Ashy's turn...

After driving 7 1/2 hours, ashley decided that I was done driving and that it was her turn.

We have driven 427.3 miles with a trip top speed of 71 miles per hour. We're somewhere in illinois and have another 370 miles of driving left today. We are actually doing better then expected.

Roadtrip breakfast...

Patrick and I headed out shortly after 5 this morning to Utah. Here we are enjoying breakfast. Really though we did each have half a muffin, although the muffin was white chocolate raspberry. We've also opened all of our snacks and candy to sample them.

Apartment walkthrough?

This is ashley and I waiting for a member of the maintenance team to come to our apartment to do our walkthrough before we check out. They are 21 minutes late.

Update ... We called the apartment office and it the first question they asked was, " are you moving out?" Unfortunately, I've called on two occasions to confirm our appointment. Bummer.

Momma Flynn's visit...

In July Patrick's mom came to visit us! Our plan was to pack as many unique Michigan places in as possible.

We headed up to Frankenmuth and started with the Christmas extravaganza that is Bronner's!

Here we are by the Cheese Haus. We walked around town sampling fudge, nuts, and cheese.

Linda loved the bridge over the river.

 

Linda wanted to visit some graves of relatives that were in the area. So after Frakenmuth we headed to Saginaw. We couldn't find the grave we were looking for but enjoyed walking around anyways.

 

We tried grave searching another day and were successful! We had searched the entire cemetery and were about to give up and then we found it!

The cemetery where we found the grave.

 We watched The Wizard of Oz at the Redford theater.

 We took a tour of Meadow Brook Mansion which is on my school's campus.

We also got to go inside the playhouse on Meadow Brook. It is a little house built 2/3's scale.

At The Polish Village Cafe in Hamtramck.

 We walked around Cranbrook.

 I enjoyed the diamond pattern to the flower beds in this garden.

 Us exploring the Asian Garden.

 The owls by the science museum, we almost forgot to stop and see them.

 We made a trip to Kirtland, Ohio to visit some church historical sites. We took a tour of the Kirtland Temple to start with.

Then we went to visit the sites that our church offered a tour of. Here we are in front of the Witney store. We all enjoyed being in an area where so many important things happened for our church.  

We loved our visit with Linda and having her all to ourselves for almost a whole week! We are so glad she was able to come.

Picked up a few back to school necessities...

Before heading out to Utah in a few days, Ashley and I decided there were a few things we still needed. A week ago I sold the apple desktop computer on craigslist. After a lot of research we decided another pc laptop was best. After even more research I found a deal on one at, of all places, Best Buy!  The price on the laptop was good enough that we would have bought it alone but when we found out that microsoft was giving away free xbox's with a purchase of a pc laptop, we weren't going to refuse. We decided why stop with a new laptop and xbox so we bought a new TV to go with them. From what I learned, BYU's MBA program is supposed to consume all of my time/life for the next 8 months. So we view the TV has Ashley's replacement or substitute for me.
Really though, we are very excited to be moving on to another stage of life in a few days!

Birthday Fun...

I turned 25 this year and my birthday was awesome! Because my birthday fell on a Monday we decided we would do most of the celebrating the Saturday before.

Now I took my nursing licensing test earlier in the week and knew that I would find out my results on Saturday morning. I hoped that I would be able to hold myself together if I didn't pass so I could still have a fun day. Thankfully I passed and finding out that I was a Registered Nurse definitely started things off right. Patrick and I went to the movies to see the Hunger Games and we took my parents out to dinner for pizza. After dinner we enjoyed the best cake. Well before my birthday Patrick asked me what kind of cake I wanted and I told him that I wanted chocolate with chocolate frosting. I later changed to just chocolate cake. A few days later he asked me what my favorite Ben and Jerry's ice cream was, to which I replied Phish Food. If you haven't tried Phish Food you're missing out. It's chocolate ice cream with swirls of caramel and marshmallow with dark chocolate fish packed inside. From this he decided he was going to make me a Phish Food cake. So we enjoyed a chocolate cake filled with alternating layers of caramel Patrick made and marshmallow fluff, topped with dark chocolate ganache he also made. It was amazing!

On Monday Patrick and I both worked and then we had a relaxing dinner of my choice, Buffalo Wild Wings. Yes I know that was an odd choice but I recently discovered that I love boneless wings and these ones are crunchy and awesome. So we got some to go and had a picnic in the living room.

It was a great birthday!

Redford Theatre with Mom...

Mom, Ashley, and I waiting for the organ to begin before our show. This week's feature film... the original Wizard of Oz!!

This post made possible by our new Samsung Galaxy S3. Btw this phone is AWESOME!!!

Bummer can't figure out how to flip the pic.