Our Move to Corpus (in pictures) Part 2...Days 4-6

The continued adventures of our move to Texas:

Day 4 - July 29, 2011

(California Redwoods! I had always wanted to see them but never knew much about the area. The Redwoods actually encompass the entire Northern California coast, and the National Park is actually a conglomeration of several smaller state and privately owned parks.)

(Trees of Mystery in Klamath, California. The Giant Paul Bunyan and Babe make the place look like a cheesy roadside attraction, but it was actually a pretty neat place. Of course, I happen to love cheesy roadside attractions anyway. Mr. V and I are in this picture, but these things were enormous and I think we're hard to see.)

(Elephant Tree inside the Trees of Mystery Trail)

(Part of the Trees of Mystery Trail)

(There's a gondola at the Trees of Mystery that takes you up to this overlook, where you're actually above all the giant Redwood trees.)

(In the gift shop at the Trees of Mystery. Another picture to add to our Pacific Northwest Bigfoot picture collection. Apparently, he lives and roams in a pretty large area, since Washington, Oregon and Northern California all claim to be his home.)

(One of three trees like this, all of which are spaced over the course of a few hundred miles [just to give you an idea of how big the Redwood area is]. This one is literally in someone's backyard, and is the first one you come across as you drive south. Cheesy? Maybe - but how often do you get to drive through a giant tree? :-) [And don't mind the mess in my car. I don't usually look like a homeless person when I'm driving, but thats what happens when we incorporate a vacation into a move. The car got progressively worse every day just from unpacking and repacking every single day. I guess we technically were living out of our cars for 3 weeks, and that wasn't fun.])

(Me, and a giant Redwood tree. These trees were really tall, but I have to admit that they weren't as wide as I had expected. I have a picture of me like this by a tree in the Olympic National Park thats twice the width of this one.)

Day 5 - July 30, 2011

(San Fransisco - by Alcatraz)

(Fisherman's Wharf - San Fransisco)

(I'm really not happy with how most of my San Fransisco pictures came out...here's a blurry one of me by the Full House house! [Otherwise known as Postcard Row and the Painted Ladies])

(Lombard Street - this picture does absolutely nothing to show the steepness of the street. It looks steep in this picture, but it looks twice as steep in real life.)

(Another attempt to show the steepness of Lombard Street - but again, this does nothing to show what it looks like in person.)

(driving down Lombard Street - the curviest street in the world)

(Mr. V and me after riding the San Fransisco Cable Car)

(I love this sign - now that we aren't in the hotel anymore. We didn't notice this until the second night at our hotel, but this wasn't exactly comforting to see.)

Day 6 - July 31, 2011

(The Golden Gate Bridge - our last stop before leaving San Fransisco)

(The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. If you've never heard of it, basically Sarah Winchester was the daughter in law of the guy who invented the Winchester gun. She believed she was going to be haunted by the ghosts of everyone who had been killed with a Winchester rifle, unless she never stopped building this house. So she hired people to build and made changes to the house every single day, 24 hours a day, until the day she died. So basically, she was crazy. This house is crazy, but its a fun place to tour!)

(The "Door to Nowhere" - one of the many weird things that Sarah Winchester added to this house. It opens from the inside and clearly leads to nowhere, except the ground, 2 stories below once opened. Its about as weird as the staircase that goes up into the wall in another section of the house.)

(Sarah Winchester was also obsessed with the number 13, and spiders, so she has several places in the house where she has 13 spider designs, like these windows - there's 13 of them in this room.)

(in front of the Winchester House)

Still more to come!

Our Move to Corpus (in pictures) Part 1...Days 1-3

On July 26th, we left Whidbey Island, Washington and began our move back to Corpus Christi. I guess its true that you never know what you have until its gone. Washington wasn't my favorite place, but it was a heck of a lot better than South Texas, and given the choice between here and there, I'd chose to move back to Washington in a heartbeat. I guess over the course of three years, I came to love a lot about the area, and I made some wonderful friends while I was living up there. Now its time to start all over, once again, in the place I consider to be my own personal hell on earth...welcome back to Corpus Christi, Texas!

