer, but it didn't back out like it was supposed to--so we finally resorted to pulling it out with teeny-tiny tweezers. Stephen performed the "operation"--I was much too freaked out to do it myself. He did a great job; he got it all out, head and all. Then we covered the wound with a band-aid and Neosporin, and now it just looks like a small bug bite--no infection. Hooray!!

Saturday was our last day of LOTS of travel. It was a really long day. Our flight was at 4:15 PM EDST, and it was 7 hours long, with one connection in Chicago. The flight from Philadelphia to Chicago was a very bumpy 2-hour ride with a hard landing. Then it was a one-hour wait for our next plane. The flight from Chicago to Seattle was long and hot. I felt really, really sick for the last half-hour of it, but thankfully didn't throw up. Closest I've ever been to doing so, though. We landed at 9:30 PM PDST, and as I said--the blast of fresh, cool Pacific Northwest air was about the best thing I had ever felt. The whole entire ride home I just listed all the things I love about living here.

Stephen and I spent Saturday night at his parents' house and most of Sunday. It was good to get back to "life as normal." We got home about 8:30 or so. Our poor kitty was literally yelling at the door as we mounted the stairs. She knows our footsteps, somehow. She was sooooooo happy to see us.

Now to get back to living in our own apartment... I definitely felt a bit of culture shock, or something, when I got back. It'll take some getting used to, LOL.

Jon was sick the entire trip, and he's been sick for a while. Everybody is praying very hard for him, because nobody is sure what's going on with him. Please keep him in your prayers too, if you think of it.

Stephen had dizzy spells today at work. I took him to an Urgent Care and the doctor told him he has "rocks" in his ears that have gotten loose. He will be fine, but it's good to know about.

We're all (I'm sure) still recovering from the trip. I know I am. Thank you for your prayer support for us. :)

New Jersey

I have some down time right now, so I'll write about the trip so far. I haven't mentioned it in here yet--so FYI, Stephen and I and his family are in New Jersey for a family reunion on his mother's side. They picked New Jersey (even though none of them live there anymore) because that's where Steve's grandpa (who has passed away) and his siblings grew up. His great-grandparents are buried here, across from America's Keswick Retreat Center, which is where we are staying.

After spending Monday night at Steve's parents' house, we flew out Tuesday at 11:30 AM for the East Coast. Our first flight was 4.5 hours long, from Sea-Tac to Nashville, TN. We had a 1-hour layover in Nashville, which was just enough time for the seven of us to snatch lunch/dinner and get to our gate. The second flight was about 2.5 hours, from Nashville to Philadelphia, PA. Both flights were without problems, although there was slight turbulence as we came into Philly and a rather hard landing that shook everybody awake.

We arrived in Philadelphia at 9:00 local time (6:00 our time!) and took a shuttle to Avis, where an 8-passenger SUV with decent trunk space was supposed to be waiting for us. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they did not have our SUV waiting for us. What they did have would not fit all seven of us and our luggage, so we instead rented a tight, but sufficient, mini-van. Using Steve's dad's GPS phone, we drove it from Philadelphia for about an hour and a half to America's Keswick. We got in about 12:30 AM. Stephen's great-uncle Dave was there to meet us and give us our keys, and two of his Georgia cousins, Victoria and Lauren, came running down the stairs to greet us. It was kind of entertaining, because they know Steve and his family very well--I'm kind of on the "outside"--but they hugged me anyway. :)

The humidity of New Jersey surprised me. It felt like Portland on a muggy day. I keep expecting the weather to turn around and be not-muggy anymore, but I don't suppose it does? Anyway, it's tolerable. It feels a lot like Hawaii to me, and like Korea to Stephen. Tomorrow is supposed to be 87 degrees though--we'll see how tolerable it is then! :)

Tuesday at 12:00 we all went to see the great-grandparents' gravestones. I thought that was a good thing to do; it gave meaning for the trip to me, reminding me why I'm here with all these people with names I'm not familiar with, LOL. One of the people--I can't remember his name, EEK!--gave a short message there about the legacy the great-grandparents left by passing down their faith in Christ. It was kind of neat to look at the people there and know they are all connected to those two people, Ida Marie and Bob.

