We made it...finally!

I'll start you all with one of my favorite moose pictures, since I hadn't uploaded those for my last post. And because my moose pictures make me laugh. Since it is the start of spring, all the animals are losing their winter fur and they're really skinny. So all the animals look a little mangy. :)

Well, this has surely been an adventure - one that I want to be over, already. It is now Day 18 or so of us living out of suitcases and we still have another 10 days or so to go. That is the part I’m most looking forward to being over. That, and I no longer want to be on this ferry anymore.

We left Bellingham, Washington on Friday. It took us a few hours to load the car on to the ferry, get checked in, and then wait for everyone else to get loaded. It was a long day, Friday. We spent the morning packing up everything and re-loading the car. That is a process, because everything can really only fit in the car one way. Meaning that if we take something out from the bottom, everything from the top has to get taken out to load it back in. It’s been a hassle, but we progressively move faster at each location. Then we headed to Best Buy, for a surge protector for the boat, and Trader Joe’s, for all my wine. J We tried to determine how many cases of cheap wine we’d be able to fit in the car. We thought, we should stick with 2 and if we can fit more, we’ll just go in and buy more. So we got our 2 and learned that we could’ve easily fit another 3. But, that’s a bit excessive. So we decided that 2 cases (24 bottles) would last us a long enough time. We then headed to Subway for lunch, to finish off a gift card before the $5 foot long became $7 foot longs in Alaska. While eating lunch I managed to convince myself that 24 bottles of wine equals out to one a month for only two years. We plan to be there for close to four and therefore we needed more wine. So, we headed back to Trader Joe’s for another case + 2 more to try some new ones.

Final wine count – 38 bottles :D

After that it was about time to head to the ferry dock. We needed to be there at least three hours before sail, due to us bringing our car. We wound up sitting in the parking lot for a couple hours while they got everything organized. But we met some people, watched the very eccentric drug-sniffing dog and heard others discuss how they had cases of wine loaded up in their trucks. Hooray!! I’m not the only silly one!

Our room on the boat is about the size of a closet. There’s barely enough room for us to both brush our teeth in there let alone live in there. The room has a bathroom and 2 twin beds stacked on top of each other, like bunk beds. That’s it. And the beds are so close to each other that you can’t even sit on either bed without hitting your head. The boat itself, called the Malaspina, is fairly nice – not too large, not too small. There’s even a movie theater, although I would hardly consider it one when it’s just a plasma screen on a wall with 20 seats around it and they only play the same 5 movies/documentaries the entire trip. The restaurant is expensive and the food, while it isn’t bad, isn’t too exciting either. Fortunately, we brought on a lot of our own food, so really only have had to purchase one meal so far.

I have to say, overall, that this boat ride is rather boring. We’re not moving all that fast – 16 knots, about – so you see the same scenery for a while. Our first day aboard, the scenery wasn’t even that great., just okay. We didn’t bring any books or cards, because they all got packed up too fast and before we could even think about it. There’s no internet on board or at port. Eric has been busy studying and I’ve been trying to clean up my pictures from Yellowstone. This new camera is troublesome, I’m learning, because it takes pictures so fast and so nicely that we just keep snapping away. I think between 5 days we took about 800 pictures in Yellowstone and Grand Tetons, so I’m still working on cleaning those up. Our second day aboard, the scenery got much better. We passed gorgeous mountain ranges and we even saw a couple whales. It was a better day overall too, because we stopped in Ketchikan and Wrangell and were able to get off the boat and walk around for a little while. We had the most time to wander in Ketchikan, but from what we saw I don’t ever feel the need to visit there again. The town looked really run down with shabby houses and empty storefronts. There were two cruise boats in town, but it just seemed that they were taking water tours. Later in the day we stopped in Wrangell, while most everything was closed on this Sunday evening, it had a charm too it. We only got to spend about 25 minutes walking around, but it looked cute.

