The Cruise

So it's been a long time since we've posted. With all the craziness, it just hasn't really been possible to find the time. But we're hoping that we can slowly get caught up on this blog with all the wedding and cruise and such.

Let's start with the cruise in general. We know, the wedding happened first, but as you probably know, weddin pictures can take a while to get picked and processed, so we'll try to get to those later.

Back to the cruise. Well, we had a great trip. It was so nice to just relax for a week. We hadn't realized how frazzled we were until we got on the boat. No cares and no worries after these last few months was just great.

This is our boat, the Carnival Legend. It was super-luxurious. Our room was very nice, and we had a balcony from which we spent quite a bit of time just sitting and relaxing, watching the water.

This was our room. It was very nice, not so much for the room, because being on a ship, it wasn't particularly large, but because of the service. We literally had people coming in, straightening up, and making the bed and replacing the towels twice a day. They even folded us all sorts of fun creatures out of towels while they were there.

They even offered free room service, but we didn't do much with that, as we preferred to go to the dining area to eat. They had a great selection of food, which allowed Camshaft to be adventurous with his pallette (fish, sushi, lobster, caviar, escargo, and a ton of different fish, to name a few menu items) and Mandee to be more conservative in her meal choices.

The ship always had a lot of fun activities, and we did a few. One afternoon, we decided to pretend to be all sophisticated and went to an art auction. We bid on a few things, but didn't win, as pretty much everything there was way out of the price range of a couple of poor newlyweds. The big item of the auction was a genuine Picasso that had a starting bid of $58,000. But while we weren't on excursions, we mostly spent our time either in the room, napping and relaxing, or in the dining hall (they did have a 24 hour buffet as well, incidentally, but we didn't eat there as much). There were also a lot of shows, including a big show every night that seemed to alternate between comedians or else big musical reviews with singers and dancers.

Well, that's about all we can think of for this post. We will try to go through our excursions in the following days and will get to the wedding when we get our pictures back. On and incidentally, here's another interesting picture from our balcony. That's Cuba! Crazy, huh. We were that close.

This past month...

Well, not much really exciting has gone on with Mandee and Camshaft the last month or so. We have been very busy with the wedding planning and family and such.

Things are slowly shaping up. Most of the planning is done now. We have a place to live in Clearfield and have the honeymoon pretty much all planned.

We've had a few chances to go do stuff during all of this madness though. The Gateway has been a frequent hangout for us in recent weeks (we even saw Mehmet Okur there (starts for the Utah Jazz)). Last Saturday we also went to the Dinosaur Park in Ogden.

So sorry for the lack of updates. I'm sure we'll have a ton to tell come October.

And the Rest...

The rest of our trip up to Washington was mostly concentrated on us getting ready for the wedding in Ogden in October.

Tuesday, with the help of Mandee's mom and her sister Chelle, we pretty much got the photos for our wedding invitation taken care of. This is one that we aren't planning on using, but gives you a good idea:


We also spent some time going through Mandee's boxes of stuff and did some shopping for some gifts and souveniers.

Thursday, we made a brief trip to Mukilteo Beach. We had originally wanted to go to some forts on the islands, but the ferry was having some troubles that day, so we spent the afternoon at the beach and lighthouse.

But it was a great trip. Both Mandee and Camshaft had a blast and enjoyed spending as much time together as they did.

Road Trip Part 4

Monday was our excursion into Canada, Victoria to be exact. Unknowlingly, we had happened upon the 150th Anniversary Celebration of the province of British Columbia. It was super busy and crowded, with people everywhere.

The ferry ride over was pleasant, and we spotted both seals and porpoises.

In Victoria itself, we mostly walked around and took in the sites. As we arrived, there was a boat show, with tugboats floating together in formation.


We then headed over to Chinatown. What we saw was pretty cool, but it seems like the Chinatown has shrunk over the years, as the Chinese have become more integrated.


After some more wandering and site seeing, we ended up at an English-style pub called the Sticky Wicket and had a late lunch there, heading back over to Washington on a converted passenger ship.

Road Trip Part 3

Sunday consisted mostly of us doing the regular Sunday activities, then getting on the road and staying the night in Port Angeles.



Port Angeles was a quiet little town that is on the north end of the Olympic Penninsula. It seems to get a fair amount of traffic from Victoria and ships coming down from Alaska. The evening ended up being fairly laid back. We wandered around the port area and watched the ships coming in through the mist and the minnows jumping in the shallow water around the docks. There had also been a sand sculpture contest around the town, which was cool to see.



All in all, a pretty laid back day. We went to bed early to get ready for our adventure into Canada the next day.

Road Trip Part 2

Today we visited the lovely city of Seattle where we visited the old World's Fair remnants around the Space Needle and then took the monorail down to Pike's Place Market.





Pike's Place Market is an awesome place for anyone who likes food. There are shops selling food from about any country you can think of. We tried teriyaki chicken, potstickers, Chinese pork buns, mini-donuts, and Reinier cherries. Cameron ate some spicy salmon sushi, but no one else dared try it. There's also all sorts of exotic produce and flower shops among the little restaraunts.

Road Trip Part 1

So right now we are in the midst of another trip up to the Seattle area, this time with Mandee's whole family for a week. Our first day, last Friday, the 1st of August, mainly consisted of us travelling up to Seattle in Chelle's awesome car. We made stops at Shoshone Falls and Snoqualmie Falls. We took a couple of pictures:





Shoshone Falls





Snoqualmie Falls

The trip was very long. We did a lot of chatting, listening to music, snoozing, and playing our Nintendo DSs. Chelle snapped a couple of pictures of us doing the latter:



Day 1. Stay tuned for Day 2