Pocatello 2013

A friend of mine's, Heather, husband was finishing optometry school and the last year of school is rotations. He had four 3-month rotations; one of which was in Pocatello, ID.

While Heather and Chris were in Pocatello I had just quit my job, so I went to visit her. Why not?! She's always a blast to be with and only 4 hours away.

The few days up there were perfect and just what I needed. Heather has the most adorable daughter, that I can't get enough of, who's schedule we worked around; and I wouldn't have it any other way. We spent most our time hanging out in their apartment: playing with Londyn, talking, getting addicted to games on our phones (Ruzzle!), cooking and watching the finale of the Bachelor.

Chicken Rolls

16 Rhodes rolls, thawed (or croissant rolls in a can if you want to be lazy like me)
1 cube butter or margarine
Seasoned breadcrumbs
Filling:
6 oz. cream cheese softened
4 T. soft butter
Sage and Thyme to taste
2 T. minced onion
2 T. minced celery
2 cups cooked, cubed chicken or turkey
Salt and Peper to taste
1 (4 oz.) Can mushrooms, drained and chopped (optional) (I skip this)
Roll out each roll, Put a tablespoon of Chicken filling in the center of each roll. Fold over and seal. Dip rolls in 1 cube melted butter or margarine, then roll in seasoned breadcrumbs. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.
Sauce:
1 can cream of chicken soup, undiluted
1 (8 oz.) carton sour cream
Heat soup; add sour cream. Add milk to desired consistency. Pour over rolls.

Chicken Tacos
4 chicken breasts-frozen
1 can of black beans, drained and rinsed
2 cups of frozen corn (or 1- 15 oz. can, drained)
1 jar of pace salsa
1 package cream cheese
1 1/2 garlic cloves
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp onion powder
Cook on HIGH for 4-5 hours.
Take 4 frozen (or thawed) boneless chicken breasts put into crock pot. Add 1 can of black beans, drained, 1 jar of salsa, 1 can of corn drained.  Keep in crock pot on low for about 4-5 hours or until chicken is cooked. Once it is cooked, take it out and shred it. Return shredded chicken to the crockpot.
Add 1 package of cream cheese and let sit for about 1/2 hour. It may look at little strange at this point. Don't worry. Stir in the cream cheese. 
Serve over rice or in warm flour tortillas.
Cilantro Lime Rice
Yield: about 4 C cooked rice
Time: 45 minutes start to finish
2 C uncooked rice
1 T butter
2 cloves garlic minced
4  chicken bullion cubes
1 t lime zest
4 C water
2 T lime juice
1 T sugar
3 T fresh cilantro, chopped
1. In a large skillet combine rice, butter, garlic, lime zest, bullion cubes, and water. Bring to a boil and stir well.
2. Reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer for 20-30 minutes.
3. In a small bowl combine lime juice, sugar, and cilantro. Pour over the top of the hot cooked rice, and stir to incorporate. ENJOY!

I had looked up things to do in Pocatello and one of the recommended things was The Clean Museum. The what?! Yes, The Clean Museum. Haha, so we went. (The Clean Museum is also recommended by Roadside America) When we first got there the parking lot was empty. We thought we were either in the back parking lot or it was closed. Nope to both. When we walked in nobody was at the front desk to greet us and to pay admission was a sign, on a bucket, that said something like, "This is the honor system, just pay here." mmmk. The museum was basically random displays on vacuums through the ages and brooms through the ages, random cleaning facts and suggestions, and cleaning games and books.

My most favorite fact I learned at the museum was about the FIRST chimney sweeps. Back in the day before children were chimney sweeps they (I don't know who "they" is) would tie ropes around the necks and heads of geese and throw them down the chimney. The goose would FREAK OUT and flap its wings and "they" would slowly pull the goose back out... AND they would "sweep" the chimney. COOL Uh?! I loved this that anyone I talked to for a month afterwards I would tell them about this.