DAY 1 - July 26, 2011

(all packed and ready to go!)

(Welcome to Oregon! For anyone who is freakishly observant [I would notice this], yes these are the same clothes that we're wearing by the "Welcome to California" sign a few pictures down. Thats because this picture was actually taken as we were leaving Oregon, not entering it. We stayed in Portland for our first night on the road, and the exit to our hotel came before the welcome sign on the interstate. When we left the hotel in the morning, we entered the interstate just past the welcome sign. It would have taken too much time to turn around and get the actual welcome sign, so we just took it on our way out of the state. For the sake of chronological order we're going to just pretend this was actually taken on our first day on the road :-).)

Day 2 - July 27, 2011

(Voodoo Donuts in Eugene, Oregon...the main location is in Portland, but the one in Eugene doesn't have a 2 hour line every day, making it much easier to access for people who don't have all day to wait in line for donuts. Check out the Food Network if you've never heard of Voodoo Donuts.)

(the signature Voodoo Donut)

(proudly displaying my box of Voodoo Donuts)

(Crater Lake National Park - Thomas loved that there was still snow on the ground in July, and I have to admit that seeing snow in the summer is something I'm going to miss in Texas [or for that matter, seeing any snow at all]!)

(Crater Lake)

(Thomas and me by Crater Lake)

DAY 3 - July 28, 2011

(Grants Pass, Oregon...we have no idea what the Intergalatic Headquarters of Bigfoot is, but since people in the Pacific Northwest are generally a little obsessed with Bigfoot, we had to add this picture to our growing collection of Bigfoot pictures from the area.)

(Great Cats World Park in Cave Junction, Oregon...We didn't know what to expect from this place since it was a last minute discovery, but it was very cool, and I highly recommend it to anyone passing through the area. Its not a zoo, and its not a sanctuary. Its a place where big cats [i.e. lions, tigers, jaguars, etc...] are raised and then trained for movies and photo shoots. Thomas thought it would be necessary to bring one of our cats into this picture with us.)

(African Wildcats, which look like regular cats, but apparently they can tear your entire body apart in minutes. The one on the right is a cloned cat, and the one on the left is her daughter. I have mixed opinions about cloning, but having never seen a cloned animal before, I thought this was kind of neat. She's 5 years old, and apparently very healthy.)

(A tiger performing for the handler and getting his reward.)

(The tiger eating his reward)

(A White Tiger)

(I think this guy was a jaguar if I remember correctly, and he's roaring on cue. All of the cats could roar, hiss, swipe [without extending their claws] and stand up on cue...they were obviously all very well trained! I can't even teach my normal house cats to keep their claws in when they swipe at things.)

(Welcome to California!)

(sunset near Crescent City, California)

More to come....!

Fall in Washington

Its been a really long time since I've posted anything other than the Friday Fill-Ins so I guess its time for a little catching up.

The past few months have been pretty hectic. Lots going on - both good and bad.

A few of the highlights (not all necessarily good highlights):

~I've come to appreciate and enjoy Washington a lot more over the past few months (I can't believe I'm saying this). I think its because of several things, but the biggest thing being that our OSC has a fantastic woman in charge of planning activities. I've been here going on 3 years now and while I've found stuff to do on my own, our spouse club was severely lacking in fun activities. That never bothered me, because I was perfectly content to have nothing to do with the OSC, but just in the past few months we've had a lot of fun. Some of the drama filled wives have moved away and have been replaced with much nicer wives. And our social chair is always up for new exciting things so our club social calendar has been pretty full. I've been spending my time learning how to make soap, canning apples and making homemade applesauce (there are fruit trees all over this island including a peach tree in my own backyard which we baked several pies with and made peach butter), hiking the different trails on the island, crafting, and other random things like that. Its been keeping me pretty busy and pretty happy.

