Pumpkin Lovin

Pumpkins remind me of the fall leaves in Blacksburg.  I was never much of a pumpkin eater until I went to college, and now I can’t get enough of it.  When I found this amazing pumpkin muffin pan at Crate and Barrel, I had to buy it.  This pan makes 3-D pumpkins that you put together with frosting (cream cheese of course!) And to make the pumpkins even better, we found pumpkin muffin mix at Trader Joes.  Mmmm….the taste of fall has never been cuter!

I love FALL!

Fall is my favorite time of year. I love watching the leaves change, feeling the air turn crisp, and ordering pumpkin spiced lattes at Starbucks. Unfortunately, San Diego doesn’t get that fall feeling, though I do feel the San Diego fall in the air. Last year, I couldn’t tell the difference, but I’ve been here long enough to feel the difference this year. It’s subtle…but there. To enjoy fall, James and I drove to the beautiful mountains of Julian, where us Southern Californians drive to experience fall. At only an hour away, Julian gives you the crisper fall air, slight leave changes, amazing apple pies, and a cute small town feel. Every year they host the Apple Festival, where you can pick your own apples, enjoy homemade cider, apple wine, apple butter, and apple pies. My personal favorite was the pumpkin apple pie. That piece of pie alone was worth the drive! We actually made two trips to experience fall, one that included some wine tasting and enjoying the cute old mining town of Julian, and one that included apple picking and the pumpkin patch. It was a bad year for apples in southern California, so there wasn’t much picking to be done. It was still beautiful though, and we enjoyed walking through the orchards. We spotted a pumpkin patch on the drive in, so we left the orchard and went to pick out our pumpkins. It was also a bad year for pumpkins, but we were able to find a few cute ones for the apartment. At the pumpkin patch, James and I reminisced about the pumpkin patch in Christiansburg. It really is a hard one to beat, with the beautiful mountains surrounding the farm, the tractors to climb on, the rolling hills of pumpkins, the petting zoo, and of course the home made cider and kettle corn. I could almost taste the homemade cider and feel the crisp air on my cheeks. I miss Blacksburg in the Fall! Check out our new site: http://wanderinghokies.com/

I love FALL!

Fall is my favorite time of year. I love watching the leaves change, feeling the air turn crisp, and ordering pumpkin spiced lattes at Starbucks. Unfortunately, San Diego doesn’t get that fall feeling, though I do feel the San Diego fall in the air. Last year, I couldn’t tell the difference, but I’ve been here long enough to feel the difference this year. It’s subtle…but there. To enjoy fall, James and I drove to the beautiful mountains of Julian, where us Southern Californians drive to experience fall. At only an hour away, Julian gives you the crisper fall air, slight leave changes, amazing apple pies, and a cute small town feel. Every year they host the Apple Festival, where you can pick your own apples, enjoy homemade cider, apple wine, apple butter, and apple pies. My personal favorite was the pumpkin apple pie. That piece of pie alone was worth the drive! We actually made two trips to experience fall, one that included some wine tasting and enjoying the cute old mining town of Julian, and one that included apple picking and the pumpkin patch. It was a bad year for apples in southern California, so there wasn’t much picking to be done. It was still beautiful though, and we enjoyed walking through the orchards. We spotted a pumpkin patch on the drive in, so we left the orchard and went to pick out our pumpkins. It was also a bad year for pumpkins, but we were able to find a few cute ones for the apartment. At the pumpkin patch, James and I reminisced about the pumpkin patch in Christiansburg. It really is a hard one to beat, with the beautiful mountains surrounding the farm, the tractors to climb on, the rolling hills of pumpkins, the petting zoo, and of course the home made cider and kettle corn. I could almost taste the homemade cider and feel the crisp air on my cheeks. I miss Blacksburg in the Fall!

The Julian Bakery... Built in 1882...     Burned in 1957...     Restored in 1978

The Internets (according to Steven Colbert)