That night Heather and I kept laughing and joking about how ridiculous the museum was but her husband made a great point that we would never forget it and it would be something we'd probably laugh about for years. So true!

Things to go back and do in Pocatello (if I'm ever forced to go back now that Heather is not there):
Hiking
Natural History Museum

Read Heather's Post about our Clean Museum Adventures too: The Lowe Down

Orlando 2012

A week before I left on my cruise my mom reviewed the points for the time share she and my dad own and realized that she had a few more points that needed to be used before the end of the year. She asked me if I would want to go somewhere with her. So a week after I had gotten back from my cruise, she and I took off to Orlando!

At the airport: When my mom and I walked up to the security woman in the security line she immediately said, "Are you two related?! You look so much a like!" Traveling with my mom is always fun. She is such a cute and sweet lady and she always gets so excited and giddy about "adventures."

One of the cute things about her is that flying always makes her nervous; she's not scared of the actual flight, I think she is just afraid of missing flights and loosing baggage or not "passing" through security. It's such a cute nervous too, you can tell she's trying to play it cool but she's a bit jumpy. Getting to Florida was not an easy picnic. A huge snow storm came into Salt Lake City that afternoon and once we had boarded our flight we had to sit there for 45 minutes while the plane was sprayed down with some defrosting stuff. I was even getting nervous because we only had a 30 minute layover in Denver. When we finally took off the capatin said, "We'll do our best to make up time." (That always makes me laugh, why don't they fly extra fast everytime? Why do we have to be running late to fly faster?)

We made it to Denver, going in for landing when an annoucement was made that certain connecting flights were holding their flights for us. We were on the list; Wahoo! THEN the plane started to lift up again (I swear we were inches from the runway with the wheels out). WHAAAAAT?! Turns out a gust of wind came in just as we were going into land and it was too dangerous to land so they pulled back up.

We missed our connecting flight and had to spend the night in Denver. The next day we were re-routed to Kansas and then on to Orlando. It pretty much took a chunk out of our trip. So we decided to add on another day at the end and I just called the airline and asked them to extend our flight to a day later and to have no fees since they were the ones that re-routed us all over. They did it!

Our first actual day there we went to Universal with the sole purpose of spending as much time as we wanted at Hogwarts and going to other things if there was time. Oh my goodness... I knew I was a bit of a Harry Potter nerd but I LOVED the Harry Potter part of the park. It actually felt like I had stepped into the pages of the books. They even had Moaning Myrtle talking over the sound system in the women's bathroom! My mom talked me into buying myself a wand. Hahaha, I don't even have buyer's remorse!

 While flying to Florida I explained to my mom about how you can spell "wow" with your mouth and fingers. So when we walked into Universal and she wanted a photo, she said, "Do that "wow" thing you were telling me about."

 It's hard to see because the photo is dark but this is me when we first entered Diagon Alley. I'm pretty excited.

 Drinking Butter Beer

 Hogwarts Express

Hogwarts!

On Sunday we went to church and it was the Primary program. Score! Always a fun day at church. Afterwards we visited the temple and then went to the beach to read our books.

At the beach we found some shells and decided that we would make wishes with them and throw them back into the ocean. You can think we are dorks but we were having fun

The rest of our trip was spent at DisneyWorld! I wouldn't say my family is a crazy fanatic Disney family but we sure do have fun at the parks and always get excited about the cute details in the decorations, rides, etc.

Animal Kingdom: We only spent a half day here but for us and the time that we had that was enough. We had fun going on the Safari Ride and seeing all of the animals in a more natural environment and getting "shrunk" down to the size of bugs in the Bug's Life movie. We rode the roller coaster Expedition Twice and regretted it because it made us a little sick... too much backwards riding.

