Scotland!

I guess I actually have to start updating my blog again since mom isn't covering everything for me anymore.

I am in Scotland! The second greatest country in the world, as far as I'm concerned at this moment in time. I've always wanted to go to Scotland. What are museums and monuments and shopping outlets to lakes and hills and castles?

Monday we drove up the east coast a ways to St. Andrews Cathedral and Anstruther.  

We stopped and got some strawberries; Sister Griffiths says they are the best strawberries in the world.  However, we forgot about them until we were back from Ireland, and so I guess I shall never know. 

We also made a stop at St. Andrews Club, the first golf course in the world. My excitement for anything golf probably overwhelmed everyone there.  :)

Then we went to St. Andrews Cathedral, a ruin in Fife.  It used to be the seat of the archbishop of St. Andrews or something, who knows.  There wasn’t much left of it, but what was left was really beautiful.  

   

I really like the cemeteries here and in England.  A nice break from the ones in Utah, where it’s just a plate on the ground, although I think I prefer the Utah ones overall.

 

Anstruther, a cute little fishing town on the east coast of Scotland.

Kate’s cute grandparents.  I love these two!

They have a fish and chips shop there that has won a whole bunch of awards so we went to get some.  It was haddock, so it really didn’t even taste much like fish, just like I like it!

 

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Facebook Picture Comments

Whenever I log onto Facebook and I have over 10 notifications, I know either Kara or Mom has gotten on and seen one of my new photo albums…

I love my family.

San Francisco!

We decided to go to San Francisco on Wednesday, the last day I was in California.  On the way there, we saw a big woody hill and all I wanted to do was go there.  So we went to check Albany Hill out!

It was a really cool hill because it was mostly deserted, especially at the top.  Although through the trees, you could see the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, there weren’t any lookouts or anything.

There was a rope swing though!  That was just about the only thing that was on the hill.  And bugs.  Lots and lots of bugs. 

After Albany Hill, we headed over to San Francisco.  This is us at Lombard Street.  I didn’t even know that street existed!  Cody had me look at a map to find some other street and I pointed to that one because instead of a strait line, it was a zig zag. I showed it to him thinking he would think it was super weird and he just looked at me and said “yeah, that’s Lombard Street.”  Oops.  :)

Then we went over to the Golden Gate Bridge.  If you ever go there, don’t cross the bridge in a car!  We crossed and then walked halfway out across the bridge and then tried getting back and it was a toll road!  It cost $6 to get back and we had no cash and it was cash only so they were going to have us drive through and take a picture of the license plate on the car and send a bill in the mail for $30!  I say “was going to” because Cody didn’t have any plates on the car yet (he just bought it) and so we didn’t get charged.

From the other side.

That’s Alcatraz in the background, so we did our best thug faces.

Cody is not a hunter-gatherer.  He could survive for months without any food or communication in the wilderness, but he’s not so good at the finding directions thing.  So we got serrriously lost trying to find the wharf.  Yes, it’s an island, and a fairly well known one, but we still got lost!  We ended up in some foresty residential area with homes (I just looked this up) around $40,000,000.  Wow. 

But when we finally found the ocean, we ended up on some beach, which we later learned was China Beach.  It was pretty much deserted, but it was a really beautiful beach with a great view of the bridge!

When we finally found the wharf, I had my first bowl of clam chowder that I can remember, and it actually wasn’t that bad!  And Cody found some people from France and got to talk to them, so that was really interesting to hear him speaking French. 

Due to our finding free two hour parking, we ended up only spending about $15 the whole day (two clam chowder bowls and parking at the beginning of the day).

Who knew I’d be a fan of San Francisco!?

Skydiving!

Tuesday, we did a couple small things on our list and then were trying to decide what to do for the rest of the day.  Cody mentioned skydiving, and I said that would be awesome, not thinking we would actually do it. But he replied with “Really??” and I thought, why not?

We looked it up on the computer and I started to get really anxious.  I knew that I was eventually going to do it, but I was pretty scared.

I gathered hold of myself (Cody was not even a little bit anxious) and we left. 

It was an hour drive to get there.  When we got there, it was this semi-ghetto place.

 

We sat down to fill out the waiver.  For the first time in my life, I was actually trying to read through the whole thing, but I couldn’t because they were rushing us so much.  We had gotten there about 5 minutes before a plane was going to leave and so they said that we could either go on that plane or wait another two hours or something to get on another one.  Of course we chose to leave right then, so we didn’t even watch a video.

The guy I was going to jump out with was from South Africa.  He told me (this was my training instead of the video) that as soon as I jumped out, I just needed to kick his butt as hard as I could and say “Banana banana banana” to keep my body in a good position for flying.

Cody’s guy was from England and he was tiny.

We told him that I would be living in London this summer, and he basically told me that since I don’t drink beer, I wasn’t going to have any fun there.

This other guy kept following me around.  I couldn’t figure out why he kept talking to me until he mentioned something about pictures.  I had decided not to buy pictures even though it made me sad not to do it, and I looked at Cody and he had gotten pictures for me!!!  What a great guy.  I was really excited.

The plane was suuuper ghetto.  I felt like it barely made it off the ground.  Cody told me that as soon as he got on the plane, he was thinking of how he could land the plane (he has been taking flying lessons) and then he realized that if something went wrong, we could all just jump out since we had parachutes. 

