Bye, Bye Seattle.

Our small group's trip to Camano Island our last weekend here.

Well folks, our time in Seattle has come to an end. We’re really going to miss this place and all the friends we’ve made. It’s odd because as sad as we are to leave, we’re just as happy to see everyone back home. August is gonna be a whirlwind of a month, but we have tons of fun things planned!

If you’re wondering what we’ll be up to after August, well, you’re just as clueless as we are. We’ve been saying lots of prayers, having dozens of heart-felt talks, and spending countless hours pondering what’s next. We honestly don’t know. Your guess is as good as ours :). So say a prayer God will reveal to us the next leg of our journey!

We honestly can’t wait to see all of our Atlanta folks! We missed you just a bit. Ok, a lot! We leave in just a couple hours and plan to be back by late Saturday night. It’s about 48 hours of driving in all! We have some fun stops along the way so it shouldn’t be too bad. I foresee lots of singing to bad country songs in our near future, hehe.

Praying for safe travels home,

Justin & Jennifer

That Was One Creepy Dragon.

On Friday afternoon, right after Justin got of work, we packed up the rest of our stuff and hit the road. We had about 6 hours of driving to get to our hotel for the night. That doesn’t sound like much, but I had been packing all day and Justin had been working so we were both already exhausted.

One thing we’ve learned about driving is that it’s SO much better to do it during the day. You miss out on so many amazing things when you drive at night. Not to mention it’s lonely on the roads we drive and can be pretty scary. To prove how creepy it can be….

Around 11pm we were driving through Oregon. It’s pitch black outside and there aren’t many cars on the road. We can barely see the mountains that are surrounding us, but know they’re there based on the curvy, steep roads. This is seriously the middle of no-where.

As we’re driving, all the sudden Justin yells out “look out your window”! I glance up in time to see a GIANT dragon statue right outside my window. It’s even light up with a spot light making it even creepier…as if that was possible. I freaked.

Just when I think it can’t get weirder, we notice a couple of lights in the valley below. It looks like a really small town with just a few houses. I mean maybe 4 or 5 houses at most. Right above the “village”, in a sea of darkness, is a bright circle of light and weird clouds. It was like a giant evil eye of light. Sound weird? Well, it was. I was so freaked out I told Justin to bust a move and get us out of there.

I managed to find a picture of the dragon. I didn’t take it but I found it on the internet. You tell me it wouldn’t weird you out to see that in the middle of no-where at night!

This is during the daytime. Photo borrowed from google images.

As for a picture of the creepy clouds/light, I found something similar. If you look at the pic below you’ll see a circle of clouds. Imagine if you saw that circle, but the rest of the sky was pitch black. Scary, no?

Anyway, we made it to our hotel and crashed for the night. The next morning I think I weirded out the guy at the check-out desk when I asked him if there was a “dragon town” somewhere close by. I tried to explain, but he just keep looking more confused. I guess I’ll always be the “weird dragon girl”. Hehe. We continued on our way and headed for our first stop at the University of Oregon to see, you guessed it, the football stadium. It was pretty stinkin’ nice!

University of Oregon's football stadium.

Our next stop was Oregon State about an hour away. The entrance to their football stadium was so pretty. We ended up circling the whole thing so we got a few great pics.

Oregon State's football stadium.

It turns out that Oregon State was having their spring game. (Random trivia, they make you buy tickets for the game. How strange!?) Justin tried to get the ticket takers (in the right corner of the above photo) to let him in, but no dice. We kept driving around and finally found someone who let Justin sneak in for a few pics.

Oregon State's football stadium.

Oregon State's football stadium.

Oregon State’s campus was also gorgeous. We found an awesome little Hawaiian restaurant that had THE best sauce we’ve ever had. It was like a soy sauce/tariyaki combo that was insanely good. They even had signs in the restaurant saying it was a crime to steal the bottles of sauce! A quick lunch and we were back on the road. And what a beautiful road it was…

While we were driving we saw this gorgeous field of yellow flowers. I wanted a picture of it SO bad. When we realized we would be passing it again to go back to the interstate from campus, I begged Justin to pull over. I’m so glad he did. I think this is my favorite picture I’ve ever taken. It’s definitely getting framed when we get a house! (P.S. I didn’t even photoshop it!)