Holloywood Studios: we walked the "streets" of movie sets, spotted Santa Clause, rode the same rides multiple times and ended the night watching Fantasmic. We took advantage of people at one of the day time parades and rode Star Tours about 4 times; only because we thought it was so cool that the ride is a different scenario each time. We couldn't get enough of The Tower of Terror because the build-up was even more exciting than the one in California. Fantasmic was the perfect finale to a first "disney" day. We added a "p.s." at the end and ran over to the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster right after Fantasmic before the crowds thought to head there and rode it one more time before heading home for the night.

Epcot: probably one of my favorite places to visit. It's like getting a taste of travel. I think the other parts of Epcot are fun but my favorite is "visiting" all of the countries.

 United Kingdom

Canada

Norway

 Paris

Germany

Morocco

 Japan

Italy

Magic Kingdom: aka DisneyLand. Our favorite part about this park this time was that we got in for a sneak peak preview of the new Beauty and the Beast Castle and the Little Mermaid Castle, which wasn't opening up for another month, and we even got to eat dinner at the Be Our Guest restaurant in the Beast Castle. We also had a lot of fun in this park taking advantage of parades going on and riding the busy rides when they had no lines.

 It was cute, there was even fake snow falling behind the windows while we ate.

 Food was brought out to everyone in these cool carts. So fun!

A part of Prince Erik's Castle

It's funny, I have never really cared for the Haunted Mansion at DisneyLand but I loved the one in DisneyWorld. They're different and the one in DisneyWorld was a lot more fun for me.

Like I said before, I love traveling with my mom. This trip was no exception. We would play hard everyday and at night we would go back to the condo and make dinner and watch a movie that we would pick up from RedBox. It was the great mix of playing hard and vedging too.

Riviera Cruise 2012

Last fall I went on a Mexican Riviera Cruise with some friends. I had heard of a guy in the Salt Lake City area putting together a group of LDS singles to go on a cruise together. I thought it sounded fun to be with a big group of people for a cruise and to be with an LDS group. I wasn't interested in going with the sole purpose of finding my knight and shinning armor; I was legitimately excited about going on a cruise with a lot of single people and having a lot of fun... and it was. I asked two girls from my singles ward if they'd like to come and one of them also brought a co-worker.

The cruise was a 7 night and 8 day cruise and it went to Cabo and Puerto Vallarta. We flew into LAX airport and took a shuttle for the cruise down to the ship. (Learned later it would have been cheaper to have taken a taxi... live and learn.)

ON THE BOAT
Our room! Haha, when we walked into our cabin and there were only two beds we were so confused where we were all going to sleep. We finally figured out that the other two beds were in the ceiling and just needed to be pulled down.

This was the wall art just outside our cabin room. I got a major kick out of it.

Life Jackets! During the hurricane (Story below) Krista and I wanted to put the life jackets on and run around with them on but we decided that could possibly start a panic.

We decided that we should have a fake room number so if anyone ever asked (for example), "Well what room are in, maybe we'll stop by." We would just give them a fake number which was 1612. We chose this because it would be on the opposite side of the boat because evens were on one side and odds were on the other AND because it didn't even exist. Lets just say we had a lot of fun with it.

The Towel Pets on our Beds Each Night

We were obsessed with the waterslide on the slide. Krista and I even spent so much time on the slide we trully believe we perfected the art of waterslide speed.

If we weren't on the waterslide then we were playing miniture golf... our other obsession. We made a goal to play miniture golf everyday and we almost did it execpt the day of the hurricane ruined our streak because it wasn't opened that day.

We went dancing everynight on the curise. Since we were with such a big single group it was a lot of fun and we were always dorks and extra goofy.

Our first day on the boat Krista, Heidi, Whitney and I went to the Kareoke night and we were the only ones who showed up. Haha. So Krista and I sang Journey's Don't Stop Believing and we threw in a leg kick here and an imaginary guitar solo there. As the week went on we continued to attend Kareoke events, which got really popular after the first day, and everytime we sang Journey. By the end of the week we had Don't Stop Believing impecibly choreographed and synchronized.

