Part Three- Siauliai, Trakai, and last day in Vilnius

The next morning was Sunday, and we got up super early to catch the train out to Siauliai (though still not early enough apparently because we were only about 45 seconds away from missing it!) Siauliai (pronounced Shaw-lay) was were Lewis served as the branch president back on his mission. It was a two hour train ride through beautiful country side and we even saw quite a few deer!
It rained on and off most of the time we were in Europe, and when we got to Siauliai everything was so fresh and green! We walked a few minutes to the church building, which was actually an apartment because the ward is so small there. the Sacrament meeting was held in a small room with only about 20 members there.

We got to watch a new sister be confirmed and Lewis and I were asked to bear our testimonies. After church we hung out with Lewis' good friend Skaiste and her husband Auntie and their two kids. There was also a young woman there named Usta who was baptized about a year ago but lives quite far from Siauliai. Every Friday she takes a bus to Siauliai and stays with Skaiste for the weekend so she can attend seminary on Saturday and church on Sunday, then Sunday night she takes a train back to her home. She is only 15 years old and it was so amazing to see such faith from someone so young! What was I even doing when I was 15?!
We ate lunch at Skaiste's parents house and then went to visit the Hill of Crosses.

The story with the hill of crosses as I understand it is that while Lithuania was being occupied by Russia they were prohibited from worshiping Christ. Lithuanians would sneak to this hill and put up crosses in a peaceful act of defiance against the Russian rule. Over the years it has become a symbol of "hope, peace, love, and sacrifice" and is covered by over 100,000 crosses.
After that we picked up some juice boxes and bandelas (pastries), and visited a park by the lake and this awesome park up in the woods. The pine trees there had this amazing dark red bark and it was so beautiful there!

So generous with sharing his pine cones! 

I am crazy for the wild Lilacs there! 

When we got back to Vilnius we ate the most amazing pizza ever at a place called Cili Pizza. And it was so cheap! We probably ate better for cheaper in Lithuania then we did the whole rest of our trip. The next morning we took a bus to Trakai. Trakai is a castle built on an island in the middle of a lake, but while we were walking there we got a bit nosey and found another castle that was not as well advertised as the other one. That meant we got to climb around on the walls and play with the trebushe!

 Since we got to Lithuania I noticed that all the women seemed to be carrying around fresh cut flowers (probably to put on their tables at home) but I felt a little left out. Lewis ducked into a flower booth when I wasn't looking and bought me a rose. :)
Here is the island castle.

When we got back to Vilnius we climbed to Gedimines Pilies (a castle overlooking Vilnius) and watched a storm roll in.

A view of St. Annes from above

 We could see a wall of rain coming toward us as we ran down the hill, trying not to break our ankles on the cobblestones. We barely made it under the balcony of a church before it started pouring. We were stranded there with quite a few other people who were trying to stay dry. We noticed a couple of teenage girls dancing in the rain in the square next to the church. They danced their way around the square and then down the middle of the street. It was fun to see such youthful energy!

When it finally stopped raining we met up with Brigita and Valerija, two girls that were in the Siauliai ward when Lewis was serving there. We decided to break the rules a bit and get desert before dinner. We went to this amazing gelato place and then dinner at a nice restaurant and talked the whole time about life, Valerija's upcoming mission, and the perils of wearing skirts or shorts in the winter :)

Lewis and I spent a long time walking around Vilnius and talking about life.

Part Two- Vilnius

The thing about Lithuanians is that... They are all so stinkin' Beautiful! It's hard to quite understand until you go there but to put it in perspective, the normal, average Lithuanian woman is like, an 8 or a 9 on an American scale. And it's not just my opinion, you can Google it. It's a thing.
Anyway, I was marveling about that phenomenon while we were walking down Pilies street the next morning on our way to get some crepes at this tiny cafe. Which were amazing.
The church celebration went from Friday night to all day Saturday. It was one long blur of amazing people, hugs, speakers, performances, and dancing!

 After the celebration we went back to Pilies street to eat at a place called Forto Dvaras. This place was built in the 1300's (older than most of the stuff we saw in Rome) and was actually a place that the knights would eat at back in medieval times! The most awesome thing about it is that it wasn't touristy at all. It was all just very matter-of-fact. We ate traditional Lithuanian dishes, Juodus Duonas and Cepelinai. Cepelinai was so interesting, basically what they do is extract all the liquid from potatoes, leaving kind of a potato flour, and then take the starch from the liquid they extracted earlier and mix it back into the flour, making a sort of dough mixture. Then they form the balls of dough into a football shape, stuff it with meat or cheese, and then pressure cook it. It tasted amazing, but it was just such a new texture! Like, really Really thick heavy jello. We also had potato soup in a black bread bowl that you can see in the picture.