A few more hours on the road and we made it to Washington. I have to say, the one thing we noticed about the state is all the stunning bridges. As soon as we crossed the state line, we started going over bridges. And then more bridges. Every single one was beautiful.

And of course we saw a couple random things along the way. These giant wind vanes for example.

Finally, after 12 hours of driving, we caught our first glimpse of Seattle! It looked just like we imagined…overcast :).

We’re so excited to explore our new home! Check back tomorrow for pics of our new apartment…

Good-bye, San Francisco.

Our building was the one on the left. We lived off an alley.

Before we “move on” from San Francisco, we thought we’d share what we liked/disliked about the city and what we learned from the month we were there.

San Fran is an incredible city. There is SO much culture there that we really loved. Each neighborhood truly has it’s own personality that’s evident the moment you step foot there. We’re probably biased because we lived in between both, but Chinatown and the Italian neighborhood were our favorites. You actually felt like you were stepping foot in these countries when you went there!

We also loved how beautiful the city was. When you were walking along the top of a hill, you could look down and usually see the water in the distance. We lived near the Bay Bridge and saw the most incredible views just walking down our street. The city was also really clean and had such pretty flowers and trees everywhere you looked.

There was a vibrancy to the city…you always felt like there was something exciting going on. Usually there was :). We loved that. The entire city really felt like an adventure. Coming from laid back San Diego, this was a pretty big difference from what we had known. I think that only being in San Fran for a month made it a bit overwhelming. We don’t do anything small…it’s pretty much go big or go home. Trying to fit in every experience the city had to offer in a month was a bit exhausting.

We managed to do a good job of getting to do as much as we did. We’re plum worn out from such a busy month! Seattle is going to be a nice change of pace. Someone told us that a month in San Fran would be more than enough, and I think we’d have to agree. It’s an awesome city to visit, but we couldn’t live there.

It got frustrating trying to go anywhere. We could never find parking and when we did, it was about 20 min. away. Getting groceries was a huge hassle and walking everywhere got to be tiring. (We did lose weight without trying though!) Those hills are just as big as they look in pictures and walking up them everyday isn’t on our top 10 list :).

The city was also INCREDIBLY expensive. Food, parking, entertainment…all of it was so much money.  Just to go through one toll would be $6! I think we realized just how “relative” our thinking had become when I saw parking for $20 and said, oh that’s not bad at all. Oh, and it was $20 for a few hours. I can’t believe how much our definition of  “expensive” has changed in such little time.

We are really happy that we got to spend a month in the city, but we’re also glad we were just there for a month. We learned a lot about ourselves and how to make small changes in our lifestyle. We learned to live without a dishwasher (*gasp*), washer/dryer, parking spot, nearby grocery store, TiVo, and a quiet place to live (we lived by a REALLY loud bar). We were pretty spoiled in Atlanta and have realized that our life isn’t determined by what we have. We’ve got each other, our health, and this awesome adventure. We learned that things we thought we had to have (like the things listed above) aren’t really necessary. People survive everyday washing dishes by hand, and dangit, we survived too :).

This whole trip has been a learning process. Every place we visit, we pick up a new idea to implement in our life. When you move to a new place, it’s always a great time to make a change. Justin decided to start eating vegetables and once we stepped foot in San Fran, he made the change. A lot of people who are in the same day-to-day rut want to make changes, but there isn’t anything to really jumpstart it. For us, moving to new places had encouraged us to evaluate our lives and our relationship and strive to make them even better as we move along.

We’re really happy that we did this trip. It’s been life changing, and in many cases life awakening for us. San Francisco taught us a lot and we plan to put it into action in Seattle. “Move” with us and start something new in your life that you’ve always wanted to do! Oh, and thanks for following us along the way. It means so much to hear from you guys!

Cruisin’ the Coast

***Please note that 99% of these pictures were taken in our moving car!!***

Saturday morning we were up early to finish packing our car. I don’t know if packing is the right word, it was more like cramming. When you try to fit all of your stuff in a tiny Honda Accord, it gets a little tricky. We managed to get everything in, take a last look around the apartment, and hit the road.

