Stuck in Nauvoo!

Paul and I spent an eventful weekend stuck in Nauvoo, IL. It all started late Saturday morning as Paul and I left Davenport in his car to go to the Nauvoo LDS Temple. Everything seemed fine till we went up one of the few hills in Illinois and the heat guage (don't know what that's really called) started heading to the "H". It went back down and seemed fine till we started over a long drawbridge over the Mississippi after waiting in line for 10 minutes, then the needle hit the "H" and didn't go back down. But we were on the bridge with no where to go... so we made it to the end and pulled over. We then turned off the engine, put the hood up and proceeded to start calling AAA for a tow to.... somewhere, not a lot out there in W. Illinois, E. Iowa. A few minutes into the call a pickup pulled over and the nice gentleman inside called out "Do you need some help? It's my birthday and I promised to do something nice for someone today." After getting out of the truck he asks, "Are you LDS (Latter Day Saints)? Heading to the temple?" He was tipped off by the out of state plates and church clothes in the back of the car. He then checked the car out, etc, etc.... long story short, he (Gary) followed us into town, dropped our car off at the only car repair shop in Nauvoo, and took us home to his lovely cabin on the river to stay the weekend with him and his wife (Kathy).

He insisted that we make our temple session, so he gave us the keys to his wife's car to drive, and he made the arrangements for the car while we were at the temple. The temple was BEAUTIFUL! It's so big, everything is amazingly intricate... it just amazes me that the Mormon pioneers (pre-pioneers I guess) were able to build it.

We spent Saturday night at Gary and Kathy's in one of their spare bedrooms. The next morning they took us on a driven tour of Nauvoo... including the modern day tour (this is where Dr. so and so lives, etc.) and the olden day (Joseph Smith's house, burial site, original temple quarry) and other fun things (like where the film Legacy was filmed). We then went to sacrament meeting with them, their ward was amazingly nice, at least 8 or 9 people greeted us before the meeting. Then we skipped out on the rest of church to do a tour of historic Nauvoo. I think I'll try to figure out how to make a slideshow of my pics of that.

When we got back to the cabin, Gary had found out that the problem with the car was a bad water pump and it the part would hopefully come in on Monday and be fixed shortly thereafter, so we spent another night with Gary and Kathy. They are truly wonderful, fun and smart people. We were SO blessed that he listened to the spirit that told him to stop and that we were people he could trust. He gave us all sorts of financial tips, he's a bank president, which we are very grateful for. And we heard all sorts of fun stories about their family; one son works for Dreamworks and worked on movies like Shrek and I Robot; one son that's a Navy Seal; and another son who's a lawyer with a cute little red head daughter. Woke up in the morning... got to put on the SAME clothes for a 3rd day in a row :). And got dropped off at the car place (Gary and Kathy had to go back to their 1st home for the work week). We then found out that the part didn't come in and we got to spend another day in Nauvoo! Hooray! We watched the movies at the visitors center, did more touring and spent the night at the Hotel Nauvoo.

The next day, Tuesday, found out that the car also needed a new radiator on top of the new water pump... but all got fixed for a mere $100 thanks to the extended warrantee on Paul's car. Then we got off... at 1:30pm... 72 hours after we stopped on the side of the road.

3 down... 47 to go

I passed my Illinois law exam! So I am now officially a licensed pharmacist in Washington, Iowa and Illinois. Hooray!

First week of work

Had my first day of work at HyVee pharmacy on Tuesday at the Moline, IL store. I'm not officially licensed in Illinois yet, so I get to be babysat like an intern again. Fun times! Apparently Illinois is the slowest state in the union at getting things like that done. Anyway, work is good, although I miss my old store, Platters, in Spokane. I miss the people and the fact that my pharmacy technicians did the hard stuff ie. computer entry and dealing with insurance companies etc... now I have to do all that. All the techs here do is cashier and count pills. Odd! But everyone is really nice and not too many grouchy customers yet. :)

Mount Rushmore

Our long trip across the U.S. let us make a fun stop at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota... it was good to have a stop like that before the rest of South Dakota, because let me tell you the rest of that state is a whole lot of NOTHING! Just miles and miles of prairie. Not much to say about Mount Rushmore itself, I did learn that Pres Lincoln was orignally supposed to be on the LEFT of Pres Washington, but the rock was too unstable and he kept falling apart. AND the artist that designed the monument was LDS, like me. :)

Our other South Dakota stop was in Wall, the direct result of a deluge of media. Starting about 30 miles before Wall, SD there were little billboards every mile or so reading: Fresh Pie; Homemade Ice Cream; Free Ice Water; 5 cent Coffee; etc. all at Wall Drug. The media did it's job and we made a fun stop at Wall Drug... where there was not a single Pharmacist on duty, just one big tourist trap. Got to ride a jackelope and a bucking bronco though.