After eating we took a walk around Old Town. We saw St. Annes Cathedral (probably the most amazing building I have ever seen), we wandered around ancient cobblestone streets and eventually found ourselves at the top of a hill next to a medieval guard tower overlooking the city. On the way back I got to sample a Kebab, which is not a skewer of meat, it's actually a burrito type thing with cabbage and lamb meat.

At the end of the night we heard this girl performing on the street. It's dark in the video but you can still hear her beautiful voice!

Part One- Riga and Vilnius

We have been scheming about this trip for over a year and it finally happened! I wanted remember every detail of the trip so I kept a journal that I will be kind of transferring over to the blog so I won't ever loose it! Here is a brief overview;
We visited Latvia, Lithuania, Switzerland, Venice, Rome, Sicily, and Germany (in that order) and we traveled by just about every means possible! We had a Eurorail pass that we used to get most places and we booked all of the placed we stayed via AirBnb

After almost 25 strait hours of travel, we landed in Riga, Latvia. Lina, a sister that Lewis taught on his mission in Lithuania, let us stay with her and her family. The next morning we got up and ate museli and yogurt and Lina showed us around Riga Old Town. Her two year old son cracked us up! His mom speaks Lithuanian, English, and Latvian, His dad speaks Latvian, English and Russian, and we heard Sebastian speak Lithuanian, Latvian, English, and Russian! We were laughing at how many languages he was speaking when he surprised us by yelling Hola! Hola! Hola! Spanish?! That kid is going to be a genius.

Riga was unbelievably beautiful. The winding cobblestone streets and old colorful buildings were like something from a movie. I wish we had more time there, because after a few short hours we had to hop on a bus to Vilnius, Lithuania. It was incredible to experience getting on a bus in one country, driving for three hours and getting off in an entirely new country where everyone looked different and spoke a different language! The Lithuanian countryside was beautiful, with green and yellow rolling hills and aspen and pine forests. On our trip I talked to a couple locals who told me that Lithuanians are "close to the earth." They have a culture of gardening, farming, mushroom hunting, and are just generally very close to nature. I noticed in most of the homes we visited they had incorporated plants into their decor and almost all of them had fresh cut flowers on the table. On the bus to Vilnius we saw a man and a wife tilling their farm with a horse drawn plow. I never thought I would see that in my life and it made me happy :)

Part of the reason we timed our trip the way we did was so that we could attend the LDS churches 20 year celebration of the country being open for missionary work. After getting into Vilnius, finding the apartment we were staying in, and relearning the bus system, we got to the church a little late but just in time for Lewis to bear his testimony along with others who have served their missions in Lithuania. Though I didn't understand most of what was said, the Spirit was almost overpowering and the warmth and love from the members there is something that I won't ever forget.
It was really fun to be in a country where American's weren't considered "stupid tourists." Everyone we met was super excited to meet us and LOVED that Lewis was an American who could speak Lithuanian! On the bus ride back from the church activity a bunch of girls on a field trip from Belarus got so excited when they found out we were American they took a picture of us and asked us to speak English for them :)
That night we ate Lithuanian pizza and kepta duona, which is black bread that has been fried and you dip it in cheese. It was very different, but good.
Stay tuned for more about our trip :)

Lost...

At long last... I finished our Florida movie!