Our last stop of the day, and the last one before Juneau, was Petersburg. It was supposed to be our shortest stop of the trip – less than an hour. We didn’t bother getting off in this town because we would’ve only had about 15 minutes to wander. We did however start packing and loading our car back up so we could be better prepared for our 5:15 a.m. arrival to Juneau. And by that I mean, so that we could just roll out of bed and get in the car the next morning. We arrived there around 8pm to a gorgeous sunset setting over a beautiful mountain skyline. After getting our stuff in the car, we decided to try to get cozy in our room and watch a movie for the night. About an hour into the movie an announcement was made that we are still in Petersburg because we were waiting for clearance from the coast guard. Shortly after that, another announcement is made: The coast guard is requiring that we get a signed piece of paper from an electrical technician because the boat was having some engine troubles, giving us clearance to continue on. Now, here’s the kicker: There is no such person in Petersburg, they need to fly an electrical technician to Petersburg to look at the boat and they are working on making those arrangements for the morning. Damnit! All I’ve wanted to do all trip is get off this boat and get to Juneau. Now they are telling me I’m going to be spending at least another day on this thing? Argh.

So we wake up Monday morning to another announcement that we are still in Petersburg and the technician is expected to arrive later this morning. The boat is providing free breakfast and we are welcome to get off the boat and wander through town. So that’s exactly what we do. More announcements are made throughout the morning, but the gist is we’re stuck here until noon. They are expecting to leave by noon though. So we wander through Petersburg, which is also known as the Little Norway of Alaska. It has a lot of Scandinavian charm throughout, but we didn’t get a chance to see much. I’m not sure how large the town is, but I can only guess it’s pretty small. We didn’t wind up leaving until almost around 1p.m., but we’ve left. We’re still 8 hours from Juneau, so we’ll arrive close to 9p.m.

Here's a view from the ride, in between Petersburg and Juneau.

Thank goodness we scheduled the closing on our condo 2 days after we expected to arrive. But, of course, this also added on some extra stress because Eric is required to be at work Tuesday morning in order to report for duty, or else he’s considered AWOL and officially he can be fired. It seems now that we’ll make it just fine, but of course we’re also missing appointments with our insurance guy, realtor and mortgage consultant that we had intended to take care of today. Eric will probably be tired tomorrow, because we have no idea how long it will take us to get off the boat once in Juneau, then we have to check into the hotel and then pretty much unpack the entire car into the room so that Eric can get all his uniform elements and then iron them for his first day.

On the bright side, upon leaving Petersburg today we saw a bunch of sea lions catching some sun on the buoys and swimming around them. We’ve also seen a handful of whales and a school of black and white porpoises swimming past the boat. And the scenery has just been stunning the entire way. It’s almost a shame that we were expected to miss all this.

Yellowstone! Oh, Yellowstone!

Ok, so this keeping up with the blog thing can be a little tricky at times.

Warning: Since it's been a few days until I've updated... this one is loooonnng!

Well, we wound up spending 4 nights in Yellowstone. The first 2, were spent in Gardiner, Montana, near the Northwest Entrance of Yellowstone. We stayed in the Honeymoon Suite of a very small hotel. We were fortunate in the fact, that most hotels and most of the park were not open until May 16th, which meant not a lot of people in the area, in the park, or on the trails. The area had a cool spring as well, so with the cool weather and the non-heavy crowds, the animals were ALL over the place.

The night we arrived and got settled in Gardiner, we thought we'd go for a night drive in Yellowstone. The sun doesn't set in this area until around 9 p.m., so our night drive was still light out. That first night, as soon as we entered the park, we saw hundreds of elk, buffalo, deer, and antelope, with a few baby buffalo too. We didn't even make it much further than 10 miles into the park before we turned around to go home because of all the animals we saw and stopped to watch.

The next day we headed to the "Grand Canyon of Yellowstone" and the falls. Our hotel guide told us that if we ever got a sunny day to go there. It was a bright, sunny, blue sky kind of day - one we hadn't seen in awhile, so we took advantage of it. The only flaw - at about 10 a.m. it was only 24 degrees outside. The high of the day was supposed to be near 60, but 24 is not that appealing to go out in when it's the middle of May! By the time we got to the canyon, we were anxious to finally start hiking. The plan was to start slow and just do a 2-3 mile hike that day. We started our hike in about an inch of snow - no big deal, the sun was shining and the views were awesome!


