December Catch Up

I don't know about the rest of you, but our December was very busy, and we are just barely getting back to some semblance of a routine.  This post contains a small smidgen of what we did in December!

 Our anniversary is December 27, but we usually celebrate it early because we are normally with family on that day and this year we celebrated it on the weekend of December 3.  We went to Monterey on Saturday, and on the way there, we went to the outlets in Gilroy.  Chase got a pair of tennis shoes for the first time in years and I got a new pair of shoes and a pair of pants (I seem to go through pants faster than any person that I know).

 When we got to Monterey Bay Aquarium, we found out that it was free college student day, so I got in free and we only had to pay for Chase, plus we found free parking about a mile away from the aquarium.  It was felt great to save so much money!  Our favorite tanks were the jellyfish, the seahorses, and the deep sea tank.  We couldn't get a decent picture of the deep sea tank, but it has tuna, hammerhead sharks, a sunfish, and a giant sea turtle in it.

This is a picture of the shore next to where we parked.  I wanted to eat seafood that night, because we were right next to the ocean, but one restaurant that was recommended to us had a three hour wait and the other had nobody in it, so we went to Chili's where I had some of the best fried shrimp ever!  

 We stayed in a hotel next to the ocean in Seaside and ended up watching three consecutive hours of Storage Wars.  We are totally addicted to that show now.  In the morning on our way back home to go to church, we stopped at the ocean and watched a bunch of old surfers trying to surf (we were late to church).

The middle of December consisted of finals, papers, and stress (me) and work for Chase.  We are working on building a bedframe for Chase's parents.  They gave us half the money for the bed in early December and I immediately ordered cross country skis for myself.  They are awesome (more on that later)!  On December 22, we left to travel to Utah to be at my parents for Christmas.  We stopped on Donner Pass off the old highway and slept on a turnout in the car.  The next morning, we woke up, scraped off the ice from the inside of our windows, took pictures from the top, and drove on.  The picture above shows Donner Lake.

 Highway 80 between Donner and Reno was closed just twelve miles before Reno because of a big crash and so we ended up following our trusty Garmin on a road that we thought would take us through.  It started out as a great smooth road, but we ended up going 10 miles on a dirt road through a mountain pass in our little Elantra.  Both ways of the 80 must have been closed because I have never seen a dirt road have so many cars on it.  We stopped in Reno to see our friends the Ellison's (which we saw on our way to Genoa in September) and the two oldest girls put a bead in my hair, to match theirs.

 After the Ellison's, we put the pedal to the metal because we realized that we were not going to get to my parents house until late if we didn't hurry.  Above is a picture of the Ruby mountains Chase took during the THREE hours he let me drive.  He didn't let me drive the whole trip back.

On Christmas Eve, Chase tried to climb the Wellsville's (mountains by my parents house) by himself, but ended up coming down after a mile because he saw mountain lion tracks and he heard rocks move.  He wanted to see if a pond by the railroad tracks about a mile and a half away from my parents was frozen, so we went over there.  The pond was frozen, but it was behind a fence, so he didn't skate on it.

During the summer, my dad and brother put in a fire pit in the backyard, so on Christmas Eve, we went out and roasted giant marshmallows on it.  My parents have a German exchange student staying with them this year named Jonas.  He is awesome! We had the greatest time with him.  This is him with marshmallow goo all over him.

 The only snow we could find was in the sinks up Logan Canyon and on Hyrum Dam.  The day after Christmas, we went sledding on new sleds from Walmart in the sinks, but the three new sleds immediately broke, so we used the plastic pieces to sled on.  I took them back to Walmart and the first thing the employee asked me was "is everyone okay?"  Needless to say, I got our money back even though Chase didn't think I could.  The picture above is me on Hyrum Dam (there is about a foot and a half of ice under the two inches of snow).

The day after skiing on the dam, it rained and the snow melted.  This is the dam after the snow is gone.

Chase, Luke, and Jonas went geocaching a couple of times.

Our last night in Utah, we went ice skating at the Eccles Ice center that they built for the Olympics in 2002.  Chase, Jonas, and I are pros, Katie was good, but Luke had problems.  Katie and I took turns helping him, but by the end of the night he could skate by himself.

We left Utah on Saturday the 31 of December and met Chase's family in Beatty Nevada.  Chase and I slept on a windy hill above Beatty with Lehi the dog while Sam, Chuck, and Judy stayed in a motel.  I slept in the car because I was freezing and when I woke up in the morning, Lehi was under a blanket on Chase's cot.  He had bit off his leash in the middle of the night.  Above is a picture of me in the badlands under Zabriske Point in Death Valley.  We hiked down from the point through many canyons.  It was fun.

 This is badwater after sunset.  Badwater is the lowest point in the western hemisphere and those are salt formations.

 That night we slept at our favorite camping spot, Texas Springs and the next morning, Chase, Sam, and Chuck went to take pictures at the sand dunes while Judy and I slept.

 Usually we drive back to Fresno through Bakersfield, but because of the no snow situation, we were able to go over Tioga pass into Yosemite.  There are three lakes at Tioga pass and usually they have snow on them when they are frozen, but this year was an anomaly and we were able to skate on them.  Chase had a goal to skate all of three of them, but I only skated on the lower two, because the wind at Ellery Lake was freezing.  The picture above is me on the second lake, Tioga Lake. Tenaya Lake had tons of people on it.

Skating on Tenaya Lake (Judy took the picture).

I am working in a lab at school right now and volunteering at the hospital.  I am starting up school on the 18th of this month and it will be my last semester at Fresno State!

Hopefully you enjoyed my suuper long post.  Adios till the next one!