Bahaya: March 2015

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Our New Home

Whohoo! We left Utah over a month ago and we have finally settled down! In the past month we have packed up and left Utah, visited 4 countries, drove to our new home in west Texas, Colby started his new job, we looked for a place to live, found a place and moved in, then had family come and stay with us for almost a week! It was all so busy, but so much fun! However, we were homeless for a month and now it's nice to have a place to relax and call home.

Here is the quick low down of what has happened within the past month and half:

Feb. 16th: Movers come to Utah and pack up all of our stuff and take it away!

If you want to see our last days in Utah click HERE

Feb. 17th: We drive to Colorado
Feb. 19th: Celebrate my mom's Birthday
Feb. 20th: We drive more than 13 hours to Austin, Texas and visit my sister for a night
Feb. 21st: We drive 3 hours to Houston and board a plane for Costa Rica
Feb. 22nd - Feb. 27th: Arrive in Costa Rica at 2am on the 22nd and have adventures!

If you want to see pictures of our Costa Rica Trip click HERE

Feb. 27th: Leave Costa Rica and fly back to Houston
Feb. 28th - March 7th: Carribean Cruise to Mexico, Belize and Honduras, from Houston

If you want to see pictures of our Cruise click HERE

March 7th: Arrive back in Houston and drive to Austin to celebrate my birthday with my sister
March 8th: Drive to our new hometown
March 8th-16th: We live with friends because they are so nice and awesome!
March 9th: Colby's first day of work! MyKel goes apartment hunting
March 10th: Put in application for apartments
March 11th: Apartment is ours
March 13th: Sign lease and get apartment
March 17th: Movers arrive with our stuff and we officially move into our new apartment!
March 17th-March 20th: Unpack like crazy and get everything cleaned up!
March 21st - 26th: Family arrives at 4:00 am on the 21st and we hang out the whole week!

Although our home town is not close to anything really outdoors we still have great reasons to be here. We sure do miss the mountains, rivers, lakes, biking/hiking trails, but we have a lot of great people surrounding us. We moved to Texas already knowing 5 wonderful families and friends (all BYU grad geologists and their fam's). It's nice to have friends when you move somewhere new. Here are some recent pictures of the happenings of Texas!

Ignore the dirty windshield, but the sunrises and the big skies here are amazing!

When my fam came to visit I made these nutella filled brownies! They were delicious! They taste way better than they look. But use caution: stay away if you don't love chocolate! Because it required an entire bottle of Nutella (If you doubled the recipe, which you need to for a large family of 8 people), it was the most expensive dessert I have ever made, but oh so worth it (almost)! You can find the recipe HERE.

I come from a gaming kind of family! We played lots of Hearts, Settlers of Catan (of course), Telestrations, Battle of the Sexes (which is rigged for only men to win. A man totally invented this game), Banana Grams and the Wii.

We went to the wildlife preserve and it was nice. Not much to look at right now, but when the leaves come in and the flowers pop up it will be gorgeous! Right now it just looks like a swamp because we went after it rained.

This was the prettiest part of our 1.5 mile hike...right next to the parking lot!!

The next day we went to Monahans Sandhills State Park. It's only about 40 minutes away. It was perfect timing. No one was there because of school and it had just rained 2 days before, so it was perfect for sand castles. Also, the weather is not hot yet, but just right!

Carsten wanted to stay buried all day! He sat here for about 40 minutes.

Carsten refused to come out of his shelter for the picture!

They started going down backwards!

Next we went to the Museum of the Southwest

I want a puffer fish! He looks like he is smiling and so happy. He wanted to be everyone's friend!

The museum had a miniature town set up for the kids! Here the kids are making lunch for mom

Whatever this thing was it was awesome! It made different noises and musical sounds when you touched the different wood pieces.

And the weather today is sunny and warm!

"Would you like a drink with that order, sir?"

The movie theater here is pretty awesome. It has half price Tuesdays, which makes everything a good deal and it has laser tag and a sky walk ropes course. We will definitely be doing some Tuesday date nights!

Cruise'n

After our Costa Rica traveling experience we wanted to actually relax, so we flew back to Houston on Feb. 27th and boarded our cruise on the 28th! Which I thought we might miss since we only had a one hour connecting flight from Florida to Houston and we had to get through immigration and customs. But luckily my nagging and seeking skills of finding certain employees helped us barely make our flight! The flight crew actually held the plane for us for 5 minutes and we were the last ones on! We were literally running through the Fort Lauderdale airport and skipping steps as we ran up the stairs. I hope I never have to do that again. However, the worst part of this whole experience was that we were told by the airlines that we would have enough time. I asked several different employees and even asked before I booked our flights. I would have totally picked a different flight to avoid that! But it is what it is. We made it with no time to spare. We knew two other couples that missed their flights...who knows how many others there were.

Once our cruise started it was nothing but eat, sleep and read. It was definitely a relaxing kind of trip! And just what we needed before work and real life began again. It was so great to sleep in and not feel bad because you were stuck on the ship and had no obligations. And I had ice cream everyday, which was awesome! We may or may not have gained some weight on this trip ;)

Delicious food every night!

The Tulum Mayan ruins in Mexico. We met an LDS tour guide that pointed out many fascinating similarities between Mayan ruins and the temple in Jerusalem.

These ruins were all painted blues and reds originally. Some of the red color is still preserved.

This is a close up of the corner on the picture above...

This is the same corner again. See the face?

This is one of the few Mayan settlements that was built right along the coast

One of five entrances through the outer wall

On the ferry from Cozumel to the mainland

"Cozumel"

We saw my Young Women's president on the cruise!! We ended up hanging out with them quite a bit, and we had a great time together! We are so glad they happened to be on the same cruise with us.

I beat Colby in Chess for the first time (out of two, so we're tied!) He was humiliated, but got over it...

We found a mouse in our bedroom!!

Now we are in Belize...Time to go cave-tubing! You better belize it!

It was about a 1.5 mile hike to the put-in

At the entrance to the cave

This trip was unbelizable!!

It was about a 30 minute float through the cave. This is one spot where part of the cave collapsed, so you could see sunlight. There was not enough light for any of our other pictures to come out.

At the cave's exit

We saw this van with a BYUI sticker on it! The license plate cover says "Rexburg Auto" or something. Somebody must have bought this van in Rexburg and driven it to Belize...not a bad idea. Then, on the drive back to town, we saw a guy from the bus with a BYU shirt on!