The Next Adventure

Well, Tuesday morning we received the long awaited phone call...our orders. However, they didn't come as we had expected they would. You know when the detailer (the Coast Guard dude who gets to play chess with our lives & decides where we will live for a few years) calls its not going to be good news. And this is because it mean that out of all the places you submitted, that you would like to go, none are available. For us it meant that 37 places we would like to have lived were places other people apparently would like to live also. So we are now headed out to the big state of (INSERT DRUM ROLL HERE)........................................................Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Yeah, that's what we thought too...Wisconsin? I have never felt the undeniable urge to even want to visit the state let alone live there & Ryan has never mentioned it either. However, we are determined to make the best of it, snow and all. So we have started making a list of activities/places to visit/things to go that will make us excited about being stationed there. Believe me it took a couple of days for me to get over the snow issue, it pisses me off having to live and deal with it, & be able to thing of anything to be excited about. Here is the list so far:

Reasons To Be Excited to Move to Wisconsin

1. The Green Bay Packer are 1 hr away.

2. Visit Green Bay

3. Norter Dame's Fighting Irish are 8hrs away

4. Hockey games (probably better than the high schoolers here in Eugene)

5. Learn to ice skate

6. Oprah is only 3 hours away

7. Visit Chicago

8. Visit Canada

9. Closer to the South than Oregon is

10. See our friends stationed in the Midwest & east coast

11. You can bait bears for hunting

12. Different ducks to hunt than in Oregon

13. Great excuse to buy some Uggs

You probably noticed #1,3,11, & 12 are courtesy of Ryan. If you can thing of any other reasons let us know. We are still waiting for the report date so I'll pass it along later.

"Hiking"

I was going through our photos & ran across our adventure (another time I thought my life was most likely in danger, I mentioned it in the last post) where Ryan had us "hiking" down a cliff via ropes. Uh, Ryan...that's not called "hiking" that's repelling...without harnesses. Thought I would post some of them for your viewing pleasure & to remind myself how precious life is. I may not make it out of his next adventure.

Oh, & this little beauty right here. This is where Ryan just happens to be collecting more crap...I mean useful found "treasures." Leave it up to him to be able to find an old crab pot beacon on a remote beach accessible by repelling only. He succeeded in getting the strobe light out & packing it home. He was so happy!

Hobbitt Beach

After leaving Astoria Ryan & I realized that there were quite a few activities & locations we failed to take advantage of while there. With only four months to go before we are transfered again we are scrambling to see all the "hot spots" of Florence before it's too late. So last week we went to Hobbitt's Beach. I had heard so many great things about the beach from friends. I was told you can collect a ton of shells, the path to the beach ends with you emerging out of a earthin hole, hence the name of the beach, & it has easy access (this really peaked my intrest because not so long ago Ryan took me to a beach where we had to use ropes off the side of a cliff to access!)

Aside from the evening of our reception I have never in my life been to a beach when it was so warm & calm, not even in Hawaii. It was such great weather. And because we had to hike 1.5miles in & out the weather was especially a blessing. We found some nice tufts of beach grass to spread our blanket on, left our picnic basket, one of our fav. wedding presents, & went exploring. I was so happy to see an outcropping of rocks where tidepooling was a probability, I have really missed tidepooling latley, and just my luck there were lots of pools stuffed with anenemis.

Of course we had to take a picture in front of the Hobbitt Hole. After ten minutues of trying to create a tripod out of drift wood a lady offered to take our picture. I must say her's turned out much better than ours.

We strolled the beach, did some sand carving, & ended our day with a picnic under the emerging rain storm (that most likely accounted for the great weather), how romantic minus the stringy wet, wind blown hair.

Oh, & on the drive back home we had a little adventure too. Ryan is always on the look out for free crap on the side of the road and I do mean crap. One time he saw a cardboard box, got curious, stopped, looked inside & decided it was worth lugging home. It was full of tapes, not CD's tapes, from 80's hair bands. On this particular day he spots a binoculars case on a guard rail. A guard rail that was on a corner of the road with no pull out. So hoping it was full of an expensive pair of binoculars he turns around drives back up the road where I figure he will park the car on a turnout & walk back down to the guardrail. Much to my horror he starts briefing me on his plan involving me as the recoverer. He tells me I have to be quick because he can't really stop on such a sharp corner & because we can't see the traffic coming until they are right there on us. And while we wait for the traffic in both directions, the traffic we can see, to clear he's saying, "You've got to be fast. You have to be really fast." And at this point I am scared for my life but I go along anyway. Once we can't see any traffic coming either direction he hauls the Expo' back down to the corner where the prize awaits, yells, "Hurry, get out." And I'm off, out of the car, grab the case, run for my life & jump back in the car.... and... the case... is EMPTY. Was it worth it?... Oh, yes. Because for those few minutes that I thought my life might be rapidly drawing to a close, I reinforced in Ryan's mind that I AM still the coolest chick he knows. And that is priceless.