After a mile or two we made it to our destination - Artist's Point - for another waterfall. These waterfalls were in full force, with ice surrounding the sides of them and snow at the tops. It was just beautiful - there was nowhere you could look and not drop your jaw in amazement. Once we got to artist's point, our hotel guide told us there was a really cool trail off that. We didn't think it would be that long and we still felt like hiking, so trekked off in that direction. After walking for an hour and not seeing any signs for Clear Lake, we thought we had gotten lost or on the wrong trail. I was getting tired because our 1 inch of snow turned into 3 feet, our flat trail turned into a steep trek up the mountain, and the high elevation was making me feel like my lungs were going to pop out of my chest. We didn't have any good trail maps, so were just going on a whim, so Eric tried to use his GPS on his cell phone to see where we were. That didn't work. So, we decided to just keep walking. We didn't turn back because it was a loop trail, so at some point, we figured it would eventually bring us back to our starting point. We eventually made it to the sign that pointed us in the direction of Clear Lake, but the trail was closed. We had no idea why, because there was no snow on it, completely open, and looked like a way easier route than the way we came. So ... we ignored the sign and took that trail. It started as a hike in the forest, then went to a hike in a thermal area (think: Old Faithful), then a lake. So, at this point we thought maybe we were finally on the right track. But then, we noticed some pretty fresh buffalo tracks on the trail we were walking. I started getting nervous, I had already worried about running into bears, but knowing that Buffalo were near freaked me out a little more - that, and not seeing another person for awhile. We wound up losing track of the trail and Eric, of course, wanted to try to find the buffalo. Thankfully we had purchased Bear Pepper Spray that morning, so we were at least prepared and figured it should work against any animal. We did find the buffalo, there were 2, along with some neat birds. It was pretty neat seeing them so close and without them knowing we were watching. Until, one noticed us and gave us a really dirty look. We slowly started to back away... I was officially out of my comfort zone and we were officially lost in the back country of Yellowstone. We decided to continue walking, because I didn't want to turn back, I wanted to get back to my car, where the metal frame would protect us from any animals that wanted to attack. Shortly after that we came to a wide open clearing, covered in snow with 6 new directions for us to go. Eric picked one that he felt was the right one. After hiking that for awhile, I officially asked him if we could turn back. We had no idea where we were going and it was close to 4p.m. Better safe than sorry and stuck in there for the night. So, we made it back safely, but exhausted. Our 2-3 mile hike, turned into an 8-9 mile hike through snow.

On our way back to the hotel to eat dinner, we saw a coyote in the distance. We sat and watched him for awhile and saw him pounce, catch and eat his dinner. He was pretty entertaining! Then, we saw a bunch of cars pulled off to the side of the road. We pulled off to find out what they were looking at... A grizzly bear! But.. they had lost sight of it. So, we all stood there searching and finally found it. But it was wayyyy off in the distance that we could barely see it. So we went on our way to find a similar situation a few miles down. We got out and there was another grizzly! But this one was really close, so close we could see it with just our plain eyes. We took lots of pictures!! And with my new camera, got really close shots.

The next day we headed towards the east side of the park - Lamar Valley. There was talk of wolves being in that area, so we were hoping we would see some. I made sure to make it very clear to Eric that I didn't want to do another 8-9 mile hike today. So he was nice enough to limit it to 1 mile or less trails. We had a lot of fun on this side of the park. We sat and ate lunch at Buffalo River Valley where at least 100 buffalo were there grazing along with elk, deer and antelope. It was so beautiful and so relaxing. While eating, we saw a couple coyotes approach the valley, along with pikas (like mini prairie dogs) and eagles. Unfortunately, we didn't see any wolves, but we had a great day. Later that evening, after dinner, our hotel owner told us of a place only locals know about. It was a thermal pool, or natural hot spring, just into the park that was unmarked so tourists wouldn't find it. We went out and had a blast. Usually thermal pools are at a boiling temperature, but this one ran into a river and so the 2 equaled itself out and made it warm but not deathly hot. It was really nice! To just be sitting in a valley surrounded by nature sitting in a natural hot tub watching deer walk by in the distance. We met some people who were spending their summer working in the park. It was fun talking to them about what all they have done and seen. What a relaxing end to our day!

