Summertime!

As of today, Joe and I have been married for 3 months... and so far so good. Our only complaint? Not having enough time to play! As usual, I'm going to narrate snippets of the last few weeks with pictures.
To celebrate the ends of finals, Joe and I packed up his car and drove off to Antelope Island to camp for the night. My awesome manager had me leave early to beat traffic -- good thing, too! We weren't sure we would be able to get a campsite, but we beat the rush.

Immediately after setting up camp and taking this picture, we had a great bike ride along the causeway, watched the sunset had tinfoil dinners, made a few s'mores... and were randomly attacked by 40 MPG gusts of wind. Out of nowhere our camp started blowing everywhere! We cleaned up dinner and Joe had me sit in the tent so it wouldn't blow over while he took the bikes off the car and put everything else away. The wind lasted all night and morning, and it was so crazy that the tent wall would fall almost flat on our faces while laying down. Amazingly enough, nothing, including the tent, was damaged!

On Saturday (the 19th), we got up early and hiked up Olympus. We talked about how we remember hikes in sections, and actually named each section of the hike:
1) The Eye of Satan's Butthole - the first 15 minutes or so of straight uphill that makes you immediately question your choice of a hike and ability to finish
2) The Airport - The longest (distance-wise) part of the hike that could not be any easier. In fact, it's kind of like riding an airport walkway.
3) The Rattlesnake Switchbacks - Joe and his siblings saw a rattlesnake in this area a couple years ago. The switchback thing is pretty self-explanatory.
4) Hell - The never-ending uphill stretch just before the saddle
5) The Scramble - The rock scramble to the top of the peak.

We finished this hike, crashed for a couple hours, and headed back to the Festival of Living Traditions for round 2 of pigging out. I feel like this evening's pig-outage was well-earned.

This week has been a blast, so I'll post a few highlights just from the last few days as well:

On Wednesday, we hiked Donut Falls. That's not particularly difficult or adventurous, but the fact that it was so spontaneous (we were planning on going for a bike ride, but my bike broke last Saturday and we weren't sure how to fix it) and that we both got soaked made it just that much more awesome.

On the way down, I made Joe listen to this book on tape I'd just finished and loved. I finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower this week, and I'm adding it to my list of favorite books. It takes some great writing to keep a book interesting while nothing is happening! I'm not selling the thing very well, am I?

Yesterday, we hiked to Timpanogos Cave with a group of friends. We had a lot of fun, since those of us who had seen it before hadn't seen it in years. The time they give you to hike the trail is ridiculous, so we stopped and took lots of great pictures. This one is just one of my favorites.

After the hike, we stopped at Taco Bell before coming back home. That sounds like a random, boring detail, but I actually think it has everything to do with this story... Everyone met at our place, so they came inside for a bit. Jake informed us that he needed to "wreck our toilet." We very generously gave him permission, but then as he was in that process, a line formed. In the end, the combined efforts of 4 men made me think of "wrecking the toilet" as less of an exaggeration. Gross and hilarious. On my sharing this story: you're welcome.

To conclude this week's hardcore Saturday, we met up again in the evening and played Silly Hat Poker -- which appears to have turned into a weekly tradition and even involves a trophy. Logan won this week. The loser could either be me or Logan. Logan was the first one out of chips, since he went all in on one hand and lost everything. Jake gave him one to keep playing, and somehow Logan ended with the most chips by the end of the last hand. Anyway, the deal was that the loser takes the winner on a $5 shopping spree to All-a-Dollar. I guess I owe him the chance to load up on single-use spatulas and stale candy!

Some other highlights that I don't have pictures of:
+ Bowling
+ Raging Waters
+ Nick's hockey game
+ Numerous bike rides (including biking down Big Cottonwood Canyon. Or, for me, just half of it)
+ Random hikes up the S-curve and Bells Canyon
+ Horseshoes
+ Ultimate frisbee with a few high school kids we met and challenged at a park. We got spanked!
+ A couple trips to Airborne for hours of jumping fun!

Ketchup Time!

Remember that time I didn't blog for 6 months? Well, I decided it's time to do a little catching up. The problem is that I don't remember exactly what happened the first 3-4 months, except for a lot of snowboarding and even more wedding planning.... so we'll just leave it at that and start with March 10th of this year. :)
I never actually believed the day would come (especially that last week), but come it did, and everything turned out perfectly. You know your wedding day is going to rock when your also-restless fiance texts you at 6 AM to ask if he can come over and eat your cereal. Yes, please! The sealing was incredible. The sealer did a fantastic job bringing the Spirit there and not leaving an eye dry. What an amazing experience that was. Since that was later in the day, we went straight to our dinner/dance after pictures. Small though it was, it was pretty hopping, not gonna lie. The best part was doing the Thriller dance with family and friends -- classic!

So what have I been up to since then? Quite a bit, actually. I'm not feeling a whole lot like typing, so I'll let the pictures do most of the talking. First, obviously, was the honeymoon in Mexico.


We didn't snorkel a whole lot (just had a lot of fun taking pictures with them), except for that incident with the sharks and stingrays... but I'll let your imagination take over from here. Trust me though, your imagination won't do the day justice.






We spent a ton of time here at the beach in Playa del Carmen. I read The Princess Bride and Joe did Sudoku puzzles -- those moments we weren't swimming, I mean.

There was plenty to do away from the beach in Mexico. On our 3rd day there, we took a 4-hour bus ride to Yukatan to see Chichen Itza, and believe me, it was worth the commute. We also visited the ruins of Tulum one day.



We spent that Saturday (day 5) swimming with the dolphins. Our dolphins were named Yoconda (sp?) and Estrella. They were both mothers with 1-year-old babies, which, though they're cute, we decided we'd rather not sneak home with us when we kidnapped the mothers. They're useless right now; they don't do any tricks!


We did quite a bit more and ate a lot of indescribably delicious food, but I'll leave this where it is and move on to the things we've been doing since our return to reality...

We've played a lot with friends. On this particular Sunday evening, we invited our friend Jake over for dinner, after which we all decided to put various bridal shower/bachelor party gifts on our heads. And yes, believe it or not, I actually meant to make that face.
Another night, we went to dinner with our friends Logan and Elise. Wait, I worded that wrong. They kidnapped us and took us downtown to The Bayou, so we showed them a favorite location of ours -- what we call Thinking Hill. The only downside to this trip? There was a couple up there, so we felt a tiny bit unwelcome and eager to leave.





Joe and I went to the Salt Lake colors festival. It's much smaller than the Spanish Fork one, which is why it was so much better!


Here we are, showing dominance over our bikes after the Salt Lake bike tour, where we rode 26.1 miles for a Creamie and chocolate milk. Worth it? Well, yeah... the Creamies were peach-flavored!
So much adventure, and hiking season hasn't even begun... life is great!