1. A cool type of ski lift. Instead of the chair lift at every hill they had these at some of the runs. At the bottom of the hill you follow the next one through just like you do on the chair lift to catch the next one. You catch it behind you and skiers catch it and sit on one of the the sides of the "T" , while snowboarders sit with one of the "T"sides inbetween their legs. Its on a big bunge cord and your own weight keeps you down at ground level and it just pulls you along on your skis or your board. When its time to get off you just let go and it springs itself back up top. It is really cool becuase this way you can get off the left at anytime of the hill. Most of the time right at the top/end of a lift its really congested and busy, so you can get off just before. Or if you like this one part of the hill you can get off right there. BUT the bad part about it is that if youre not paying attention one of the sides of the "T" can hook on your jacket and keep pulling you. and if youre not prepared for it like i was you can start to freak out and panic for a few seconds. I threw my ski poles and fought for my life it seemed like! haha. it really wouldnt have dont anything except pull me highter up the hill. but i paniced! david was laughing his pants off at me! im sure i would have done the same if i were watching myself!

2. Me at the top view point with the Alps behind me.

3. Davids favorite greasey potatoe meat dinner

4. Me and Davy at the view point.

5. Us our first day in Germany. On the train from Munich to Garmisch.

1. At the top of Zugspitze our 4th (last day) when God opened up the sky for us to see all of the Alp in the beautiful sun! (dont be fooled though, just because it is sunny does NOT mean it was warm)2. One of the MANY MANY shots I have of Davids snow filled beard. This is day 2 of skiing when it was like 30 or 40 feet of visibility when we were skiing, and in some parts skiing in powder up to over my knees deep!
3. Our cute little humble family owned hotel. We were the very last room on the left on the 2nd floor.
4. Us on our first day of skiing/snowboarding on Zugspitze.
5. Davids beard had collected little ice beads on his little individual strands of hair! I just about laughed my way down the mountain rolling after I saw this! They were perfect little round beads!


...........PART TWO of our vacation.
Well I think I left off in my last blog with us getting on the train heading down to Rome. But before I do I have to take a few seconds and talk about the food in Germany. Every meal for the 12 days of our vacation we just ATE and ATE and ATE! I think our 2 most used phrases on our vacation were "I CANT wait to eat!" and "I CANT wait to go to bed!". Our hotel in Garmisch had a good breakfast (not anywhere as good as the hotel in Italy, but ill get to that later). So we ate ALOT at breakfast knowing that we would need all the energy we could get knowing we would be skiing for the rest of the day. So then came lunch. Lunch was of course way over due no matter what time we ate it seemed like after skiing our brains out all morning. And of course lots of meat and sausages in Germany. They also had more pasta than i was expecting. But my favorite dish in Germany was their soup! REALLY REALLY good soup there! And there is nothing better than chowing down on something HOT after being out in the snow all day. So I ate a lot of soups for lunch and dinner while David ate more of the meats and sausages. Davids favorite dish was this potatoes and meat skillet dinner. It had like 3 different types and flavors of sausages fried up in this garlic butter together with some pork and cow steaks and bacon and then potatoes thrown in. Of course the whole thing was swimming in a VERY good amount of grease but it was pretty darn good if i may say so!
OK back to the story. Day 4 of our trip was waking up to the sun, going up to the top of Zugspitze and taking the tram to the top view point and seeing all the beauty! We didnt go skiing our last day in Germany because we didnt have a hotel to go back to and get showered and packed again since we checked out of our hotel at 11. So we found some lockers at the train station big enough for all of our bags and went on exploring more around the town before getting on the train at 6. We left Garmisch and went to Munich, Germany where we caught our train to Rome. I slept fine on the train in our room, but David didn’t do so well. All night I was thinking about what it was going to look like waking up and looking out into Italy, after being in Alaska for the last year and especially the last 2 days where it was nothing but snow. It was just as I pictured it. You know how when you see movies of Italy it just seems gold there? I don’t know how to explain it, but I just imagined the air and the sun and the earth just to look gold. And when I did wake up and pulled up the blinds in our room that’s EXACTLY what I saw! It was so pretty!!!! Pretty rolling hills, farm houses surrounded by olive and grape vineyards (not sure which). And every half mile or so you would see some sort of old ancient building somehow still standing after all of these hundreds of years! It was so neat to see these old structures still standing, covered in vines and moss. It was colder in Italy than what I thought it was going to be, but it was still warmer than anything we’ve been used to since Sept. It was around 50 or so the whole time, but it was a crispy chilly 50. We arrived in Rome around 9 and had some time to kill until we caught our next train to Napoli (Naples). We didn’t have enough time in between to go see any sights in Rome, plus we had no idea where we were in comparison to anything else in that city so we didn’t wanna get too far and not be able to make our way back in time for our train. We arrived in Napoli around noon and caught what they call the Circumvesuviana train to Sorrento. It was a train that took you out of town and around Mt. Vesuviana (Vesuvius). BOY was that something! While waiting for our train we got time to witness how the normal loading and unloading of one of those city trains work. It only remains stopped for less than a minute, just long enough for the doors to open and close again pretty much. IT IS NOTHING like how America runs things. There are no ‘lines to get on’, there is no ‘stepping to the side’ until all the people are off, and then the people who want on file-in in a nice orderly fashion. Picture this….. Really think hard back to your last war action packed movie. Ok………… It is minutes until the beginning of a battle. There is a huge valley or field where on opposite sides the good guys and bad guys stand. Both sides are standing firm, waiting for their commander to finish his inspiring and motivating speech and to give the signal of throwing up his sword and saying something like “CHARGE!” or “FOR THE KING AND FOR FREEDOM!” and then it starts. Slow motion takes over the scene and both sides are tearing forwards towards each other. With their war cries, matching their mean hard tough faces they howl and yell for a more intimidating look. They are coming closer and closer to meeting. They begin to see the faces of individual men, and pick out the one they want to fight first. And then it happens. The camera is set at ground level, and the slow motion is shut off just as they reach inches away from meeting. Horses and men and arrows, and swords, and axes and clubs meet in one huge collision. Only the toughest, quickest, hardest, most cunning make it out alive. Its either you or them. No time for hesitation. No time to think, just time to move. One faltering foot step and you join the rest of the lifeless mess on the battlefield. …………………AND THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE!!! ……………Ok I might have exaggerated a little bit, BUT I promise it was close to being exactly like this! There are no-polite moves to the side, waiting for the moms with children to get on first, helping that little old lady with the cane down the first step, a gentleman standing up to give the ladies his seat. NONE of that. Just everyone going at the exact same time. So with witnessing a few in action we knew just what to do if we wanted to make it out alive. ………………………….. TO BE CONTINUED…………………………………

