We Got Married!

August 26th 2006.
More pics will soon be up on our flickr website. . .

WE WON!!!!!!!!!

EBAY link: http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=018&item=280018602892&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWN%3AIT&rd=1

We just won Junk2Funk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It is ours!!!!

VW Campmobile!?

Will it be ours? We are only 35 minutes away from finding out if we will win the auction for our Junk2Funk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh the nervousness. . . . . excitement!!!!!!!!! It cannot be contained!!!!!!!!

BBQ

Today was the Army BBQ at North Riverside and it was fun. Cotto brought a roasted pig! Mmmm. . . And tonight we are going swing dancing at the Willowbrook Ballroom to practice for our wedding next Saturday since our first dance will be swing.
Speaking of BBQs, on Friday we have our rehersal BBQ the day before our wedding, and suddenly it looks like about 25 people will show up!! We gotta have a lot of food, so we're going for simple stuff like brats, burgers, potato salad, watermelon, and of course beer!
And to go with the flow, this pic was our BBQ in Sardinia this past May.

Update

Well, today is Saturday, and Romy has a drill weekend. Tonight I wanted to do the high ropes course at the YMCA, but that is propbably not going to happen since Romy will do something else with army friends. Oh well.
I am exercising everyday for about an hour to an hour and half, so that is good, and I'm really watching what I eat, so its not that much. Today though, I just really don't feel like going to the gym since I woke up so late. Maybe I will go running outside instead.
PS: This pic to the right is a traditional wooden house in Siberia. We took the picture in Irkutsk. They have detailed woodwork around the windows, and they like to paint them bright colors. It probably looks so nice in the snow!

Trying to exercise!

Now that we are back, and its less than two weeks til our wedding, I am trying to exercise a lot so that I can drop a few extra pounds!
Its tough! I am trying to go for an hour and a half each day to the gym, plus go rock climbing.

Back in the US of A!

Now we are back, and getting back to our old schedules and getting ready for school.

But, tomorrow we might be going camping for a long weekend to the Dunes.

This pic is us sleeping at the LaGuardia airport in NYC. We had no other accomodation due to very high prices, so we decided to get comfortable on the floor, in a quiet hallway leading to the parking garage. Nobody bothered us! But we did get a little cold!

Back from the USSR!!

Hi everybody! We are now out of Russia, with no problems! The train ride back was really really long, and kind of stuffy and hot! We were in platzkart (3rd class). We had a bed out in the hallway, like every person crammed in the train car. But it was really cheap and the people were nice around us so it was okay! We arrived in Moscow at 4:40 am, so it was hard waking up. Then it rained all day in Moscow, so we couldnt walk around the city. We ended up going straight to the Mocow airport, and found something to do for 12 hours before our flight left. When we finally got to London (because of the time changes) we realized we had been awake for 24 hours already, and we still had problems ahead. We got in sooo late that we just made the last train out of the airport to the city center, but once we got to the center there were no more connecting metros to Bayswater (where our hostel is). Oh no! So we had to walk around for about an hour to get there, in the middle of the night. But it was safe and okay, and we finally got to the hostel, and we were sooooo happy to find that it was a good hostel and not shitty like the other London hostel we had before!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So now we just ate breakfast, and in 15 minutes we are going to Heathrow airport to fly back to the U. S. of A.
See you tomorrow!

Old pics again

For some reason we cant upload the new pics we took in Russia, so we only have Finland ones. . .

This is Jenn and Romy while we were hiking on the Aland islands. It was cold!!!! In Siberia, it is very very hot right now. About 90 degrees F.

Building the GBT

We just came back from our adventure on lake Baikal. The lake was really really nice, and hopefully we will post some pics soon.
We starting hiking towards the lake on an older trail that followed a river. While we hiked, we stopped to fix up the trail, and we even reinforced a bridge. There were a lot of mosquitos and the land was swampy! We even saw a Siberian bear (same as a Grizzly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Good thing it was really scared, and ran away!!!!!!!!! We made camps every 15 km or so, and cooked over a big fire.
We finally got to the lake after 6 days, and it was soooo nice! The water was about the same temp as Lake Michigan, but the water was much cleaner, and less waves. There were mountains surrounding us all around the bay we were in. We camped on the beach for 5 days, next to a "party barge" which played music and had a "banya," which is a Russian sauna. They put water on the hot rocks, and then steam birch branches and beat you with it! IT WAS SOOOOOOO HOT! Then you jump out of the boat into Baikal, which is nice! We went twice. On our way back we took a boat ride to the island which has the Nerpas, the only fresh water seal in the world! They were funny looking, and kept trying to hit and scratch each other. After that we took a boat to the hot springs. Then we went back to a village to sleep in a backyard, and finally made it back to Ulan Ude yesterday.
We are going on the train now all the way to Moscow. It will take 4 days, and we are not sure if we will have internet until London, which we'll be in on the 6th of August.
NOBODY has to pick us up from Midway. We will just take the L-train.