During and after dinner each evening there are "photo stations" with backdrops and a professional photographer to take your picture. The first night when all of the photographers were pestering us to take our photo we were annoyed but the next day we caught on that you didn't have to pay to have your photo taken, you only had to pay to buy the picture. Well that changed everything. We spent the rest of the week stopping at almost every photo station, nightly, to take fun and ridiculous photos. We had such a blast doing it. They got us in the end though, we ended up loving some of the photos we took and so we each bought a photo.

Pictures like these make us think this is why we didn't make more friends while on the cruise.

Every morning Krista and I would set our alarms to get up before the sun came up and we would go get hot chocolate and then go outside and watch the sunrise over the ocean. So beautiful! The last morning the daily agenda gave us the wrong time of the sunrise and when we got outside it was already up; we were pretty sad about it.

Sunrise

Sunset

THE FOOD
When people go on cruises they seem to always talk about how incredible the food was. We weren't in love with the food on the cruise, it was usually just "alright."
On the other hand, the unlimited Ice Cream made us feel like we had died and gone to heaven. If we ever passed the ice cream machines we always got ice cream and we usually would alter our routes so that we just "happened" to pass the ice cream. There was one time, when we were headed to the ice cream machines and I had to go to the restroom so I told the girls I would meet them at the ice cream machines. On my way to meet up with them I passed a different ice cream machine and got myself some ice cream. When I caught up with them, Krista had gotten me an ice cream cone. She was so excited to give it to me and then she saw I already had one and her face fell. I laughed so hard because it was the perfect example of "happy face" and "sad face." I took the cone from her anyway... I had no problem eating two. Because it was so warm I had to alternate my licks quickly back and forth between the two cones... it took a lot of concentration.

Dinner was fun because we were in the dining room with the whole group and our cute little waiter, Max. Every night for dessert I got a plate of fruit and the chocolate moulten cake. I felt like I could justify the cake everynight if I ate it with fruit, which was delicious too.

The group at our table with our cute waiter Max

 All dressed up for one of the formal nights

HURRICANE PAUL
The route for our cruise got changed due to a hurricane, Hurricane Paul, which the ship went through. I was often heard during the hurricane saying, "Silly Paul." It was a truly rocky time. While the ship was going through the hurricane we went out on deck and "played" in the storm. Pretty much we would stand in one place and let the wind push us down the deck like we were on a slipping slide. Haha, we were sliding past the dining room windows while people were eating. A few times we slipped and hit the deck pretty hard... pretty sure we lost a few years of our life.

 Greetings from Hurricane Paul... wish you were here!

OUR EXCURSIONS
Dolphin Encounter (the best part of this excursion was the boat ride back to the ship! We were flying across the waves in this boat)

Krista and I went and did a Extreme Zipline adventure. Bumpy speed bus ride to the camp, donkey ride up to the top of the mountain, 9 zip-lines and 2 waterfall rappels. BEST excursion ever! We lucked out and the other people in our group were a family from Utah which was a lot of fun.

After the ziplining these were the random "dry"clothes I put on. Krista said I looked like a child and I didn't believe her so she took a photo of me so that I could see... hahaha.

Snorkeling and Lovers Beach

PORTS
Puerto Valiarta: We spent most of our time at this port at excursions but while were not off playing hard we were usually bartering in the flea market.

The first thing Krista did when we got off the ship was walk across this grass and then found this sign that said, "Please Don't Step on the Grass." Well of course we had to take a picture. While taking the picture a security guard started yelling at us... oops

Cabo: We only had about 6 hours in Cabo because of the re-routing of the trip and so we went on our excursion and then quickly ran around Cabo to see a few things before having to get back on ship.

LAX
We ended up having to spend the entire day at LAX waiting to go home... and then our flight got delayed even more. UGH! We never wanted to see LAX again.

The only thing that made our day worth it was getting to see Bill Cosby in the airport!