Joshua Tree

Joshua Trees for those of you who have never seen them (I was included until last weekend)

We went on our first camping trip together this past weekend.  Some of our friends are big campers and invited some of us less “campy” people to join.  We went to Joshua Tree which ended up only being a little over an hour away.  We don’t even own a tent, so luckily our friends had an extra. We got there Friday night and had s’mores and hung out by the bonfire.  Saturday we got up and went climbing in the park.  This was only my second time climbing real rocks and Jeff’s first time.  We had great weather and enjoyed just getting away.  You would not believe the beautiful stars we could actually see!

Our little tent!

S'mores

All cuddled up to stay warm.

Me and Rachel

Part of the group

The packed car with the VanWickle's and our stuff.

Halloween Night

We had 2 important stops for Halloween night. 1^st: $2 burritos from Chipotle {success}. 2^nd Cajon Street.  This street is famous in our area for going all out on Halloween and it didn’t disappoint! There were bands, magicians, tons of people, and crazy decorations! We even went through a maze at one house. It was so fun to see a whole street completely decked out for Halloween.

Inside the maze!

Trunk or Treat

This weekend has been filled with Halloween decorating! Friday night we set up the church for the Halloween party, Saturday morning we went and set up Halloween decorations for these older people that have mega decorations (hopefully pictures to follow on Halloween), and then we had the actual Halloween part on Saturday night. Busy, busy, busy. But the party turned out super cute!

Dead trees with Halloween ornaments and little paper pumpkins on the tables.

We made lots of banners with Halloween sayings. They were so cute.

Seattle Superfan!

Close-up of the tree. We had bats, pumpkins, ghost, mummies, spiders, cats, and spider webs hanging on them.

Dust Much?

Kind of random, but Jeff dropped his pen while he was studying in our kitchen and it appeared to be floating in the air. We were so fascinated that I took a picture. You can see the spider web in the picture, but we couldn't see it when we were just looking at it. Needless to say, Jeff whipped out the vacuum and sucked up all the spiderwebs!

Shady Oaks

We attended our first Murder Mystery Dinner with a bunch of fellow dental students. It was fun but a learning experience since it was almost everyone's first time doing it. Jeff was the Mayor and I was a boutique owner. We had yummy halloween treats and had fun pretending to be our characters.

Everyone in character.

Just smiling.

Our friends Amanda and Tyler. Amanda was the killer and Tyler was the Sheriff.

So cute.

Our characters. Ya I was black, nbd.

Mission Trip to Honduras

We were so blessed to get to spend a week in Honduras with Jeff's school doing dental work last week! We were in the city of Valle de Angelos.  It is about 30 minutes from Tegucigalpa, which is where we flew in to.  Come to find out, its one of the most dangerous airports in the world because of the short runway and it is sandwiched between two mountains, so if you don't get up fast enough you will run straight into the mountain!  Luckily, we had no problems.  We stayed in the Adventist Hospital and our clinic was right down the hill from us.  By clinic, I mean the empty building that they put some chairs in.  Since we arrived on the weekend, we got to go to church there! It was such a humbling experience and the speakers were so good. (Jeff was so sweet to translate for me.) I think about 80% of the people came and shook our hands and welcomed us. We also got to go ziplining on the weekend! We had some really funny guides that made it so much fun.  They even let us do some tricks (see pictures below).

During the week, we woke up and ate breakfast at the hospital.  Then we would start at the clinic around 8:30 or 9.  We wanted to start earlier but they wouldn't serve breakfast any earlier because they had a Spanish Bible study in the morning.. Anyway. We had 3 restorative chairs for fillings, 2 chairs for extractions, and then 2 hygienist cleaning teeth on a wooden bench.  Another wife and I assisted and ran the sterilization. Unfortunately the chairs we had didn't go low enough to sit, so we stood all day long in really awkward positions.  Jeff ended up pulling over 40 teeth and did about 20 fillings, not to shabby since before this trip he had only done a filling and no extractions!  It was such a great learning experience for both of us and we felt so good getting to serve the people.  At night we either ate at the hospital or went and tried some local restaurants.  We were so tired at night that we seriously just sat in this lounge area.  Just sat.  Somehow we got like 9 hours of sleep every night and still felt exhausted.  But so worth it!

Friday we packed up all of our equipment and headed to Tegucigalpa.  We stayed in this nice hotel so that we would be close to the airport in the morning.  We got to see the temple being built on our way to the airport!  We had been told all these scary stories about Honduras, but we had no problems at all! We had fun and got to make some great friends and learned a ton!

Apple Picking

This weekend we ventured out to Oak Glen to go apple picking! Our friend Erika has been dying to go and finally convinced everyone to go with her.  It was a really cute farm complete with many types of apples, raspberries, blackberries, knife throwing, archery, and cider making.  It was a very warm day, but we managed to pick a bunch of yummy apples that later made a delicious apple crisp.