When we were freshmen in college, having the internet in our rooms was awesome.  I mean, I had the internet at home for many years, but this was my internet connection.  Our computers were plugged into it all the time, 24 hours with our AIM status telling everyone what we were up to or saying something witty or cute.  "VTAngel06: Is at Deet’s getting ice cream with her awesome roommate! Come meet us at Deet’s and be awesome too!!" And we would spend hours on sites like Homestarrunner.com Even though we spent a lot of time on the internet, it was the pre-Facebook age, so it was different.  It was before blogging and twitter.  And even a bit before digital cameras.  A few of our friends had them, but they were on the cutting edge.  Cathy and I (my freshman roommate) were still using film cameras, with only 24 photos a roll.  It was a time when we didn’t want to share everything we were doing with the entire population.  When Facebook came to Virginia Tech, I resisted.  If you remember, only a few colleges were invited to join Facebook at a time, and slowly, almost every college was on the site.  It was only later that they opened it up to everyone, and it became an international phenomenon complete with a ton of advertisements.  I joined Facebook my senior year of college for a class called “Communication, Internet, and Society,” where I was supposed to observe internet interactions and relationships.  At the time, it was novel for me, and academic in nature.  Now, it is completely social for me, and I get on it multiple times a day to "stalk people". In fact, I’m not sure what I would do without Facebook!  I love stalking people and seeing what everyone is doing with their lives.  I love looking at people’s pictures, and looking to see why their relationship status changed. It’s a way of life for me now.  And I love reading people’s blogs to see what they are up to.  I guess it’s really a staple for us, because we live so far away from our friends and family.  This comic made me laugh and saddened me at the same time.  It is so true how attached we have become to the internet.  Just the other day, we were hiking along the beautiful coast of San Diego, and I thought to myself, this is going to make a great blog.  How sad!  So, this is just a small version of my daily thoughts on the internet.  Hope you all enjoy the comic! :) It is from http://xkcd.com/, “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

Link to Original Comic

Penguins

Heading south into winter from Brazil the temperatures quickly dipped.  As the days grew short, I managed to grab an awesome picture of the sunset off the Argentine Coast. I had regained much energy by the time we entered the Strait of Magellan, the highlight of the trip for me.  It took us two days to cross the Strait, though it took Magellan over two weeks.  Entering from the Atlantic we saw a vast flat empty land, with some ice but mainly brown reminding me of pictures from Greenland.  This was cold and boring until we reached Punta Arenas for an overnight anchorage.  The current strong and we dragged anchor, but I enjoyed looking at a large city in a desolate countryside through binoculars.  I really wished we had made a port call to walk around, but we had to continue.  The next day was one to remember, with dramatic views of mountains, ice, glaciers, penguins, and the circle of life. We entered a narrow channel with freezing mist, but got to see the southern most point of South American mainland, with only patagonia and the Drake Passage on our left to separate ourselves from Antarctica.  We are also able to see tiny Magellenic Penguins enjoying their penguin lives.  After hours of majestic beauty, we literally could take a picture anywhere and see something good, we were joined by a pod of Orcas.  It was cute at first with thoughts of Free Willy in our head, but then we saw them hunting seals, a truly terrific sight.  Seals were trying to escape, but couldn’t make it... it was just like the Planet Earth series on the port side of the ship.  After a frozen day we looked forward to my favorite port stop in Valparaiso, Chile.

Obrigado! (Thank You)

Pulling into Rio de Janeiro (January River), Brazil afforded a great view of among the most unique topography I’ve ever come across. The main city was founded within a large natural harbor with a narrow opening to the ocean. Both the French and Portuguese attempted to settle the area, with the Portuguese easily fortifying the opening to the bay. The Portuguese empire moved its headquarters to Rio after Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula, affording Old World riches and architecture to litter the city. Today, Rio is famous for its beaches which we saw riding in, particularly Copacabana and Ipanema neighborhoods. On a mountain top overlooking the city is a 40 foot statue of Jesus, Christo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) that we could actually see riding in. However, Rio is in the grip of rapid, massive urbanization as the population continues to move in from the countryside into cities looking for jobs. Without housing construction to meet population, shanty towns have gone up everywhere, called favelas. There are miles and miles of favelas and are areas of high crime. We pulled in at a commercial pier downtown. I was immediately struck by the high amount of grafitti, EVERYWHERE. There was literally nothing NOT tagged by rather colorful and artful spray paint, including churches and gravestones. Once liberty call went down I went out with a few junior officers and explored Copacabana beach in their winter. We enjoyed drinks and a sunset on top of a hotel, then headed to a few bars and restaurants, running into American and European tourists. I was surprised by the open prostitution and drugs around, but brothels are legal in Brazil... Portuguese as a language is interesting but not too difficult to communicate with others if you are polite. We tried hard not to be ignorant Americans, but did have to point to pictures at times when ordering. Also, the local Brazilian beer was not that good. The next day Tim, my roommate, and I woke up early to take a white water rafting tour out in the countryside. It was an hours ride, but saw many favelas on the way out. The rafting tour was neat, as the rapids were mildly tough but fun. The guides were nice and liked to splash us. After rafting by old coffee farms, we went through a jungle area and saw actual monkeys in the wild, pretty crazy. That night we had a required Wardroom function at a high class brazilian steakhouse. The servers kept bringing mounds of different cuts of meat, as much as we could eat. Hanging out with 80 officers got lame, and we took a cab back to the ship to pass out. The next day we got to play real tourist and visit Jesus. A group of four took a cab up Corcovado Mountain to see the famous Cristo Redento (Christ the Redeemer) statue overlooking Rio. Pulling into the city I was able to make out the statue on the peak. Unfortunately for us the clouds were low that day and hung right around the mountain peak, but we got to see Jesus up close, which is not one large chiseled rock, rather a mosaic pieced over a frame. In search of food, we made it down the mountain to Ipanema beach, an area much nicer than Copacabana. At a nice micro-brew pup we ate some fried cheese dish, then had coffee in the local style, instant... not all that good considering they grow the beans everywhere. Maybe Americans are the only ones obsessed with drip coffee. After walking the boardwalk we headed back to the ship for an evening reception for Brazilian Naval officials. While preparing to aide the captain with the evening handing out gifts, I suddenly and violently became ill. Then sick. Something I had out in town had hit me, and my last day in Brazil was spent with the toilet. Eventually I crawled down to medical, who gave me two IV’s to hydrate me and stop my stomach from discharging everything. I was not the only one on the ship to get food poisoning, and we suffered together, though I thought my insides were trying to come out. I was weak for two weeks after that blow.

