Beautiful Luray

Last weekend we took a trip to beautiful Luray, Virginia. I completed my third Triathlon there and we visited the Luray Caverns. The Triathlon was an Olympic (International) distance event. This is the same distance as the first Triathlon I competed in. I improved my overall time and performance in all three legs of the race (swimming, biking, and running), so I was very pleased with this. The swim was in the 80 degree water of Lake Arrowhead. It was so nice swimming in such warm water. I improved significantly in the swim portion which I was really happy about because I find that to be my overall weakest part of the sport of Triathlon. I finished the race -- which consisted of a 1500 meter swim (about .9 miles), a 26 mile bike ride, and a 6 mile run -- in 2 hours and 47 minutes. This was 4 minutes faster than the last Olympic distance Triathlon which means a lot since this was a much more difficult course.











After the Triathlon we visited Luray caverns. This place had been on our list of things to do for quite a while. Luray caverns is a huge underground cave with unimaginable stalactites and stalagmites. There is no way to describe these natural wonders. Pictures won't do justice either, but I will post some of them anyway. Overall, it was a fantastic way to end our summer.

Tenth Century

I completed my tenth century bike ride today in a personal best 5 hours and 17 minutes. This was 8 minutes faster than my previous best century bike ride. Even though I only improved by 8 minutes, I feel that this was actually quite a good showing on my part because there was some tough humidity today and the humidity has a way of making it very difficult to do long endurance workouts. This was the first long ride I had gone on since researching and making some significant changes to my method of staying fueled and just in terms of nutrition in general. I think the single most important thing I added to my nutrition was Electrolyte supplemental pills called 'Endurolytes.' They contain the full spectrum of Electrolytes and helped a lot. I took one or two every half hour or so and they prevented any muscle cramping and helped me keep going. In case you're wondering, this supplement is way better than just drinking a sports drink to get electrolytes.

Here We Go Again!

These pictures are from our last weekend of summer break (see blog post below). There will be another blog post however just about this weekend. I wanted to at least put a couple pictures up though.

Today is Sunday, the first day of the week. As such, it is technically a work week, and this work week happens to be our first week back to work. In other words, summer break is over. Michelle and I report back to our schools tomorrow morning -- bright and early (well...at least compared to how late we've been sleeping in the past couple months). We have had a great summer. We are so thankful to have jobs that have allowed us to relax, travel, and have lots and lots of fun! We have spent the last week gearing up for the upcoming school year. This week, we have taken care of a lot of things we needed to do and will hopefully be well-prepared for work now and not have to worry about very many other things other than reaclimating to working full-time now.

We went to the temple this week and had an amazing experience there. We know this experience will fortify us for a time and help us feel good spiritually during the upcoming year.

We took care of some important banking and financial issues.

We made a huge and well-planned out trip to Costco. Gotta love the deals and bargains on staples like fresh produce, cheese and milk there; but we can't seem to leave that place without spending a lot of money! At any rate, we are all well supplied on food and groceries!

I stocked up on books on tape from the library for my commute to and from work on my bike.

We organized and cleaned our apartment from top to bottom. We also took care of massive congestion in our walk-in pantry. This led us to the discovery of some moldy rotten boxes at the bottom of the pantry. Luckily maintenance was able to clean the carpet of our apartment and they even actually replaced the carpet and padding in the pantry.

Michelle and I are both done with grad school! Michelle has been done for a few months, but I had to take some online classes over the summer. They were way more time-consuming than I had anticipated, but the important thing is that I got good grades and am now also done with grad school. We are both certified teachers with masters degrees in teaching/education. Since we are going into our third year of teaching, we no longer will have to worry about any Teach For America matters.

Bottom line: we made through all those obstacles and came out victorious! We should be able to just focus on teaching this year!

And finally, this weekend we had one last hurrah and went on an incredible road trip to Luray, Virginia. We went our good friend and neighbor Ryan Bessey. We stayed in a hotel on Friday night and in the morning Ryan and I competed in the Luray International Olympic distance Triathlon. We both did fantastic! I set a new personal best in all the legs of the race, especially swimming which is my toughest part to improve on time so I was really happy about that. We finished off the day by visiting Luray Caverns. This is an underground cave full of unbelievable rock formations, stalactites, and stalagmites. Words do not even come close to doing this natural wonder justice, and really neither do pictures.