The next day (Day 3) we decided to leave Gardiner, MT to stay in Yellowstone N.P. at the Old Faithful Inn. It's a national landmark and sits right outside of Old Faithful. It's a quirky little hotel. In order to keep the price just at reasonable (but still too high) we could only get a room with 2 beds and a sink. The bathroom was shared. There is no internet, no tv, no radio, not even a clock in the room. Luckily, Eric managed to work his "special deal" magic and since we had joined a Yellowstone Association earlier in the week (with yet another Eric deal), that membership got us 20% off the room rate, making it officially reasonable. It was neat though, it has a clock that tells you when Old Faithful will go off (roughly every 90 minutes) and then has a deck you can watch it from with chairs to relax in. Unfortunately, we ran into a lot of problems with the hotel restaurant that made our first night really frustrating. I don't think I would ever stay there again, it was too touristy and filled with too many old people - nobody around our age. Plus the 2 days we spent in that area we saw hardly no wildlife. We went from seeing everything, to seeing almost nothing. Old Faithful was pretty cool, but we were fortunate to see a few other geysers go off before we saw that one, ones that are a little more rare to go off, and they were bigger and cooler. So needless to say, I wasn't as impressed when we saw Old Faithful. Eventually all the thermal pools made me sick, they smell awful - like rotten eggs, but way worse. We had fun in this area too, it was so different than the northwest part of the park. We saw 2 more Grizzly bears which was awesome!

Overall, Yellowstone was awesome. It is one of my favorite places. We saw every animal in their pamphlet + a couple more - bison, elk, deer, antelope, grizzly bears, osprey, eagles, yellow-bellied marmot, pika's (like mini prairie dogs), a snake, white pelicans, jackrabbit, coyotes, falcons, hawks, and a couple other birds that we haven't figured out what they are yet.. The only 2 animals we didn't see were wolves and black bears. Below is a picture of the yellow-bellied marmot and one of my favorite buffalo pictures (although I have probably 100 or so more) of a Mom and her calf.




Before I forget, I need to mention that we went back to the Old Faithful Inn restaurant and had the most delicious Bison Ravioli ever. Not that I have anything to compare it to, but it was awesome! The antelope sausage... a little too chewy for my liking.

At the end of our Yellowstone run, we checked out of the Inn and went on our next journey: Grand Teton National Park. It's just about 20 miles south of Yellowstone, so the goal was to go through the park in just one day. This park is absolutely gorgeous - just breathe-taking! I would post a picture, but I haven't uploaded those pictures yet to my computer. But, I do think that it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been! The tetons are a large mountain range, they were covered in snow and sit on a lake that is still frozen now. I could've sat there all day just staring at them. Now I feel bad that I'm not posting a picture.. another day.

My goal for Tetons was to see a moose. They advertised them all over the place and the ranger told us a few locations we could find them. Eric was still hoping to see wolves and black bears. This day was finally warm, so during the day it was too hot for a lot of the animals to be out. We made sure to hike around during the day to kill time for dusk. We didn't come across any animals, just animal bones. Again, this freaked me out a little. On our way out of the park and closer to the areas the ranger told us we'd see moose, we saw 2 moose!!! Right on the side of the road. So close to the car, I could've reached my hand out and pet him!! Although, with him being that close, we were also afraid he was going to stick his head in our car. They are so funny looking!! I love them! :)

We spent that night in Idaho Falls, Idaho and did laundry in a hotel for the first time ever. It was just like being in the dorms again. The next day we spent driving 7.5 hours to Spokane, Washington where we had plans to have dinner with an old friend of mine from college, Nick. We told him to pick a delicious restaurant and he did! We went to this place called Twigs, a bistro and martini bar. Everything was delicious and it was awesome to see Nick again. For those of you who know him, he's still crazy and silly as always. :) When we asked him what there was to do in Spokane, he told us.. nothing. After harassing him a little, he finally told us it was more a winter town. So we wound up spending no extra time there. Good times, though!

