Spring Break Part 2

For the second half of the week we went down to Disneyland!! I love all things Disney and Luke is a good sport becasue he loves me. We met my Mom, my sister Lindsey, and my Aunt Char and had an awesome 3 days. The weather was a little cold but that just made the lines shorter so we were ok with that.

Toy Story Mania was one of my favorite rides. A 3D arcade game with Buzz Lightyear. Whats not to love? Luke took pride in beating us all with his score.

The girls posing by Mickey.

 We had a fun week not working and having a great time with family and enjoying the magic.

We were waiting for the rides in California Adventure to open and we passed by this guy who was making art up the sidewalk with water and his broom. He totally made my morning. So magical.

I have the best husband ever! He spent his birthday week taking me to Disneyland and spoiling me. I love him so so much!!

Spring Break

This last week Luke and I took a week off of work and went on a much needed vacation!! We drove down to California through Arizona (Luke had some training). We stayed the night in Flagstaff and woke up to a foot of snow! An interesting start to our adventure.

Two blizzards later we made it to California to visit Luke's sister Andrea and her family in Monterey. We had an awesome time playing with our niece and nephew Kelsey and Caleb as they showed us around. We went to the aquarium and walked down Cannery Row (which I thought was canary and kept looking for birds). We also went hiking to Point Lobos and  played in the waves at Carmel Beach.

Luke also had his birthday while we were there. It was fairly low key. We made pancakes with strawberries for breakfast and Kelsey made Luke an awesome (mud) birthday cake while Caleb modeled Luke's new coat. I love these cute kids!

We Love to Travel

We love to find new places to visit. Here are some of our favorites!

 Both Luke's and my family came to visit us while we were living in Hawaii for one of Luke's school rotations. We did some island hopping and got out of rainy Hilo (where we were staying) to enjoy some sunshine.

 In Alaska (another rotation) the boys did some halibut fishing and my family did our best to find my grandpa a bear (otherwise he said the trip would be wasted :)) as we explored the glaciers and forest.

 My favorite place is Disneyland! Luke had never been there before and he was a good sport. I wore a princess crown and Luke wore an Indiana Jones hat to get into the magic.

The best value for a vacation could be a cruise. We learned to love them on our honeymoon and took our second to the Caribbean. We drove to Texas and stopped to see the San Antonio River walk before departing. We went swimming with the sting rays (kiss them for 7 years good luck!), and visited the ruins of Tulum.



While living in New Mexico we got to see a lot of Native American history. Our favorite were the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. It was cool to actually go inside the ruins and explore. We were a little misled in a hike that we thought would be short but just kept going and going. It was pretty though! 

 

A lot of our vacations are tag-along trips with our parents. Here we are at the ruins of Chitchen Itza in Mexico with Luke's parents. We were sad they wouldn't let us climb to the top but it was so hot we might have passed out.

We get to drive by the beautiful Tetons and Teton National Park any time we go visit our families. Sometimes we stop to take a hike or try to find some of the wildlife. Here we are at Jenny Lake with Courtnie's family. We only stayed still just long enough for the picture while mosquitoes were eating us alive then ran for it.

What a beautiful and interesting world we live in! Hope we can explore more of it.

Here we go

I swore that I would never be a blogger (my life is pretty normal and boring) but here I am! This is because we are trying to adopt :) and this is a good way for birthmothers to get to know who we are. So here we go:

My husband's name is Luke. We met in college through a roommate. We "non-dated" (I define this as not knowing if we were boyfriend and girlfriend) for about a year watching movies, playing games, lots of laser tag (he even gave me a fat lip hitting me in the face with his laser gun) and having lots of fun. He asked me to marry him after we hiked to the top of Angel's Landing in Zion National Park. Of course I said "Yes!" and we got married over a weekend in October, 2007 (My only wedding diva moment was that I refused to have a winter wedding!).

My name is Courtnie. When Luke and I got married he was finishing Pharmacy school. I had already graduated and was working as an X Ray technician. Luke's final year of school was clinical rotations and he wanted to travel all over so we did. We went to Northern Idaho (my favorite), Washington, Alaska(so beautiful and rainy), and Hawaii (so beautiful and even more rainy!).  It was a lot of traveling in a short amount of time but it was tons of fun!

Luke works for the Indian Health Service which took us to New Mexico after graduation. That was a totally different world for us. There was nothing green anywhere. Lots of red rock and dust. We did lots of hiking and Luke had a group he went paintballing with. I have a cousin that lives in Albuqurque and we went to visit them fairly often. They took us to the Balloon Festival. My favorite experience in New Mexico! 

We wanted to be a little closer to family so we left our wonderful friends in Gallup and moved to Wyoming! We bought our first home and are enjoying the adventure.

I have always wanted a puppy and since we now have our own house we finally adopted Baxter in August. He is seriously the cutest dog ever! And though he eats shoes and tissues and chapsticks, we couldn't imagine our life without him! So much engergy, so much fun.