I’m not gonna lie…I did cry a little while we were pulling away. We were both sad. It also didn’t help that Justin played a Train song that I had told him would always remind me of San Diego. The song has nothing to do with a city, but I made the words fit :). It’s a really great song. Listen to it here.

Once we made it out of the city, we realized just how excited we were to explore San Francisco. We know that a part of us will fall in love with every city we visit, so it will always be a little hard to leave. That’s part of the trip though–learning to live in the moment and be joyful in each day we are given.

Our route took us up by Los Angeles, through Malibu and Santa Barbara, and finally to Monterey for the night. We were honestly blown away by how beautiful the drive was. For 80% of the trip we were sandwiched in between the mountains and the ocean. Gorgeous yellow and purple flowers covered the hillsides, grape fields could be seen for miles, and the endless blue ocean followed us the entire way. We decided everyone needs to make this drive at least once in their life. Yes, it’s that amazing.

Along the way we decided to make a couple stops. One of Justin’s favorite things to do is to visit other college campuses. It’s pretty interesting to see how other schools are set up. Our first stop was Pepperdine University in Malibu. We’d both heard it was a gorgeous school tucked in a hill overlooking the ocean and it definitely didn’t disappoint. It wasn’t really a school we could see being a student at–too ritzy for us–but it was beautiful none-the-less.

Our next stop was Santa Barbara. One of our favorite shows, PSYCH, is set in the city so we were excited to see what it was like. We only got to stop for about an hour or so, but we really wished we could have stayed longer. It’s not as big of a city as we had originally thought, but it’s gorgeous. It reminded us of a “downtown Decatur” area set in the mountains–really laid back and cutesy. We made a stop at The University of California at Santa Barbara and decided that we would enroll there in a heartbeat. Where else could you go surfing after class and then go hiking in the mountains the next day??

After a quick lunch, we continued up the coast. From Santa Barbara to Monterey there isn’t much civilization. Imagine being up in the mountains, winding your way for miles and miles. That’s what we did. For about 3 hours. Parts of the drive were a bit scary since you were up so high on cliffs, but it was more gorgeous than anything we had ever seen. We were both in dire need of a bathroom break by the end, and Justin was exhausted from driving such windy roads, but we were both incredibly happy we took this route. We could have taken an interstate that would have gotten us to Monterey about 1 1/2 quicker, but where’s the adventure in that??

My goofy husband "stretching".

We finally made it to Monterey, checked in to our hotel, ate dinner, and crashed for the night. Tomorrow we’ll post our arrival in San Fran!

Your top 10 questions answered.

My mom finally made it here safe and sound! We had a few hiccups in the morning, but after that it was pretty smooth sailing for the rest of the day. I’ll fill you in on what we did a bit later…

Until then, we thought this post was long overdue. Since we decided to go on this trip, tons of you guys have had questions about anything and everything. We decided to take a minute to answer the top 10 questions we’ve gotten. If you have one we didn’t answer, feel free to ask us!

1. What made you decide to take this trip?

(Jennifer): Justin and I were dead set on buying a house this past summer. We had started the house-hunting process, and had  even talked to a mortgage broker and looked at a few houses. In the middle of all this, my Uncle Lee invited us to meet him in New York for a weekend that June. We went, and basically ended up falling in love with the city. We were sitting in the airport on the way home from a whirlwind 2 days, when we looked at each other and said “we could live here”. At the same time. Seriously. It was a God thing. For both of our hearts to be changed so quickly about something so big, it could only be God. You might be asking, “well if you fell for New York, why are you in San Diego”. Good question. We’ll get to that further down…

2. Does either one of you work?

(Justin): I work from home and since my company has employees all over the place (California, Austin, Boston, Atlanta, Costa Rica), it’s not a big deal that I don’t work from an office. I simply sign on to IM and meet via Skype or another internet phone service, so all I need is a computer and the internet. We have budgeted to make sure that we can live and do some of the things we want to with my salary. Jennifer is looking for an internship in interior design so if anyone knows someone out this way who may have a job opening, we’d love to hear about it!