Then we were going to head to Mt. Rainier as our last official stop before heading to Bellingham, WA, but decided against it. We have been filling our days with so much activity and driving and mortgage stuff and emails and Eric's job stuff that we've still been managing to overload ourselves. We decided to just drive straight to Bellingham and cutting out the extra driving to Mt. Rainier. It's close to Seattle, so it'll be easy for us to explore it at another time. We spent most of today just being lazy. We explored the town a little and stumbled across this absolutely gorgeous area, a drive in a natural rainforest just covered in huge evergreen trees with views of the water. Then we drove past a restaurant called The Oyster Bar, that was amazing! Once you walk inside the entire opposite wall is windows that overlooks the water. The food was stellar! I highly, highly recommend it if you ever find yourself in this area. I read in a travel magazine (that's like 6 months old and I'm just catching up now) that Bellingham is one of the best cities to live in.

Tomorrow we get on the ferry to Juneau. It leaves at 6pm, but with us bringing a car we have to be there by 3pm. Fortunately, there is a Trader Joe's in Bellingham, and since we won't be driving very far anymore, I will be stocking up on my cheap wine and filling it in every crevice I can find in my car. lol. There isn't any internet, or so we know, on the ferry, so also part of the reason why I made sure to write a lot in this one. We think our mortgage stuff is finally all good to go and we're set to close on our new condo on Wednesday. We'll be staying at the same hotel that we stayed at while in March, which is a nice 1 bedroom apartment so we'll have some space. I am so anxious to stop living out of a suitcase, but that still won't happen until mid-June. We don't know yet when our stuff will get delivered to the house yet. And Eric starts work on Tuesday.

So I think I can stop now...I think I'm completely updated now. I am definitely tired of writing and ready to lay on the bed and watch TV. I'll write again probably on Tuesday when Eric is at work. Hope I didn't bore you guys too much! :)

Welcome to Mt. Rushmore!

Yup. That's really it. Mt. Rushmore is actually behind those clouds. What a great view, huh?

We've run into some terrible weather at the start of this trip. It rained our entire way through Minnesota and South Dakota, but we got a break once we reached the badlands. But as you can tell, the bad weather continued to follow us. We started our next day through the badlands, but because of all the rain all the trails were really muddy. So we really just drove around looking at the scenery. We saw some bighorn sheep (look like rams) on the top of rocky cliffs. We then continued on to Custer State Park, because we were told it was a great drive. What a drive it was! We saw almost every animal that park said we would - buffalo, buffalo calves, elk, deer, pronghorn antelope, burros (similar to donkey's) and a baby burro. And we got to see them up close too. A great start to playing with my new fancy camera!

Then we headed to Mt. Rushmore. At this point it started to snow on us and man, was it cold! We drove through the mountains and ran into super foggy conditions. When we got to the gates of Mt. Rushmore we asked if we could even see it. She said, yeah sometimes the clouds let up. So we went in, because neither of us intend to be back in this area again anytime soon. After about 20 minutes the clouds did let up and we did see it, although still a little foggy. It was pretty cool, although I had always envisioned being closer to eye level with the four presidents. The one nice thing, was that since the weather was so terrible we only shared the park with another 20 people or so. And because we were all able to laugh at not being able to see it, we all sparked up some conversations. We met one older gentleman who is road tripping from Myrtle Beach, SC to Anchorage, Alaska. It was interesting to talk with him for awhile.

All that day, we kept hearing on the radio about the weather - 2-6 inches of snow from night to next day afternoon. So after Mt. Rushmore we tried to drive as quickly as we could, as far as we could to try to avoid the snow. Wyoming, by the way, there's nothing there except a cool welcome sign. Wyoming roads are so flat and so straight, and there's nothing to see off the side of the road. We made it to Buffalo, WY. We had planned to stop there because there were three different routes we could take to get to Yellowstone National Park, from there. It was a good thing that was our plan, because about 10 miles before Buffalo, it started snowing - hard - almost white out conditions. So we got to a hotel, who's computers were down but that helped us get a cheaper rate and some free snacks. :) We woke up the next morning to find not that much snow on the ground, but to find that two of our 3 road options to get to Yellowstone were closed because of the snow in the mountains. After a few hours of research, we decided to take the north route through Montana and into the north entrance of Yellowstone. We made it Wednesday night and found a place to stay. Montana is just gorgeous! Such beautiful scenery and animals are everywhere! Turns out, Yellowstone tourist season doesn't really open until Saturday, so half of the hotels are closed still. Luckily we found a small, couple-owned hotel. They offered us a stellar deal on their "honeymoon suite" because they don't start serving breakfast until Saturday and the suite has a kitchen. This actually worked quite well for us, because we brought a ton of food with us for camping, but it's been so cold we haven't camped at all.

