Life in Washington

People have been telling me for quite some time now that I need to start a blog. I've avoided it for various different reasons, but I have realized that this may be the easiest way to get info about my life out to people. I find myself spending way too much time writing email after email describing the same thing over and over to several different people. I would send the exact same email to everyone at once but there always seems to be one little piece that just wouldn't make sense if I sent it to everyone. Now maybe people can find out about my life, and I'll just respond to the personal things in emails, making my time spent on the computer much less.

So where to start? I suppose I really went MIA to people around the time of my wedding, so sit back and relax as I recount the past 6 months of my life :-).

June 14th, 2008: I married my best friend in St. Augustine, Florida. I learned that it IS possible to throw a wedding together in exactly a month. Everything turned out wonderfully, with the exception of the photographer, which I will not get into because it will ruin my current good mood.

June 15 - July 10, 2008: This time was spent frantically packing up our entire apartment which was filled with everything from our entire lives since the husband and I seem to both be insane pack rats. Husband is a Navy pilot, therefore this frantic packing was done to pick up our entire lives and move across the entire country to Washington state. Husband also refuses to have the military move his stuff anywhere in the continental United States, even though they do it for free. He has declared that it is far better to do a full DITY move (Do It Yourself move for those who have no need to know military acronyms), which the military will pay you for, and then bank a good deal of money. I'd be all for this method if the packing didn't take 2 straight weeks and one day of panic because the moving company was coming to pick up our truck and we still weren't finished packing it. This has now been our second DITY move (1st was from Corpus Christi, Texas to Jacksonville, Florida) and I hated it and complained about it every bit as much as I did with the first move. I vowed to never ever move myself again, no matter how much money I make in the end. (That is, until we got the final payment from the military. I will now happily do another DITY move, although I am sure I will hate it and complain about it just as much. But that money sure is nice in the end!)

July 11-29: Amazing road trip across the United States. This is something that I have ALWAYS wanted to do and any time I have "I hate the Navy" moments I have to tell myself that this trip wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for the Navy. We left JAX and stopped in Georgia to visit my mom. We then drove on through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and finally Washington. We stopped at some amazing places such as Yellowstone National Park where we saw the famous Old Faithful geyser. We spent 4 days in South Dakota discovering a state that I tend to forget even exists, only to learn that it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Given the chance I would go back to South Dakota in a heartbeat and I feel like I should apologize to anyone who ever heard me rant and rave about how I wasn't going to have a real honeymoon, and instead would spend that "normal" honeymoon time in South Dakota. I have to admit - it was probably the best "honeymoon" ever. We saw some crazy, yet interesting things all along the way. We saw the official home of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois. We accidently stumbled across Metropolis on a bathroom break, and found a giant 15 foot statue of Superman in a historic downtown, along with a Superman museum. Apparently the state of Illinois actually voted and declared Metropolis as THE official home of Superman. I find places like this incredibly amazing and interesting because I would have never in my life thought to go to Metropolis, Illinois. Maybe I'm just a nerd, but I love stumbling across the weird and unknown places out there in this country! We saw a ghost town in Montana (Garnet) which involved a 2 mile VERY steep drive up the side of a mountain on a gravel road large enough for one car, but with 2 way traffic on it. The ghost town was very cool (history nerd here), but I will forever be mad at my husband for taking the 2 mile steep drive instead of the 8 mile drive on the other side of the mountain. Not only was the road too small, but it had no guard rails and my car was not getting good traction. When we got to the top I proceeded to burst into tears and have a full blown panic attack, while yelling at my husband and swearing that there was no way in hell I was driving back down that mountain. I am very thankful for the employee who directed us to the 8 mile, much less steep road on the other side. Husband didn't do very well with my anxiety attack and had the nerve to say to me "I thought you drove off the side of the mountain back there. You were behind me and your car was fishtailing and then I didn't see you anymore" BEFORE we found the alternative route back down.

I'm including links to the pictures of my trip because I could write for hours and still not tell the entire story. The final state of the trip was obviously Washington. I was less than thrilled about moving out here, but when we stopped at the Washington welcome center, what did we see? Rabbits! Everywhere!! For those of you that know me well, you know how much I love rabbits. The welcome center had domesticated rabbits (obviously the offspring of a rabbit that someone dumped outside) hopping everywhere. I of course took tons of pictures, fed them an apple and decided that my life in Washington was going to be good. In my mind, the rabbits were a good sign :-). I just chose to ignore the fact that as soon as we crossed over the Casade mountains, it instantly started raining, and the sky turned grey. I'd rather focus on the cute happy rabbits, in the sunny eastern part of Washington.

Anyway, here are the trip pictures:
Jax to Whidbey album #1
Jax to Whidbey album #2
Jax to Whidbey album #3
Jax to Whidbey album #4

We arrived in Oak Harbor, Washington on July 30. We set up residence at the "lovely" Acorn Motor Inn which was to be our home for the next 3 weeks. Husband checked into his new squadron on July 31st. Soon after getting there, husband was told that he was going to Hawaii for a week. So it was me and the cats and rabbit for a week, alone in a hotel. I was definitely worried about reaching crazy cat lady status at that point.

However, Husband came home without his plane malfunctioning, and we became first time home owners! We closed on our very own home on August 18th and have since spent the time from then until now unpacking, setting up, organizing, etc.

I'll update more at another time with all of the excitement that a small town like Oak Harbor has to offer.