We will be posting pictures from the Triathlon and Luray Caverns shortly, as this wonderful final weekend of summer deserves its own blogpost.

Idaho vacation

Chad and I went to see my family in Idaho for a week this summer. It was so much fun, we wish we had planned to stay quite a bit longer. We went whitewater rafting, camping, four-wheeling, hiking, played at the park, watched movies, went to our favorite restaurant (Texas Road House), and just hung out. Here's a little more about our trip. We can't wait to go again! I love Idaho. There is so much to do there (and of course there's family). Hopefully we will live there someday.

We went camping in the mountains for 2 days and 1 night. Our campsite was great - private, gorgeous, along a stream, and close to the reservoir so we could swim.


Chad had a lot of fun collecting wood for our fire. It looks like he is collecting wood for a few days, but really he was collecting wood for just one more fire before we left. lol. He just kept finding "good" pieces of wood he couldn't leave behind. As he drove the wood down the hill to the campground, most of it fell off - of course, but we still had enough for a great campfire! Thanks Chad!

Chad did some open water swimming practice in the reservoir. He went about a mile. It was pretty cold!

We made yummy s'mores with reeses in the middle.

My parents made lots of amazing food in the dutch oven - potatoes, pork, chicken, and dessert. We ate so well on this camping trip! We roasted some of the chicken over the fire like hot dogs. It was amazing! I'm definitely doing that next time I go camping. Chad and I don't even eat this good at home. Thanks mom! In the background of this picture you can see us playing cards. We played a lot of scum while we relaxed around the campfire.

Chad made a "refrigerator" in the stream by our campground by making a circle of rocks. We kept our watermelon and drinks cold in there the whole time. The stream was also very convenient for washing all of our dishes. There is supposed to be real gold flecks in this stream too, but I never found any. I guess the plastic kitchen spoon I used to "pan" for gold just wasn't good enough.

Mom, Cara, and I cooking dinner.

We had a lot of fun four-wheeling for several hours on our trip as well. The scenery on the trails was gorgeous!

Our next (or actually first) fun adventure in Idaho was white water rafting. We did a 17-mile raft trip. The first 1 1/2 hours of it is pretty calm, so we relaxed, enjoyed the weather, and ate lunch on the raft. During the next two hours on the river there are a lot more rapids. The big rapids are my favorite. The biggest on this river are class 4. Chad doesn't like the rapids where you could fall out any second. He prefers the ones just a little smaller - big enough to be a lot of fun and challenging to get through, but small enough you probably won't fall out. I prefer the adrenaline rush from the bigger, riskier rapids. In fact, on some of the rapids, I liked to try going through them standing up to "up" the risk. Luckily, this river has both kinds of rapids.

Here's most of our group.

Scott and Dad

Chad was the only one willing to brave the freezing water and jump in during the calm parts of the float trip. Luckily, no one ever fell in.

Later in the week we hiked to a waterfall my family found basically in the middle of nowhere. It was gorgeous! The waterfall was pretty powerful, so when I was walking toward it and then standing behind it I got soaked - even from about 10 feet back.

To hike to the falls you had to hike down a cliff that pretty much goes straight down. This picture is taken from an angle, so you can't tell how steep it is, but trust me - it's steep! When we were at the top and my dad said this is where we would be hiking down I seriously thought he was kidding. It looked impossible to "hike" down instead of fall or slide down it. Actually, in order to get down we had to do a little of both. I kept sliding down so I had to hold my dad's hand as he led me down. We both slid a few times and had to catch each other. It was a challenging climb, but it was well worth it. The waterfall was gorgeous!

Here is the waterfall from a distance. It's at the back left of the picture.

Here are more waterfall pictures. Chad is crossing a log about 10 feet over the river in order to get back to the car. The bottom two pictures are of us behind the waterfall.