T*W*N*A*E
6. Weren’t hamburgers invented in Germany? We didn’t see one on any menu while we were there!
7. Open alcohol containers are allowed on government trains.
8. Dogs can pretty much go anywhere unless it is posted.
9. There were a lot of stray cats and dogs in Italy.
10. If you order ‘cheese bread’ in Europe you aren’t getting hot oven toasted cheese melting deliciousness. You get a plain slice of bread with a few slices of old cheese ontop.
11. People DO NOT respect lines.

Garmisch pictures

1. Reintal Gorge. This is where the guy took us on our sleigh ride! IT WAS WAY PRETTY!

2. Our sleigh ride. It was way romantic and pretty. Our horses were way pretty!

3. Pretty horses, and who we like to call the "escape horses" Like 2.2 seconds after we took this picture all 2 or 3 of them broke the fence and ran out! haha it was kinda funny!

4. Not a very good picture but the only one i have downloaded onto the computer at the moment. The left really pointy mountain is Alpspitze (alps-spits) and the one all the way on the right is Zugspitze (Zoog-spits) or what i like to call zug-spite. I am a horrible pretender to know how to speak german! hehe. The one on the right is actually taller, it just looks smaller becuase it is a little farther away. but we went skiing on both of those!

-these arent the best of the pictures dont worry, there are WAY MORE to come! i just dont have all 300 of them loaded yet onto our computer! Ill get more of the prettier ones. Isnt that horse one tho way pretty!?? its like a professional picture! minus the silly incorrect date in the corner.

Anyways, we are home and glad to be home even though we had so much fun! We missed our little furry puppy children WAAAAAAAAY more than we thought! I coudln't imagine having real children and taking long vacations away from home like some people do! We were only gone 12 days, I just dont know how those families can do the 2 weeks on 2 weeks off slope/platform thing either! AHHH!! May God bless them! Anyways, glad to be back! -More pics to come-

PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES

!!WE ARE HOME!!!
Everyone said that the flight/traveling to get home would seem the longest, and boy were they right! Last November we received a VERY nice ‘surprise check’ from our mortgage bank, informing us that the Sep. 07 – Oct. 08 year they had been overcharging us with silly fees and whatnot. So they ended up paying us back for all the money they over charged us with, AND it ended up lowering our mortgage monthly payment by almost 3 hundred bucks! YAHOO!! With the way the worlds money is going these days, every little bit counts! SO what would most responsible adults do when they come into such money? -Put that money back into their house? –Payoff vehicles? – Savings? !!!!!!!!!! NO !!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!! VACATION!!!!!! –so like the responsible adults that we are we went on a vacation! :) After 2 weeks of trying to decide where we wanted to go we ended up deciding on two places. Germany and Italy. Germany for the ski/snowboarding, and Italy for the sun and obvious beauty. I did all the planning myself. –Well that would just be a lie, it was ALL Gods work! From every bit of planning from the smallest detail to the biggest, it was all him leading me to the good deals, good ideas, and timing!! I don’t know how people can plan things like this and even bigger events without going to HIM first!? …
We end on Garmisch, Germany and Sorrento Italy. Two VERY VERY VEEEEEEERY different places in the world! Such opposite sites but equally beautiful! Garmisch was full of snow, especially up at the top of Zugspitze (Zoog-spits). Up at 2962 Meters it is the TOP of Germany! It is impossible to explain the beauty of the Alps! All I can say is that you LITTERALY SEE NOTHING but mountains AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE in almost all 360degrees! We were in Garmisch for 3 nights and 4 days! We both decided that this is some place we want to come back to some day. Day 1 was BEAUTIFUL, sunny and clear! We got into town around noon or so, and went walking around town and ate lunch. This is a skiing, winter sports, outdoors town so they have every sort of winter festivities imaginable available. From designated HUGE sledging (sledding) hills, Hiking trails, horse drawn sleigh rides (which was very sweet and romantic I must add) and all sorts of Olympic event/arenas. We had such high hopes with what we wanted to accomplish on day one but that’s about as far as we made with with 2 days of traveling on planes and trains behind us. At 4PM we both conked-out for the rest of the night in what we then tried to call a ‘nap’. Probably could enter it into the Guinness book of world records for the longest nap lasting a whopping 13 HOURS! God I think just prepared my body for this trip and knew that if I were to wake up like normal at home at the same time as david, our trip wouldn’t have been as pleasant! My husband-like the rest of the worlds husbands, start to get a little annoyed with the amount of time or should I say years that is sometimes taken by their wives to get ready in the morning! This at home is no big deal but when we only have so much time in each day to see the things and do the things we want, every minute is valuable. SO I was awake EVERY DAY of our trip and even this morning back home, NO LATER than 5:30 without an alarm and ready to go no later than 6:45ish. –So thank you LORD for the early bird you brought out in me! The second and third day were completely SNOWED OUT! It made skiing and snowboarding fun and like home! The resort we went to was HUGE! The sad part about the snow was that since it was low clouds and foggy we couldn’t go up to the view point at the top of the mountain and see the Alps. Looking at the weather we were seeing it just seemed IMPOSSBILE for it to be able to clear up in less than 24 hours so we could really experience the Alps. But we went on that 3rd day praying that if it was Gods will for us to see the top he would do what he thought would need to be done. So when I woke up at 5:30 like normal to get ready I was totally expecting to look out when it got light enough and see more clouds full of snow, but I woke up to the BEAUTIFUL sight of silhouetted mountains in front of sun rise on a CLEAR, CLOUDLESS DAY!!!! IT WAS SO AMAZING!!!!!! David was still asleep by the time I got out of the shower and looked through the window at 6ish and said “WHOA!!!!!!!!! DAVID LOOK! GOOD ANSWERED OUR PRAYERS! THERE IS NOT ONE CLOUD IN THE WHOLE SKY!” I get way to excited way to easy, so this was like HUGE to me! It was so cool to see God answer our prayers in such a way! NOTHING is too great for the creator of life. He is the only one who can move mountains, or in our case -a snow storm over night! The 4th day we went back up to the top of Zugspitze and took the tram all the way up to the tippiest top and saw the most beautiful sight of the mountains ever! The pictures I know will just not capture the real deal!
Day four we traveled down to Sorrento Italy overnight on a train. I definitely think one the best purchases I made on this trip was the sleeper car on the train down. 12 hours to get to Rome from Munich, Germany and I just think we would have just fallen apart if we had tried to get a restful night’s sleep sitting up in a normal seat with all our bags, worrying about who we were sitting by, if someone was going to steal a bag, or just be a creep and watch us OR worse while we were sleeping. So instead I paid a nice little ‘pretty penny’ to get a sleeper car. It was two little bunk beds with a sink and locking door, and we got a breakfast in the morning! It was nice having our little bit of first class experience!
Im going to have to cut off my vacation story short here. It’s obviously going to take a few ‘spot’ entries to get all our trip in here, and I still know ill forget things. But it was AMAZING!! We LOVED every bit of our trip, but by day 11 we were READY to come back to an English speaking, friendly, big-car driving, line-respecting, smiling, yes please-no thank you, polite AMERICA! (DON’T even get me started on the line-respecting thing!) David and I took a list of all the things we noticed (good and bad) about Europe that is different from America, so at the end of each next couple of blogs I wanna share then. It kind of reminds me of “THE RED BOOK” idea from our ladies bible study (Alicia knows what I am talking about) so anyways here are a few.

