Portland, Oregon

The weekend after I got home from NC, Michael and I flew to Portland for his Marine Corps Ball. I also had to do some training to become a family readiness volunteer. This program is set up to get helpful info to marine wives. I have avoided this program like the plague up until this point. It used to be a gossip ring with several catty ladies. However, the Marine Corps realized this and revamped the whole program. The training was pretty good and I've already sent some info out to my two wives! haha! I've met most of the marine wives in Alaska now and they all seem pretty nice.

These were two of the lovely ladies that sold their souls to the devil too! Heehee...just kidding! Danielle (above) lives in Vancouver, WA and April (below) lives in Anchorage. We are all now family readiness volunteers!

We had a lot of free time in Portland which was super nice. We were supposed to hang out with April and Amy, but unfortunately, they had moved to southern California by the time we got to Portland. Michael and I explored downtown Portland with all of our free time. It's a really cool city.

It rains A LOT in Portland! We were walking around the city all morning and stopped to have lunch. Of course, it is a monsoon outside when we were ready to go! I was too cheap to get a taxi and Michael had to get back to to hotel for his training, so we ran throught the rain to get to a store to buy an umbrella! Hahaha! The line was full of umbrella buyers! Running through the city with an umbrella in the rain was actually a lot of fun and one of my best memories from this trip! :)

Here is a picture of us all dolled up at the ball! The ball was nice, but super small (especially compared to the previous balls we've been to). Also, there was a very different atmosphere at this recruiter's ball compared to the fleet's ball. People just didn't seem to take this as seriously. Michael and I were both very bothered and disgusted by the actions of some of the Marines. I told Michael that I would be fine with him going back to the fleet now. I don't want him to become a career recruiter and turn into one of the disrespectful people we saw at this ball.

North Carolina

Okay, so since almost all of you that read this blog were with me while I was in NC, I am not going to blog about this trip! It was awesome! I completed all 39.3 miles of the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer in Charlotte! We had a great Halloween party! And it was awesome to see everyone! Hopefully, we'll get to go back to NC soon!

Denali Road Lottery Trip

Every year, the state of Alaska has a lottery for the chance to drive through Denali National Park. This a pretty big deal because people are only allowed to drive 13 miles into the park. If you want to go any further, you have to take a bus or hike. This park is freaking massive! They do have a road that goes 86 miles into the park. If your name is drawn, you can bring one vehicle and drive all 86 miles of the road for the day you were drawn. The weekend is the last weekend of September right before everything shuts down up there because of the winter. My friend Amy won!!! She invited me to go with her!! I was so excited. There were 5 of us packed up into her car and we made the trip! The picture above is Mt. Denali (or Mt. McKinley, depending on who you talk to...they are changing the name from McKinley to Denali. If you are a local, you call it Denali). We saw this when we were still a couple of hours from the park!

During our drive, we were stopped by this grey wolf strutting his stuff in the middle of the road! It was amazing! He did not even care that we were there! I took this picture from my seat inside of the car! How crazy is that?!?!

This was a male grizzly bear!!! I had no zoom going on in this photo! He was racing (I like to use the term "charging"...it sounds so much cooler and exciting) towards our vehicle! Amy got nervous once he got super close to our car...so she moved up a little. I wanted the bear to hit the car window. I say that now, but I'm sure if that really happened, I may have shit myself.

Only 30% of the people that visit the park actually get to see the mountain because it's usually cloudy. We got to see it!! We're part of the 30% club! This was at the visitor's center deep within the park. I really like this photo because of the American flag in front of the mountain.

Me and the mighty mighty mountain!! :)

Me and my Denali posse at the end of the road in the park! Thank you so much for inviting me Amy! This was a trip of a lifetime!

Fall Equinox

Since our seasons, besides winter, are so short, people really like to celebrate the solstices and equinoxes. The adventurers group, one of the online groups we belong to, had a Fall equinox party on the beach up here. We had to walk 2 miles from the parking lot to get here, and I don't think I would have ever found it on my own! Once you got off the main trail, you had to take a hidden little trail to get there! But once you got through all of this, it was totally worth it! It was absolutely amazing! This picture was taken as the sun was setting. These are some of my girlfriends up here. This is also the night that some of our AK friends found out we were pregnant. You know how they found out? I wasn't drinking!! Damn my alcoholic tendencies!!!

You know you're from NC when...

Our friend had his birthday party a couple of months ago. We had so much fun at our 80's housewarming party, that Brandon thought we should have a theme party for his party too! His theme was trash/backwoods/redneck! This was actually quite funny!

This was my costume. We are really pregnant at this point in time, but only a few weeks. However, we thought it would be funny to dress like I was big pregnant! (don't worry, I only drank water...the beer bottles were for effect!) This guy in the picture is one of our buddies, Justin. He talked EXACTLY like Hank from King of the Hill. It was hilarious! Oh, and we all had to have trashy names. My name was Elly Mae IHumpe! Hahaha! The "bump's" name was Oops!

Here's a group photo of some of us. The guy in the yellow shirt is the birthday boy. The sad part about this whole theme...Michael and I didn't even have to go shopping for our clothes! We already owned everything! So sad.

Whitewater Rafting (from July)

This is an old adventure and I just now got around to posting it! We went whitewater rafting in the middle of July on Six-Mile Canyon. This was incredible! I highly recommend this trip to everyone that comes to visit Alaska! The have a couple of Class IV rapids and one Class V!! I am sitting in the back left corner (the right side of the guide) and Michael is right in front of me. I have a yellow helmet and he has a red helmet.

This was us going down a rapid and being totally covered in water! Luckily, none of us fell out. We had a couple of casualties at the beginning when we were still trying to get the hang of everything. By the end we were pros and our raft was getting to do things that the other rafts were not due to our awesome physical ability! :)

This is us on the left saving people! Their raft completely dumped almost everyone so we had to save people and some paddles! This was so intense!

Oh, I must warn you. They do make you do a swim test before you are even allowed in the rafts! You do have a wet suit on, but it's not really insulated! I would suggest wearing lots of warm clothes underneath the suit! Even though it was July up here when we went, the water was FREAKING cold!!!! Brrr!!!

We're having a Baby!!!

Yep, that's right, Michael and I are pregnant! We are 9 weeks 2 days pregnant as of today! I'm not going to talk about the pregnancy too much on this blog, but check out our baby blog http://bdawghodge.blogspot.com/ to stay in the know about B-dawg! :)