Josh's Home Away From Home

Josh officially began his third year (3rd ALREADY!!) of medical school this week which means he has started his hospital rotations. He'll spend this next year rotating through medicine, psychiatry, obgyn, surgery, pediatrics, and family medicine. The hospitals and clinics will pretty much turn into his home away from home as he'll be there 5 to 6 days a week. Most days he'll be done at a decent time, but some days he'll be gone until really late at night or early early morning. Tonight is his first late night. I got to see him today though when I brought him dinner! It's so great living only a mile away from the hospital! I know he won't ever get bored while he's there though because even if he has down time, there are video games to play in the student lounge!! Talk about spoiled. I really am so proud of him for working so hard in school. He's really dedicated, and he truly enjoys everything! It's fun to hear his funny and gross stories too. I guess being a nurse I love hearing those kinds of things! It's also fun to see him dressed in a shirt and tie and clean shaven everyday. I know he hates it, but I always think he looks so good dressed nice! :)

(this is at the beginning of his 1st year)

We Love The Mountains...Even If We Get A Little Lost

June 14th we went back home to AZ for a visit with our families, and most of our time was spent in Greer up in the White Mountains. We just love going to the mountains, and seem to love it even more since we've moved to the "Prairie State" with no mountains anywhere in sight. We rented a huge cabin to stay in and enjoyed the great outdoors. On one particular day Josh, his mom, and I decided to go on a hike. We were picnicing right by a trail that was about 6 miles long and would take us directly back to the cabin. So the rest of the fam dropped us off at the trailhead and away we went. We figured, 6 miles, not bad at all. We'll get back just in time to help with dinner. I should mention we also brought along my inlaw's small dog and Josh's sister's large dog. So we hiked along a dirt path that was more like a road for a lot of the time, it followed a nice creek and took us through open meadows. We all knew we were headed in the right direction (and I really do have a good sense of direction) so it didn't REALLY cross our minds that we were on the wrong path. It did seem a little strange to us that the trail continued to look like a road rather than a trail and never took us through the forest as we expected.

After about 2 miles, we (LuCKiLy!!) we ran into some people on a go-cart. Feeling we better make sure we were headed the right way, I asked which direction Greer was, and they spoke words nobody ever wants to hear: "Oh boy, you're headed in the totally wrong direction!! Greers THATAway (pointing behind us). You've got a LONG way to go, there's NO way you'll EVER get there before dark!" We all just stared with blank faces. They offered to take us back to their camp to use their phone, but we opted to just back-track and head to our starting point. Luckily, I had come "prepared" and brought along my cell phone. We thought we'd just call the family and have them come back and pick us up. Well, it didn't help that a) we were way up in the mountains and I got terrible phone reception, and b) the battery on my phone was pretty much dead. I did manage to leave a few voicemails before it died completely, but we had no idea if they'd be received or not. At this point, I'm envisioning us stranded at the side of the road in the dark waiting for a ride that's never coming, or us wandering lost through mountains in the dark with no flashlight surrounded by wild bears and search teams looking for us. At least we had water.

Well, to finish up this long story, as we were backtracking the 2 miles, we happened across the REAL trail, pretty much at the beginning where we started. Josh, using his eagle scout skills, caught a glimpse of the--get this--trail MARKERS! Whadaya know. All we had to do was follow the trail! I guess it wasn't totally our fault we missed them because one had fallen down. And for the record, our senses of direction were right all along, we were right about where Greer was! The people on the go-cart were wrong. At least they told us we were on the wrong trail. We decided to just finish our hike and take the real trail back to the cabin, which ended up being a total of 10 miles rather than 6. It wasn't too bad for us humans, it was actually pretty fun and we never were too worried, but the poor dogs, esp. the little one, just about passed out when we got back. We even made it back before dark. And it turned out that someone did get my voicemail and they came to try to get us. Even though where we were staying was only 6 miles away, the main roads to get there had been closed off so it turned into a 2 hour event driving there and back. Thank you to Chris and Bill who tried to rescue us! Moral of the story is: don't go hiking without a map, and always remember to charge your cell phones!!

Some Of Our Travels

Since Josh and I met in 2001 through the planning of a trip to Europe which thus led us to get married and also helped to spark our love for traveling, I thought it would be appropriate to post pictures of some of the places we've been. Unfortunately, none of our Europe photos are in digital format though!

Cruisin from Florida to the Bahamas, not a glamourous photo, but we were having a great time!

How could we go to Florida and not visit Disney World?!

Deep in the rainforests of Costa Rica

Such a beautiful waterfall!

Road trip to San Francisco

Banana boat ride in Rocky Point. This thing was so fun, but Matt Brinton was trying to pull off some Fear Factor stunts during the ride which made heart skip a few beats!

Becoming S.C.U.B.A. certified in Cozumel, Mexico

Visiting the Big Apple

Kayaking in the Florida Everglades

Trying this out

We've decided to try out the world of blogging!! This is Melanie typing, and if we discover that we love to blog, I'll most likely be the one to post the most even though it's a shared account. Josh is pretty busy with school these days. I'm not much of a writer or a blogger, but I've had fun browsing through other people's blogs and for some strange reason think some people out there somewhere might enjoy reading ours. Hopefully our lives won't be too boring and we'll find things to post! So let me go try to figure out how this works and hopefully I'll have some pictures to post later.