San Diego Getaway - UPDATED

05May14 - UPDATE added three pictures, including the mystery picture at end of post.

I'm consistently bad at consistency. It's been a while since I've put anything on here except Bible and faith related stuff. So, I'm going to catch up on just a few of the major events that have happened recently. It won't take long... we live in Altus, Oklahoma.

Candi and I took a trip to San Diego at the end of January. It was an pretty awesome. My wonderful Mom came down to visit and stay with the kids. I think she even kept up with some of their school work while we were gone.

We were originally planned on traveling to New York to combine some time together with the wedding of two of my friends who I met in Korea. The weather got bad and would have eliminated half the reason for going so about an hour before we were supposed to leave we changed our plans to head to the other coast.

Here are some pictures from our trip.

I upgraded our fuel efficient wheels for one of my favorite cars ever... FYI, the new Mini is not a fuel efficient car.

Some other friends of ours just took a trip to Florida and they upgraded to a Camaro, I think. I guess I have a different sense of "cool." :-)

Of course, food took priority number one each day so our activities were pretty much worked around wherever we decided we wanted to eat!

Thai Pizza!

First bowl of authentic ramen since leaving the Land of the Rising Sun in 2005.

This is the first time we have been to Sea World without our children and honestly we had a blast!

We spent a few hours on the U.S.S. Midway. Pretty amazing. My Dad spent time in the Navy working on aircraft carriers so it was neat to get a glimpse of how his service compared to mine. The highlight of that day actually came after leaving the boat when I had a homeless man pee in a garbage  can right in front of me. Not all highlights are sunshine and roses.

Our trip was full of a bunch of other food, meeting interesting people, and doing, well, pretty much whatever we darn well pleased. And it was 75% with a light breeze the whole time. I hope God sends me to minister to people in San Diego after I retire.

I was going to add a picture of the sunset as we flew back to Dallas, but I couldn't find that. It was really pretty - you should have seen it.

*UPDATE - I found the picture!*

July 4th, 2011

On the 4th of July weekend we traveled to Enid, OK, which is kind of unusual because it's not much different than Altus... still Oklahoma.  Enid however is a bit bigger and so they have their own Home Depot, their own Starbucks, and even though we didn't visit it I'm pretty sure they had a Dairy Queen somewhere in town.

Of course the only thing that could get us to Enid is dear friends. 


This just happened to be some friends that we were stationed in Japan with.  Between the two of our families there were five young ladies and two young men.  Within minutes of being in their house they had managed to drag a hose out, attach it to a toy slide, lay the end of the slide on a tarp and cover the tarp with dish soap. 

                                       Shablam! Insto-matic water park!




Shortly after, we went for a walk by the "pond."  That turned out to be a water hazard on the city golf course.  It was still a nice walk.

The definition of trust.

For memory's sake, this is the tree by which I ate my first ant - a surprisingly enjoyable citrus flavor.

Where's Waldo?

The second day was full of guy stuff.   

The fish didn't bite.  They were just plain scared.

 We walked a quarter mile across a lake (which only put us in three feet deep water) and laid out a trot line.  I was quickly education that it's not used to catch "trot." 

The rest of the afternoon was filled with the pictures below.






I'm proud to say that the boys are a pretty natural shot. 





 Christian nailed a bottle from about 25 feet.  Those rabbits on the base golf course need to be on guard.
 

Wyatt successfully shot my sunglasses somewhere in the range of 15 feet (they were on the bottle... not on me).

A pretty much unforgettable weekend. Thanks Phillips'!

Coming out in the wash

Here are some things that went wrong during our vacation to the land of 10,000 lakes:
1. woke up an hour and a half later than we should have to make our plane to Minnesota
2. there weren't any Harley's available to rent for anniversary ride
3. we lost Nori's DS
4. we lost Candi's wallet
5. we lost Dale's sunglasses and sweatshirt
6. the pool was in bad shape the Friday before the Sunday Wing-a-Ding

But...we made our plane, two bikes became available and the ride was awesome, we found the DS and the wallet, and the pool was great the day of the party (I wish I had pics of the three performing amigos!)

I ended up finding my sun glasses in the Target "glasses" section and I have plenty of other sweatshirts. All in all, it was a great experience for our kids to see that patience, peace and faith are much better than stressing and striving (not to mention that it was good for God to teach Candi and I that, too).

By the way, the list of things that were great about our vacation is too large to write here. I miss and love you, my family.

Happiest Place on Earth!!!

I suppose I could be accused of selling out (again?), and this time to the megacorp' Disney, but clearly it was like the happiest place on earth. Observe.

And everywhere is better with monkeys:

Jedi Training Video #3

Here's part 2... you'll have to listen closely to hear what the Jedi Master says. It's hilarious!

Jedi Training #2

This is part one of the funniest video. It was too big to upload all at once so I split the video in half.

Jedi Trainig #1

Jedi Master's Noria, Chris'tian Ess, and Wy Att

Behold, the hope of the Rebellion's next generation:

Vacation pics - Day 2

This was Disney Day 1. We met Travis and Kristi +4 and Don and Patty +1 at the gate and on we went to fun! It was a great time for sure. I was thankful for the crash course that Wendy had given four years prior. It really helped know how to navigate.