The Sail Around South America

James has begun to chronicle the story of his trip around South America...and you can find that on our new website at: www.wanderinghokies.com Also, you will be able to see all of his pictures from the trip on our flickr site. All you have to do is click on our flickr stream on the left page of the new site, and it will take you to see all of our pictures.

Enjoy! Let us know what you think of the new page!

P-Goula to Rio

After several months of toil and hard work in humid, sticky Pascagoula, Mississippi the USS MAKIN ISLAND finally got underway.  She was only two years overdue and overbudget at 2.5 Billion taxdollars, but in reality she is a pretty cool ship. I am on a hybrid ship that saves a bunch of gas.  So, we headed south into the Gulf of Mexico and finally into the Caribbean.



The water turned a cobalt blue and was very nice, but I was rarely outside. The ship offered a deal where you could pay to not shave. I tried my hand at facial hair and surprised myself with a decent beard. A few officers even shaved theirs into a fu man shu... eventually we transited the entire Caribbean, passed through the windward islands and entered the Atlantic.

We turned south along Brazil’s Atlantic coast and saw the opening of the Amazon River (not really, but the captain was excited to tell us somewhere to our right was the largest river basin in the world).

The other highlight was a traditional crossing the line ceremony where King Neptune and Davy Jones embarked the ship when we passed the equator to allow us to enter their domain.   Other than that, our daily routine settled down and we rarely saw the sun. Three short weeks found us in the southern hemisphere in the middle of winter outside of Guanabara Bay, Brazil.

Welcoming the Makin Island Home

After seven long months of being apart, the day was at last approaching when James, along with 1000 other sailors, would be sailing into San Diego to finally be reunited with their families (and most importantly, me!).  I spent homecoming eve at the beach with another Navy wife, enjoying the sun and sharing our excitement that our husbands were coming home!  The bond between Navy wives is a special one, since most married couples don’t know what it’s like to be away from each other for so long.  Without a few of my amazing Navy wife friends, I would have never made it through those long months alone.  I couldn’t sleep the night before homecoming, and I decided to go into work for a little while, just to keep me from going crazy.  As I was driving over the Coronado Bridge, I saw on the distant horizon the outline of the Makin Island, and all the emotions that have been buried inside of me over the last seven months exploded.  I was overjoyed and tears started to swell in my eyes.  I was swept up in emotions, and had to quickly remind myself that I was driving on a bridge 200 feet about the water.  This was just the first of many emotional breakdowns of the day. As Ashley and I stood on the pier watching the tip of the ship break into view, we both broke into tears.  As the tears poured down our faces, we just held each other and watched the massive gray shipped lined with white uniforms creep towards us.  I was so happy to have her there with me that day, as the waiting was unbearable, and the few hours we had to wait felt like lifetimes.  Despite everyone kind of looking the same in uniform, I was quickly able to spot James.  It has been amazing to have him home, and I am so thankful that he is now here most of the time.  He still has to leave for a week or two now and then, and has to be on duty once a week, but it’s much better than months!  Now we are just enjoying being together in Southern California, and taking advantage of our evenings and weekends together.