Sunday, June 30, 2019

How I Did 2 Years Worth of Documenting in 2 Days

There is nothing like flipping through an album I've made and reliving the special memories that I have created with my family and friends. As we've been traveling around the past year, I've felt an overwhelming need to record everything. But it's kind of hard to pack up scrapbooking supplies and take it all with you when you are traveling for a year. I did take lots of video footage and tons of photos (check out my recent travel posts here) because I had big plans to get caught up once we were settled.

Once we finally got moved into our new place, operation "Get Caught Up" began in full force! I was about 4 years behind and it was overwhelming, to say the least, but this project was and is important to me so I made up my mind that it was going to happen no matter how long it took/takes. 


Wednesday, June 26, 2019

North Carolina

Parker's next rotation was in North Carolina and we had quite the adventure that month. To get there, we first drove from Oregon to Bear Lake in Utah/Idaho for a week with Parker's family. It was such a fun week and I was terrible at taking photos. Oops! After Bear Lake, we went to Provo and we bought a car from Parker's brother and drove that to North Carolina with a little pit stop in Ohio to stay the night with family. So. Much. Driving. But it was actually really fun! We filmed this little diddy while driving in West Virginia, naturally, and it makes me laugh every time.

North Carolina was nuts. If you didn't follow along with our Airbnb saga and the hurricane drama I've linked to those posts for you. We did get in one amazing Labor Day weekend at our favorite place on earth - Bald Head Island.

On our way to BHI, we stopped for some exploring in Wilmington. If you know me, you know I love Nicholas Sparks novels and movies and most of his books take place in NC but a lot of them specifically in the lovely city of Wilmington. One Tree Hill is filmed there as well and seeing all of these places from stories I love was SO FUN!

Also, be sure to check out the video (and the special surprise in the middle of the vid) at the bottom of this post to see just how magical BHI truly is!!


Friday, June 21, 2019

Oregon

When we finally had Parker's 4th-year plans solidified and we knew all the fun places we would visit, I knew I wanted to document each location. Videos were at the top of my list! Well in the midst of packing, we packed up our external hard drive and the cord to connect it to the computer and then Parker was constantly using the said computer so I didn't get around to creating any of the videos until today. I'm planning on going in order of rotation/vacation so first up is Oregon!

We loved Oregon. Parker spent two weeks in Portland before I arrived... I was busy having too much fun in Canada with my family haha. More on my time with them here! I rode the train to meet up with Parker and we spent the last two weeks of his rotation together. While there we spent a lot of time with my friend Candace and her sweet family. Candy and I were roomies in college and hadn't seen each other for about 3 years so being in the same place for a bit was awesome! Candace fed us amazing food multiple times and we were so grateful!

A few things Parker and I made sure to do while in Oregon: 

Cannon Beach - I wrote a blog post and shared photos about that here. It was such a fun birthday!
Multnomah Falls
Crater Lake - when we went it was suuuuuuper smokey from the fires so we couldn't really see much but what we could see was beautiful so I can only imagine how pretty it is on a clear day!
Columbia River Gorge
Neahkahnie Mountain
Tillamook Cheese Factory - good but not as good as Amish country cheese factories in Ohio. 

Thursday, June 20, 2019

I'm Back and Ready To Roll

Hey y'all! I'm back from traveling the world and I'm excited to get into a new routine. Traveling was absolutely amazing and I'll be doing posts on each of our trips at some point in the near future so I won't share too many details right now besides this: several times whilst we were on the go I would look over at Parker or gaze at the amazing view and think, "How is this my life?" I feel so much gratitude for those oh so special two months of exploring new places and revisiting some of our favorites. And maybe the most special of all was spending time with the people I love. I know that we are very lucky to have done what we did and I am so grateful!

With that being said, it feels so good to be somewhat settled as we haven't been in the same place for longer than 2.5 months since July! We have successfully moved to Boston and our apartment is small and expensive but it's darling and we love it! I just landed a job that I'm excited about and Parker had his first real day of residency today after a week of orientation. We've done a little exploring of our new city including walking the Freedom Trail and riding bikes around the parks near our apartment. We are now grocery orderers (greatest thing everrrrrr to have groceries delivered) and subway riders. I'll share more on our Boston specific adventures later, too!