3. If Justin works, what does Jennifer do during the day?

(Jennifer): I’m the official travel planner/cook/cleaner. You would think I would have nice, long, leisurely days…but I don’t! I’m either doing laundry, cooking, researching the next place we’re going, or making travel arrangements for weekend trips. A lot of time is also spent “cataloging” our trip. Uploading/sorting pictures and putting together blog posts takes forever! There’s a lot of background work to make a trip like this happen, and since Justin works, I take that role. I’m also actively looking for design internships and volunteer opportunities in each of the cities we’ll be visiting…

4. How can you afford to do this? Y’all seem to do a lot of stuff and it looks like it all adds up…

(Jennifer): Justin and I are HUGE Dave Ramsey fans. We got on his plan shortly after getting married, and in about 2 years paid off all our student loans and car payments. We’re talking $35,000 paid off. It’s not that we made tons of money (believe me we didn’t!), but we budgeted and lived on way less than we had. We scrimped and saved until we could say we were debt free. Then we kept living on a budget to save as much as we could. We have a good savings in the bank that we don’t touch for any reason, and every part of our trip is budgeted. It may look like we do a lot of stuff, but trust me, we’ve saved for it! (Oh and if you’re interested in hearing more about our story, or Dave Ramsey, PLEASE let us know and we’ll get you his book to read. It’s life changing!)

5. What did you do with all of your stuff? Are you bringing it with you in a U-Haul?

(Justin): We packed up most of our furniture and other possessions and are storing them in Jennifer’s Grandad’s basement. It was completely empty and had plenty of room for our stuff. This helps us save a good amount of money by not having to pay for storage. We fit everything else that we needed into Jennifer’s car. The trunk and back seat were completely packed, but we have everything we need. We wanted to learn to live with less anyway.

6. How are you finding places to live? Do they let you rent for such a short time period?

(Jennifer): We found our current condo using Craigslist. You wouldn’t believe how many people sublet their apartments! We’re making sure to find places that are fully furnished so we don’t have to deal with the hassle of renting furniture. It’s a little different getting used to other people’s stuff, but it hasn’t been as bad as we thought it would be. We do have to start looking early though…we’re already looking now for our next apt in April!

7. What’s your gameplan? Do you have a set travel schedule?

(Jennifer): We do have a tentative schedule, but we’re not 100% set with it. For example, we want to go to San Francisco next, but it’s so expensive we will probably find a place about 3o minutes away. Our idea for the next year is…

Jan to April: San Diego

April to May: San Francisco

May to July: Seattle

July to Nov.: Boston

Nov. to Jan ’11: Austin, TX

Jan.-March ’11: Not sure yet…Suggestions??

March ’11-?: New York

Like I said, we’re not exactly sure of the timeline, but that’s the general idea for what we’re thinking. When we fell in love with New York, we decided there were other cities out there we would love to visit as well. Hence, this plan was born.

8. How long do you plan to be gone?

(Jennifer): Probably a couple of years. After that we’ll move back and stay with family while we look for a house. Then, God willing, kids! If we wait any longer that that to have kids, I’m afraid my mother-in-law will kill us! :)

9. Is it hard being away from all your family and friends?

(Justin): Yes and no. It’s not like when you were back in school and making new friends was pretty easy. We love it out here and love spending time together, but of course we miss the people back home. When I was in school, Jennifer and I didn’t get much time to spend together. Now we see each other all the time and that’s been really great for us. It’s nice being able to take time to focus on just the two of us for a while.

10. What happens if you fall in love with a city? Will you move there permanently?

(Justin): In all likelihood, probably not, at least not just for the city. Only if an incredible opportunity or something came and, even then, we would have to really think about it. Atlanta is still our “home” and we really want to still live around our friends and family. There are things we are really going love about each city (such as the weather and gorgeous views here in San Diego), but we believe that Atlanta is still where we will finally settle down after this great adventure.

Well, there you have it. Questions asked, and questions answered. If you have anything you’ve thought of that you would like to know about, please let us know! We don’t mind sharing :).

J&J