THINGS WE NOTICED ABOUT EUROPE , or what I want to start calling the (T*W*N*A*E)

1. To turn on your T.V. you have to push power, THEN channel to get the screen on.
2. EVERYONE, and I mean EVERYONE wears scarfs. Men, women, young and old- EVERYONE!
3. Soda Pop is sweeter and less carbonated.
4. THIS ONE IS FOR ALICIA & DAN :) “Gas or no gas?” is the normal question when you are ordering water at a restaurant.
5. There are no FREE refills at restaurants on your drinks.
6. ALL the pizza in Italy was flat/thin crust! Not just good crust, but THE BEST CRUST-but flat! We thought it would be thick and fluffy! Wouldn’t you??

A Reno Story for you.

So since i started this new blogspot i was looking at my old posts on MYSPACE. and since there are people out here who dont visit the 'MYSPACE" world (good for you, youre realllly not missing out on much of anything...) -I thought i would post some of those funny stories. This one is called JUDGING PEOPLE. It was my first blog on my new 'myspace' at the time. It seams so long ago when i try and remember my 'reno days' ... as horrible as most of my experiences were there, i did have some good ones. the few good ones made up for all the bad ones... I just re-read this story and i laughed now just as hard as i did when i first wrote this like 4 years ago! (AHHHHH i cant believe its been this long!)
**********************************

So, here are the facts. I have no car. Its cold outside. I needed food... So with knowing all that i walked to walgreens, i dont know its like 2 miles away or so.. so anyways, b4 i left i wanted to make sure that half way there i wasnt going to freeze my but off.. so i layerd up really good.. topping it all off with a hat (the kind with earflaps)...and lets just say that if i tripped, i would be rolling down the sidewalk, and people would be yelling "OHH WHOA! look at that rolling marshmallow!!!" haha, so you get the picture??.. ok,so i get to the store, i do my business and then i realize i have WAY to much stuff to carry back.. and with my luck, id be the fat little marshmallow girl chasing her rolling junk down the sidewalk... so i was quick to my feet and called jenna to give me a ride home... while im waiting, i noticed people were looking at me different.... then i thought about my situation... im outside the store, sitting on a fern pot, blowing into my hands to keep warm, sitting behind my cart full of what little groceries i could afford...... the classic "POOR HOBO" look!! then realizing this i noticed how all the people were looking at me.. IF only they knew the real me!! i am just poor!! not a hobo!! i cant afford a flippin car!! it was sad to think that they thought i was some lowlife or something!!! i felt the need to tell random people passing by "ohh yeah, BTW, im not really this poor.. my freinds picking me up, so dont worry about me" but then, im sure it would just make me look crazy!! and theres nothing worse than a CRAZY RAMBLING HOBO!! right!??? so i was forced to do nothing.. i just sat there with a sad look on my face knowing that everyone around me was thinking i was a hobo.... it was quite sad!!! then when jenna pulled up i was super happy! like she was my one-way ticket on my way out of hobo life!

SO what is the moral of this story??? dont judge hobos!! i could me me next time! :)

-jenni darr

My First One

So EVERYONE I know has one of these things now, well actually it really is only 2, but I dont get out as much as I used too, so that pretty much concludes my 'everyone'. I thought I would get one becuase I have alot of stuff on my mind ALL THE TIME and not enough people I think are interested in listening to me for hours on end, which I can easily do with my eyes closed, one arm tied behind my back while standing on my head! Before I do any real stuff on here lets get down to business....... I think you should all know two things about what you might run into while reading my blog.....

NUMERO UNO- Unlike one friend who BTW is nothing short of a brilliant writer, I can not GUARANTEE you an amazing written piece of work. Everything I write could, can, and WILL come from anywhere, or anything! I am a VERY random person.....

NUMERO DOS- Both of my two friends who have these things and write them often are grammical-wizards and I am most certainly not. And I just proved it to you because I am pretty sure I just made up the word, 'grammical'. And even if i didnt, I dont know enough about grammar and sentence structure to know the difference! I just dont care about proper punctuation, the correct spelling of things, or where any of these " ' ; :() things go. .....Do they go before or after the s ?.. Is this where I double the consonant?...is it your-you're -your's or yours, I-Iam-I'm-I am?... E-L or is it L-E? I dont like to waste my time with silly things like this so I just dont. Plus I type faster when I dont think about making things upper case.... For the sake of it being my first blog post I have caps-ed all my 'I's, but dont think you will be so lucky later on! I like to use alot of excessive periods ............ and exclamations ! and I use the star* alot in my writing. WHY? I dont know. Well except for the *'s I just think those are cute and should be used as often as possible.

So anyways I just thought I would let you know all this. I know there are some people who are out there who go crazy over grammar. So maybe I am just doing you a favor, just look at this as your DOL (daily oral language) lesson like when we were back in school. Feel free to print this out and break out the ol'red teachers editing pen and feel free to go to town!

So now that we got all that out of the way next time you read, hopefuly I will have something worth reading instead of another 'disclaimer' of all my typing faults! hehe. :)