After lunch, most of us headed down toward the Point Pleasant Beach boardwalk. We got to experience a lot of East Coast driving firsthand, and Stephen's dad was doing a lot of it. :D Kind of terrifying!! On the way, we stopped at the house Ida Marie and Bob had lived in, and one of the houses Stephen's grandma lived in as a child. It took us a long while to get to the places because Steve's grandma couldn't quite remember the addresses. We made lots and lots of turnarounds! But we did eventually find the houses. Steve's mom said that they had a picture of Stephen when he was a little, little boy sitting on his great-grandma's lap at the house they lived in. That was kind of cool too--a tie-in to my own life.

When we got to Grandma's old house, e-ver-y-body got out to take pictures and stare and wonder and everything, in this small East-Coast neighborhood... The neighbors were really giving us odd looks!! A few of them finally came up to us and asked who we were and what we were doing. We must've looked like the news come to town or something, pulling up in two vans and pulling out cameras all over! LOL!

After seeing Grandma's old house, we tried to head down to the boardwalk, got a little lost, and wound back up on Grandma's old street. And just as we were pulling through, a woman about 65 years old with tight white curls frantically yelled and flagged us down. She knew Grandma and her sister when they were young--Grandma's sister taught her how to swim. That was all I caught... Grandma was in the van behind us, so the woman went back there to talk to her through the passenger seat window. I watched through the back window of our van, and Grandma's expression when the woman introduced herself was totally enough for me. :) It was worth it. They held hands, enraptured by the joy of finding each other after so many years... It was really, really sweet. I think both women will remember this meeting for a long, long time.

After that, we finally made it down to the Boardwalk. Nobody rode any rides, but we did stick our feet in the Atlantic. Now seeing the Atlantic was sure different!! I'd never seen it before, and the first thing that struck me was how insanely close the waves crash to shore. It scared me to death for a minute until I realized that the waves come very regularly, slowly and only one at a time--which was also bizarre! And it was really strange knowing that to my left was the North and to my right was the South. It was a little disorienting, in all truth. LOL.

I had to avoid the waves, sadly, because I scraped up my ankle pretty bad on a bike (or rather, falling off a bike) yesterday, and I had bandaids on it. But I let the seawater wet me up to the bottom part of my ankles. It felt like California water--very nice!

The sand was really different. Somebody said they probably trucked a lot in. What I noticed was that it was dark yellow, not white like the West Coast. It looked for all the world like yellow cake mix to me! It also felt different, though I could never pinpoint quite why.

We went in a couple souvenir shops and I realized something else different. They wrap their saltwater taffy in rolls instead of blobs. I should have bought some, but looking at the way they were wrapped, my brain kept saying, No, I don't feel like caramel... LOL. I did buy some souvenirs for my mom and sister, and a beautiful little sand-sculpture castle covered in glitter for me. It looked so perfect! I wish I could have bought a couple others too.... They're just so cute and pretty!

Wow, that's all yesterday--I haven't even gotten to today yet. Today has not been terribly eventful, really. We took group pictures galore mid-morning. We had lunch on our own. Stephen went canoeing with one of his cousins and I took pictures. There's stuff to do but none of it jumps out at me, I guess. Dinner is in about a half an hour, so I think I'll wake Steve up. He's been sleeping for the last hour and a half. We're a tired bunch! I took a long nap earlier. Jet lag catches up to us on the second day, I guess. :)
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Tomorrow we go to Lancaster County, PA, where Stephen's dad grew up.

Oh, and I have a possible job interview coming?! Crazy?! I got a call today from CampusPoint saying that there was a temporary (3-week) proofreading job available for a software company. It starts Monday. Yeah. Insanity. We're getting back Sunday, so I could do that--but how insane, right?! I kinda hope I get it. It's a possible foot-in-the-door for that company too, in whatever positions they might have for me. So pray for me! Wisdom and guidance and strength too.

Also pray for Stephen's brother Jon. He's been sick for about a month, and nobody's quite sure what's going on. Stephen thinks it's mono. Please pray that we'll sort that out. Thanks everyone!