Anyways, it's time to start our day today. I will write more on Yellowstone later. :) But so far, it's been AWESOME! If you have never visited before, I highly recommend you plan a trip now!

Our Journey Has Begun!

Well. It begins. It's official. Yup... we're crazy. We had a very busy week last week. You can now call Eric, Dr. Lieutenant Metterhausen as he graduated with his doctorate and got double promoted shortly after. Which means you can call me, Mrs. Dr. Lt. Metterhausen. :) That's a mouthful. Our last week in town was super crazy. Eric didn't receive his official orders until Tuesday. Thankfully we were able to set up the movers to come assess our stuff Wednesday, pack up everything Thursday, and load it all in the truck Friday. We left Sunday with our car and stuff, which packed it to the brim. I wanted to fill up any empty space in the car with Aldi canned goods.. but Eric was concerned that we had already reached the weight limit of my car. So for the sake of needing said car for a 2500 mile road trip.. I abandoned the Aldi stop idea. :( And we checked.. there doesn't seem to be any Aldi's this far west. We were hoping if there was one in Washington or Idaho we could load up there. Darn.

We left Sunday around noon, and headed up to Dad's to have lunch with the family before our long road trip. We left there around 5pm and the plan was to just drive as long as we could. We made it to Rochester, MN, got a good nights sleep and then headed out the next morning for our next long drive. We would be driving through almost all of South Dakota on Monday and was told by a certain SVA that there were only 5 things to do in South Dakota. Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, Corn Palace, and 2 others I don't remember. So when we came upon the corn palace in Mitchell, SD we thought, "Oh! We should stop!" Mr. SVA was WRONG. I said to Eric, If this is one of the 5 things you must stop to see in SD, I don't want to go to the other 4. I've posted a picture of it. We thought the whole thing would be made of corn. Wrong. They make murals on the building of corn. We also thought this would be smack dab in the middle of nowhere. Wrong. It shares a wall with the town's city hall. And is smack dab in the middle of a city. When you walk inside, it's a stadium - a fairly new one. I will admit, it was an odd spectacle to see... but is it worth the 30-40 minutes we lost driving? I'm not so sure...

Last night we stayed in Interior, South Dakota. We are right outside Badlands National Park, staying in a gem we stumbled upon. It is this quaint Bed & Breakfast that sits atop a butte. That's right... we slept on a butte last night. This B&B is almost in the middle of nowhere... no neighbors to be seen, and the views are stunning. And for $65 a night we got the best hospitality one could find, an amazing home cooked breakfast with burritos, peach cobbler, home made muffins, etc. and a huuuggeee house to roam around in and relax. I will take some pictures of the house and the area when we leave today, and post them in the next entry. Last night we played pinocchle with the owners, who were ecstatic to have run into other people who played. It's always fun playing pinocchle with a new group of people because everyone plays it differently. For those who know the game, the interesting ways they play are instead of passing 3 cards - they pass 4. And they have something called a "shoot". If you think you can win every trick, you call it before you play. If you succeed, you get 100 points. If you lose - 100 points. The funny thing about this rule is that they only play until 150. It didn't happen when we played last night, but seems like too much of a bonus for me. Another guest staying here is doing a cross country bicycle trip. He started in Portland and will end in Boston, going as far south as Atlanta. It was fun to talk to him and hear of his tales. I guess he started pretty early in the season and has run into some snow storms and hail storms. Not to mention cold. It's supposed be a high of about 48 degrees today. I have not packed properly for this weather... and will use up the last of my warm clothes in the next 2 or 3 days.. so hopefully it warms up some.

Today we will hike and explore Badlands National Park, which the little bit we've seen seems very similar to Petrified Forest. We saw some deer driving through last night and some White Pelicans - who knew those existed? After that we'll go to Mt. Rushmore and depending on what time it is we'll start our drive to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, where we'll spend the next 4 days or so. Alright, that's all for now, I should have some more time while in Yellowstone to keep everyone updated and hope to post more pictures then!