I was getting really anxious again leaving the ground.  My jumper could tell and told me some really stupid jokes to keep me distracted and I just decided that I was being a baby and made myself overcome it.  From that point on, I was never really anxious again.

I think we got to 13,000 feet.  But I could be wrong.  Waddling over to the exit was pretty funny.  Both Cody and I wanted to do flips out of the plane.  I kept asking my guy, and he kept saying “We’re going to have a really good time.”  Cody went first and apparently he did like 10 flips straight out of the plane. 

When we finally jumped, it was scary for about 1.6 seconds.  That’s the only time (besides opening the chute) that you actually feel like you’re falling.  The rest of the time it’s just windy.

We didn’t do any flips.  Later I learned that they really aren’t allowed to do flips so since I had the camera on me, he wouldn’t do it with me.  The hard thing about it being so windy was that it was hard to breathe.  Especially since they kept making me look up at the camera.

But here is the funniest picture from the whole thing.  Cody almost died laughing when he saw it.  We all did.  It’s the skydiving picture that everyone has but no one shows because it’s so bad.  Or at least I hope other people looked like this and it wasn’t just me…

Hahahahaha. 

Landing.

We both loved it.  It was really fun and really exciting.  It was fun to ride around in the parachute because they let us drive it.  Cody’s guy had him hold one of the handles as low as he could and then the guy held the other one as high as he could and they whipped around almost horizontal to the ground. 

 

I highly recommend skydiving!

Loomis!

Cody, Cody’s parents, two youngest sisters, and I headed to California on Easter Sunday.  It stunk to miss church but the drive was really nice.  We had some interesting weather.  Rained super hard some of the time and was really windy, but very pretty.

When we were actually getting into the Loomis area, it started getting really, really pretty.  It made me laugh because to get to Loomis, you take the Auburn exit and drive through Auburn, and that’s how you get to my house in Washington too.

This is Cody’s “I’m super excited that I’m in Loomis” face.

His house was in a really cool little street.  It even has a cool name!  He lives on Autumn Lane.  Maybe not quite as cool as 120th Ave, but pretty close. 

His dogs crack me up.  I think that’s what Cody was most excited for- seeing his dogs.  Ukiah loves riding the motorcycle with Cody or his dad.

 

Sunday night we played Settlers of Catan. Cody won and I was super grumpy the whole time because he kept attacking me in the game.  I have since developed a theory about why Settlers is a terrible game, but that’s for another day. 

Monday we went to the foothill bridge.  It’s the tallest bridge in California or something.  It was really cool, but super windy that day so we look super weird in all the pictures of us together.

     

We also mowed the lawn.  That was another thing that Cody was super excited about coming home for.

 

The last thing we did on Monday was ride bikes around Fulsome Lake with his mom and sister.  It started off really steep and I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle it but the beginning was the worst part and it got to be really fun.  I haven’t ridden bikes in a really long time, but I always really enjoy it when I do.

  We had a big long list of things that we wanted to do while we were in Loomis, and we knocked a ton of them out of the way on Monday!

People actually celebrate Easter?

The night before I went to California, I went up to Bountiful to stay at Cody’s grandma’s house.  His mom teaches Zumba, and so all the girls (5) wanted to do it with her.  I did it with them and felt pretty dumb the whole time, but it was fun.

We played Rumikub after.  I wanted to cheat so bad.  Cody and I were laughing because our plan was to rearrange all the tiles on the board until it was a total mess and then say “Oh. Dang. I thought that was going to work.”  We didn’t actually do that because his older sister Shayne and her husband finally won, but if it had taken any longer, I probably would have cracked.

 

Cody’s family is weird because they actually celebrate holidays.  Like Easter, for example.  We haven’t celebrated Easter by hiding eggs or baskets or anything since I was five years old or something.  But we made cupcakes and dyed eggs.  The cupcakes came out of this book, What’s New, Cupcake which was a really great book that had designs to make a bunch of different and cool cupcakes.  We tried to make the Easter Egg.

This is what it was supposed to look like, but I have doubts that this person actually made it work because it was impossible.

The other ones are apparently easier, because they had done some of them before and it had worked, but ours turned out nothing like the above picture.  So we improvised.

Here are the final products.  Mine is the lame one in the back that looks like a baseball diamond.  Or at least I hope it does, because that’s what I tried to do.  Cody just laughed super hard when he saw it though, so maybe it doesn’t.  His is the one that’s even lamer in the front- the evil smiley face one.

We also dyed eggs.  We each made three.  I’m not sure why I don’t have a picture of them.  I made one where I wrote “Hide me in the OVEN” on it with white crayon and then dyed it.  I thought it was pretty clever.  And pretty much everyone made a camo one.  I knew that if I tried too hard, mine would look stupid so I made a camo one that was grass against a sky. 

Cody’s camo egg was a total cop out.  He just used crayon, so it looked the best.  He’s a cheater, but his was the last one found the next morning, so I guess it worked.

I didn’t really understand the whole “finding you own eggs” concept at all.  I just assumed that everyone just wanted to find their eggs, you know- end goal and all, but apparently they wanted to find their own eggs themselves.  Took me forever to get that- everyone was getting mad at me because I would tell them where theirs were.

Oh well.  Mine were easy enough.  I only had to look for two of them because apparently the Easter bunny can read and put mine in the oven.