In case you hadn't heard about our little adventure last Thanksgiving, I'll get you up to speed.
We had a couple Buddy passes (You can fly standby with one of these magical things) and they were about to expire. Lewis suggested that we check out Key West (because, you know, why not?) so we planned on spending a couple laid back days in the Florida Keys around Thanksgiving weekend. A couple days later Lewis came to me and said he had found a Cuban guy who would let us rent his huge  Sea Cat while we were there. We found this island called Dry Tortugas that had this awesome fort and great snorkeling and lots of sea turtles! Then we saw that they would let people camp there and, well, that sounded awesome so we decided to do it.
We jumped on a plane late on the 27th of November and got into Miami in the early hours of the 28th. We rented a car and drove about four hours to Long Key where we had rented a room on AirBNB. We got a few hours of sleep and then drove over to the place where we were going to rent the boat. We stopped and grabbed some sandwiches and chatted with a few Conchs (born and raised locals). They were both fishers and when we told them what we were planning on doing one of them said, "Wow. That's bad A. The water's supposed to be kinda rough.. But you could probably make it." That should have been our first clue.
We got to the guy's house who owned the boat and had his son do the translating because he didn't speak english. We drove the boat to a place where we could get gas and as we were pulling away the person working there pled with us, "Please don't go out. You're not going to like it. The water is *crappy* today, seriously!" That was our second clue, but we were pretty confident. (Or maybe naive?)
The first little bit was ok. It was pretty chilly, the wind was biting, and the waves were pretty choppy. The Keys are just one long chain of islands that continue pretty much unbroken for quite a ways. We stuck pretty close to shore which shielded us from the really huge waves and blocked a lot of the wind. But after Key West there is a channel about ten miles wide that wouldn't shelter us from the wind or the waves. Guys, that was crazy. The waves were between 6- 8 feet tall! I was bouncing around the boat while Lewis was holding on for dear life. We made it past the channel, bruised and exhausted, just in time to hear the coast guard come on and order a small craft advisory. We had only about an hour of sunlight left and it was another two hours at least to Dry Tortugas. We found a little island in the Wildlife Preserve that we could spend the night on and go the rest of the way to Dry Tortugas in the morning. What we didn't know was that we pulled in right at high tide, so when we woke up the next morning at low tide our boat was sitting
on
the
beach.
We tried super hard to push/dig it out, but to no avail. And the sand there isn't really sand. It's itty bitty pieces of broken coral, so it had the same effect as shards of glass when we tried to dig through it with our bare hands. Lewis' poor arms looked like he had stuck them down a garbage disposal :( We were kinda bummed that we wouldn't be able to make it to Dry Tortugas, but then we realized... That we were LITERALLY Stranded On A Desert Island and that the only responsible thing to do now was to make a survivor-type home video.
Enjoy!

A Blank Slate

It is 01/01/2013!
Most years I get so excited for Christmas that I almost forget about New Years. But New Years has always held a special place in my heart. One of my favorite things in the world is a brand new notebook. The possibilites are endless what you can do with a hundred sheets of pristine, white paper! It's a blank slate, a new start, and a place where all of your ideas can just sort of flow out onto the paper and nothing is impossible. I get that same feeling around New Years time. A whole year is just rolled out in front of you and you have all the power in the world to decide what it's going to be like and what you are going to do. I love making resolutions and always sit down (with a brand new notebook) and make a list of all of the things I want to accomplish, and how I plan on doing it. It feels magical to have so much control over my goals and I hope I am not the only one who feels this way about the new year!

You might have noticed that we have not been doing great on keeping up this blog. Things just got a little too crazy with school and work for us to keep all of you in computer-land updated. That does not mean that we have stopped having adventures, it just means we havent been telling you about them... Anyways, we have some pretty good stories coming up but they are going to be out of order.. Just FYI. But here is a sneak peek.

We spent Christmas and New Years eve in Utah again this year. It's been so great hanging out with family and friends! Last night to welcome in the new year we lit lanterns provided by LaDena and sent them flying into the night sky. After that Mark toasted to "living extraordinarily." It was a very inspirational thought that I will always remember!

Happy New Year! Make some memories!

Catch Up

We feel bad for neglecting our little blog-journal. Our vacation in August totally threw off our schedule! Anyways, I know from experience with previous journals that playing catch up is hard. I just recently went back in one of my journals and read and example of this very thing! 

"Dear Journal,

Wow. It's been a while. Like, three years and two months. Well, let me try to catch up a little. 

In April my family and I drove down to Blanding.. 

Hold on I have to go eat dinner. Back in a minute!"

And then another two years went by before I picked it up again. 

Suffice it to say, I will keep this brief, and painless. 

In August we had our first Anniversary. It was amazingly special! Lewis took me to Herman Park where he gifted me a lock with our names inscribed into it with the dates, "August 6- Eternity." We followed a tradition that is pretty popular in Europe and is starting to get traction in the US. We locked the lock onto the bridge and then threw the keys into the water. Then Lewis took me to a Brazilian steak house where you can eat as much meat as you want and it is all to die for! He knows me way too well :) 

A week later we headed out to Utah to spend time with friends and family and to see Aleah get married!!! The week was a wonderful blur of good food, good weather, and good company! The wedding (and especially the bride!) were beautiful and we are so happy for Aleah and our new brother-in-law Shay! 

That night we spent the night in Salt Lake with Jade so we could catch a super early flight to San Francisco! We spent a day in the bay, then drove to Yosemite and spent two days in the park. Then we drove over and spent two days with our good friends Patrick and Danielle in Monterey! We decided that day that Monterey is like, our favorite place on earth. Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the trip. 

It was a really great adventure! 

Since then we have been keeping busy! I started a new semester and Lewis has been working as hard as ever. Lewis had his birthday a few weeks ago and we celebrated by cooking up some steaks on the portable grill that I got him! The weather it noticeably cooler and we hope it stays that way so we can spend a lot more time outside!