Weekend in Wenatchee

The last days of the honeymoon

The next day (after having gone on a nostalgia tour the night before of Paul's hometown and getting burritos... and all important stop) after spending the night at our hotel right on the beach :) we went to the Monterey Aquarium (for free - Paul's friend used to work there so he had his friend Pedro come let us in the back door... I'll vote for you Pedro!). I got to touch an manta ray thing (not really a manta ray but you get the idea). We watched them feed the sea otters... that was adorable. One of them came right up to the window and pounded his toy on it... very very cute!

Then we went on 17 Mile Drive; a 17 mile drive through fancy houses, swanky golf courses and along the ocean. It was sooooooo cold and windy... but we got out at all the important spots, including Pebble Beach. That's a fancy golf course for those of you who are as clueless as I am.... and I felt SO underdressed. Oh well.

The next day we had planned to go skydiving... would have been so cool! But it was raining and apparently you need to be able to see the ground when you jump out of the plane, so our appointment was cancelled. I had said a prayer the night before that if it was a dumb idea for us to go that Heavenly Father needed to let us know in no uncertain terms. But the rain wasn't enough for us. Paul proceeded to call every single town up the coast between Monterey and San Francisco to find out it any of them were planning on doing jumps, we finally found one in Holister CA (not really as cool of a surfer town as you would think by thy way... really just a lame farm town no where close to the ocean!) we got there and it started raining as we pulled into the airport. I told Paul that this was our final sign... if we ignored this one we weren't getting anymore warnings. So we cancelled our appointment and we're alive! Happy day! Still planning on doing it someday... so stay tuned.

I got a calling!

And my mom's response to it was "well somebody has to do it..."

Any guesses?

Did I mention that my mom is scared of teenagers?

That's right... 14 and 15 year old Sunday School teacher. Hmmmm... could be really fun right? Just calls for lots of treats, bribery and games!

Owl in Our Neighborhood

The other morning Paul mentioned that he thought that we had an owl in our neighborhood, he thought he had heard one while we were sleeping the night before. I thought that was pretty cool... till I heard the same owl later that DAY... odd. And I kept hearing it ALL DAY LONG at very predictable intervals... Turns out my neighbor has a fake owl sitting on her porch that turns its head and hoots all day long.

Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo... 2 second pause... hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo... 6 second pause.... hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo... 10 second pause. Repeat 1000 times = a recipe for driving me CRAZY!

Day 4

Day 4 started in Paso Robles where we had a Mexican breakfast with Paul's uncle (also not a Mexican). Burritos for breakfast... who woulda thought! Actually Paul does it frequently at home... not Mexican my eye! ;)

Then we started the long drive up the coast to Monterey. It was BEAUTIFUL!!! The first part of the drive was through part of the California wine country and I have this HUGE thing for vineyards... were I not LDS I totally would have gotten married in a vineyard. I LOVE them, think they are so pretty! And where there weren't vineyards it was just beautiful lush and green... like Ireland.

On our way we saw a sign for Hearst Castle... being all about touring homes (especially ones called castles) I insisted we go. So we did! (good husband). It was amazing!

The story about Hearst Castle for those of you who don't know is that it was built by William Randolph Hearst, the Hearst family being incredibly wealthy due to media (magazine etc publishing) and he was bored and build a ginormous house on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. In it he stored is millions (now billions) of dollars art collection ranging from Italian monastary church benches to statues from King Tuts tomb. All displayed next to each other with nothing in common but Mr. Hearst liking them all. He designed the house(s) to look like an Italian village... part of it was never finished but all in all it was amazing. And all the famous people of the time spent time there... Charlie Chaplin, umm.... can't think of anyone else. But all the rich and famous of the 30's and 40s hung out there. One really cool thing is that he also had a zoo with all sorts of animals, most all are gone now but supposedly you can sometimes see zebra grazing along side the road. We didn't see any. These are some of the pictures... our camera was running out of batteries (and guess who forgot the charger... that would be me) so we didn't take as many as we wanted to.

From there we drove up Highway 1... long, windy and beautiful. Loved being able to always see the ocean. We stopped and ate at this little restaurant and I loved that the sign told us which way the llamas were... we didn't see any of those either :(