Alaska Adventures!!!!

Chris and I moved to Alaska!
Juneau Alaska!

I took this picture on a Sunday afternoon when Chris and I wanted to go for a walk, we drove up to the Mendenhall Glacier and found this gorgeous area! The glacier is the mass of ice in the top left corner! We weren't there long because we weren't dressed for the occasion! But we will go back there again for sure!

Chris and I moved out here to work at a Hotel.

This is Grandma's Featherbed. The Best Western Hotel Chris and I work at. It also has a restaurant in it and we work in the restaurant as well! Grandma's is so nice and absolutely darling inside! Look how beautiful it is from the outside!

We work between two hotels, Grandma's Feather Bed and Country Lane Inn which is just a five minute walk down the street. The owners are an incredible couple! The most generous and kind people I have ever met! They have been so wonderful to bring us to Alaska and allow Chris and I to move up here and work for them! It is such an incredible opportunity and we are so grateful for it! They have been taking care of us so well and we are just trying our hardest to be valuable employees for them!

Alaska sure is gorgeous! The mountains are just so magnificent! There is something completely majestic about it here! It is dark most of the currently, but at least we aren't in complete darkness 24/7. Currently the sun comes up around 8 or 9am and sets around 2pm. But we are gaining more light each day.

This is the itty-bitty apartment Chris and I live in. We live above the garage of a nice families home. We walk up those stairs and in the door. We don't have a ton of extra space but we do have a pretty amazing views!

We have just enough room for the two of us! It is perfect!

 That beastly van is what we drive around town! The driver's door doesn't open so we both have to climb through the passenger door. And we don't have room in our apartment to store our empty luggage so we permanently store them in the back of the van!

 Our Views . . .

This is the view from our kitchen! We get to watch the tide come in and go out throughout the day. It is cool!

This view is looking a little further right of the above view, and here we look right onto the airport landing strip. It is really cool at night because you can see the landing strip lights flash up and down the runway. I took this shot after a fresh snow! It is gorgeous out when everything is white!!

This is just a pretty view of the mountain side not far from our place.

 
 Now that we are living in Alaska we have to look like we belong . . .

Look at my handsome husband! Doesn't he look like he belongs in Alaska!? He is super cute!!!

And he of course wanted to snap a picture of me. It was so cold I'm starting to turn red! Eeak!

 
Chris and I have only explored a little bit, but we have come across some gorgeous and incredible things! We did drive up close to the GLACIER! How cool is it to have a glacier up the road? Also we have driven a little down town and holy cow it has just been ridiculously cold. In the low single digits on a good day, which is most of the time, and it is often in the negatives when the sun goes down (which is early)!

I took this picture out of our car's front window on our way to the Glacier. Isn't it just a gorgeous drive? It is like this all over everywhere!

This is a shot I took of Mendenhall Glacier. I haven't enhanced any color! It is just incredibly beautiful!

While we were walking down to the Glacier we saw this porcupine! Poor little guy must be cold!

Ever stood on water? Chris and I have!!! Frozen water! We are standing on the ocean! Can you believe it? I hear in this area it gets up to 4 feet thick (maybe even thicker)! You can have a bon-fire on the ocean!

Chris and I are standing in the same spot on the ocean as in the picture above just a few days later! It snowed about a foot! Crazy cool stuff here! Standing in snow, on top of ice, ON the OCEAN! Love it!

   

I couldn't resist making a snow angel in the fresh powder on the frozen ocean!

We are still new to Alaska, but we will definitely have tons more adventures!

Alaska Adventures to be continued . . .

Happy New Year 2012

5. 4. 3. 2. 1. . . 2012!!!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I took this picture on a boat dock just before midnight.

Baby your a FIREWORK!

 

Chantel and Randy were my sparkler models! They each held their own sparkler and on my count they each drew their half of the heart and I took the picture. It took a few practice runs, but it looks pretty darn cool! Of course the top right photograph is the original, but I played with some fun color duos.

Here is my very handsome husband who also played with some sparklers for me to take pictures of.

 Awesome! Blue and Red Giant Fireworks, I shot these photos from across the lake! Love the reflections!

This year we spent New Years Eve with Chris' family. Shauna took us to one of her friend's gorgeous home on a lake! They had this gorgeous boat slip with wooden swings. Chantel (Chris' sister), Shauna (Chris' Mom), and I sat and watched Chris, Randy, and some of the kids and men at the New Years party play with fireworks. I took a bunch of pictures, and it was a ton of fun!

These are the awesome wooden swings, on the dock, the girls sat on and watched the boys play fireworks!

The guys were supposed to keep their fireworks on a large granite slab in the middle of the dock just to be sure they didn't catch the wooden dock on fire. . . Well at the end of the night some of the guys decided to take one of those huge fireworks that shoot up in the sky and blow up, huge and colorful. They wanted to blow one more off. UPSIDE DOWN! so instead of blowing up in the sky it exploded on the dock deck and destroyed the tube they placed it in and everything around it. It also cracked the thick granite slab it was laying on! Incredible and so LOUD!

While everyone was running away from the explosion I ran to it, in order to capture this incredible shot!!!! Awesome! Pieces continued to fall from the sky after this explosion for minutes all over the place!

Here is the broken slab after that firework explosion!!!! Crazy!

Part of the Grand Finale the people across the lake shot off! I caught a sweet variety of colors in this one!

Aside from the firework fun Chris and I did start some of our own New Years traditions.

We actually have decided to keep a tradition my family has done for as long as I can remember. This tradition is that on the 1st Family Home Evening of the New Year we all make our own personal lists of New Year's Resolutions. These lists include a few categories. . . Physical, Spiritual, Monetary, and Fun. Under each section we list some of the things we would like to accomplish during the year. Chris and I did this and we also made some family goals. Then, like my Mom has always done, I took his list, my list and our family list and I stored them in a binder. At the end of the year we will review all the goals and see if we have kept them. Next Year we will make new goals and they will go in the same binder. And I will keep them all, so in many years from now we can see all our goals, including all the previous year's!
I loved this tradition growing up, so we started it this year as a part of our first New Year's Eve being married!

We also want to start a tradition his Aunt Thelma and Uncle Scott have been doing for years. They told us about their New Year's Balloon Wish tradition. They each take small slips of paper and write a wish for the New Year on it, then slide it into a balloon and fill the balloon with helium. At midnight they take the balloon and release it into the dark sky, they watch the balloons fly to heaven and that is a sign that God will know their wishes for that year. I just loved this as soon as I heard it! It sounds like a wonderful tradition!

New Years is such a fun time and it has been so wonderful for Chris and I to make some of our own traditions! Happy New Year!