~On a sad note, we had a recent death in the family. My 20 year old cousin died very suddenly and very unexpectedly. We're still waiting on autopsy results, but the doctor's suspect that he had an undiagnosed heart problem which might have caused an aneurysm. He came home from work one night, said he didn't feel very good, went to sleep, and never woke up. It was definitely a huge shock to our family. The worst part is that this is my second cousin to die so young and so suddenly. Several years ago my 27 year old cousin (from the other side of the family) died from having a brain aneurysm. You would think this kind of stuff wasn't that common, but its happened to two very young people in my family now.

~On the topic of heart problems, one of my cats may have heart disease. I still have to make an appointment with a cardiologist for her, which I've been putting off because I'm scared to hear bad news. She has a pretty significant heart murmur, which doesn't necessarily mean heart disease, but it IS an indicator of it, so I'm hoping and praying that she'll be one of the lucky ones who just has a heart murmur, but no other problems. I just went through this with another cat, but thankfully, he ended up having asthma, and not a heart condition. (As a side note, I've become a pro at giving a cat 2 daily doses of an inhaler - something I never thought would be possible.)

~The very first person I met here is moving soon :-(. I was living in a pretty sketchy hotel (it was the only one in town that didn't care how many pets you had), while Mr. V was off on a Hawaii det, when we first moved here. We were waiting to close on our house so we spent 3 weeks at the hotel, and when Mr. V left I was pretty miserable. Thanks to a military wives online forum, I met Allison, who invited me over for lunch one day while Mr. V was gone. After traveling across the country for 3 weeks and then spending weeks in a hotel, I was just plain sick of restaurant food. Allison made egg salad sandwiches that day and I swear it was the best sandwich I've ever eaten. I still tell her that too. But her husband is getting out of the Navy in just a few weeks and then they are moving back to their hometown on Buffalo, New York. I'm really truly devastated that my first friend here is leaving already. But I guess thats the life I signed up for.

~On a happy note Mr. V dragged me along on another adventure this past weekend, which I thought was going to be horribly boring, but was actually a lot of fun. He's been obsessed with the big, snowy mountains that surround us since we've moved here and I have to admit that it IS pretty, but I am so sick of hearing "Look at the big, snowy mountains Brooklet!" every time the sun is out. He knows I'm sick of hearing it, but it doesn't stop him from saying it over and over! He's been wanting to drive the Cascade Loop (see info on it here , here and here) since we moved here. We took a trip to the North Cascade National Park when we first moved here and out of everything I've seen here in Washington, it just didn't impress me much. It still doesn't impress me and I don't know why. I think the Olympic mountains (to the west of us) are gorgeous , but the North Cascades (to the east) do absolutely nothing for me. The Cascade Loop is about a 10 hour drive total. He was going to do the drive with or without me, but he whined and begged for me to come along, and since our time together is limited to begin with, I caved in and agreed to go. I have to admit that I had a great time. We stopped in Leavenworth, which is where we went for a weekend when he returned from deployment. Its a cute, VERY tiny, Bavarian town that holds an annual Christmas lighting festival every December, which is what we went to last year. This year they were just finishing up their annual Oktoberfest when we got there. The leaves were changing. The sun was out for the entire trip. So I have to say that most of the drive was beautiful (though I'm still not impressed by the Cascades. Yes they're pretty, but I just can't get as excited as Mr. V does about them.) So here are some pictures:

(Near Marblemount, WA where we stopped for a picnic lunch)

(North Cascades National Park)

(North Cascades National Park - overlooking Hwy 20)

(Winthrop, WA - these pictures don't do the town justice. This town is what you hit as soon as you drive over the Cascades. We felt like we walked onto the set of a Wild West movie as soon as we got into this town.)

(Winthrop, WA - A real "Wild West" town)

(one of several funny old advertisements in Winthrop, WA)

(You have to love the schoolhouse turned brewery - Winthrop, WA)

(Winthrop, WA town hall)

(Winthrop, WA)

(me and my ice cream eating wild west buddy - Winthrop, WA)

(sunset over the Cascades)

(ever wonder where the famous Washington apples come from? Apparantly Wenatchee, WA which is where we spent the night. The place is full of endless rows of fruit trees - mostly apples obviously.)

(Leavenworth, WA)

(fall in Leavenworth, WA)

(Leavenworth, WA)

(fall in Leavenworth)