Hello from Virginia!!

Hey everyone!! We are getting settled here in Virginia and starting to explore. Last weekend we went to the National Arboretum in D.C. It was great and we only saw about a third of it. It is rather large and has a bonsai museum there too. It was also free! So we will definitely be going back to see the other two thirds.

Matt was rather excited about these plants, they are carnivorous plants that eat insects! There was a variety of them including the Venus Fly Trap.

We only got to see the columns from a distance because some band was doing a photo shoot. They look cool though, not certain what they are for or anything.

Ahhh. The wonderful bonsai museum It was rather extensive with collections from Japan, China and North America.
This tree is over three hundred years old. It dates back to 1625!

And is from Japan. Wow this tree is older than our country.

This is a Japanese White Pine. We saw many trees that were

a hundred or more years old.

This bonsai was created by the father of North American bonsai,

unfortunately we forgot to get his name.

It is amazing how they can train the roots of trees to grow around rocks like this one.

We also went to a wine festival this past weekend. Many Virginia wineries

were featured at this festival that is one of the largest wine festivals on the East Coast.

Here I was a volunteer at one of the seminars about aromas in wine and learning

to distinguish what my personal preferences were in wine.

You can only do so much wine tasting then it just becomes too much! There were well over 100 wineries there and when you set your glass down and ask to start with their white wines they will take you through their whole wine list if you let them. After visiting a few booths like that and you can guess my head may have been spinning!

We have arrived!!

Yea! We made it safely to Fairfax, VA on Friday afternoon. It was a long 14 hour drive, we drove straight through the night on Thursday and were completely exhausted. Neither one of us slept much between driving shifts. I crashed at 6 on friday evening until 6 on saturday morning!

Our apartment is HUGE! Two bedrooms 1.5 baths. They only furnish one bedroom and our living space is huge too, so our apartment looks quite sparse, but thats okay. We have tons of room if anyone wants to visit, just bring a blow up mattress, we have space for at least 3 or four of them, crazy! We also have the top floor this time, which is great until we started climbing all the stairs to move in, but we made it. We have new carpet which is great, because our last apartment had really dirty and stained carpet. We also have this huge balcony. Overall much nicer place, less convenient, W/D not in apartment, bummer we have been very spoiled! And no garage so we have to lug our bikes up and down and do not have a place to store our trailer. The office won't let us just keep it in the parking lot either. I guess we'll have to find a storage unit somewhere. The area feels pretty safe, which was a huge concern of ours while trying to find housing. I think it will be nice place overall.



So our next adventure begins...

On Friday morning the hospital in virginia calls... to tell me that the unit I interviewed with is closing and they are going to place me in one of the other critical areas. At first they told me I would be placed in the neurosurgical ICU, (I don't have much neuro experience, I started sweating). They said that they are willing to train me. I took a deep breath and said I am very teachable and love to learn, but I will need a lot of support from the staff. I called my nurse recruiter right away and left her a frantic message... then the hospital calls back and oops they had me mixed up with another traveller and will be placing me in the coronary care unit. A sigh of relief I have a lot more cardiac experience in comparison to neuro experience. Okay so I get to work in the cardiaic ICU in their heart hospital! Wow and they are willing to train me, and work with me. I am a little overwhelmed and excited, I love cardiac nursing and can't believe I get this opportunity to work in such a large teaching hospital to learn it all. So it begins on Monday...

Community Memorial

For those of you who really question if I was working in Milwaukee,

I snapped some pics last week!!

Community Memorial was a great assignment, I will miss the team on nights at the MCU!

Holy Grounds

This is a great article written about the coffee shop that Matt volunteered at this summer. If you have time check it out!

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=794199

Getting ready to go...

We bought a trailer earlier this summer to aid us in our moving, we built sides for it last week and it is going to work great for us. Matt is very proud of our trailer. He spent a lot of time researching and finding a good used trailer, (because they are very expensive), had our hitch installed and now built the sides for it!

Our Final weekend in Milwaukee!!

Our last weekend turned out to be very relaxing, however many of our plans got rained out! Bummer. Friday we had dinner at Greg and Marcia's and we taught them Settlers of Catan. Saturday we had planned on going to this international kite festival down at the lakefront, I was super excited about this... however it poured all day and we ended up just going to the movies. We saw Dark Knight, love that movie btw! So we had hoped that the rain would hold off on Sunday so that we could still hit the kites, nope, it rained and was cold all day. We ended up having a great morning at church though and then relaxed at home in the afternoon and evening.

For as many pictures as we have taken, we neglected to get pictures of some of the wonderful people we met along the way. Sunday at church we said our good byes to Greg and Katy, as well as Lindsey and Ryan, bittersweet. Greg and Marcia have to see us one more time yet, so no good byes to them yet! Not to mention we have their vacuum this week... When we left KC we hadn't planned on needing much in the way of a vacuum so we just brought this little battery powered Dirt Devil, then we acquired our cats and they require a little more in a vacuum, so we are borrowing one for our deep clean right before moving out.


So Monday morning we tried to go down to the Lakefront to watch the sunrise, it was something we said we would do before we left... Well we aren't the best morning risers so we waited until the last weekend... it rained all weekend. We tried on Monday morning but it was just blue clouds, not much of a sunrise... Oh well, mayebe we should just stick with sunsets! So after that we went to Holy Grounds the coffee shop at church and said some more good byes.

This is Vera, she is the woman in charge of the Holy Grounds ministry and the woman who taught Matt how to become a barista!

This was a random picture at church on Sunday.


Playing games and eating great food on Friday at Greg and Marcias' place!

New City, New Hair!

Okay so I am a girl and even the slightest change in hair can be exciting and important to me!

I cut and highlighted my hair and added bangs. This was just after I got back from the salon so it will probably never look that good again, which is why I wanted to take a picture...

My hair curls much better with this cut, my hair is much lighter with the added layers.

The Harley museum!

So Harley Davidson is all over Milwaukee, at first we thought that is interesting, then we learned that this is where the company started and things started to make a lot of sense then. We also learned that the only Harley museum in the world just opened this summer in Milwaukee, so we took an afternoon trip to check it out.

I thought this sign was funny, I never thought of a car as a cage...
The engine room, where they tore down a bike and let you learn hands on how it runs.

This was a delivery bike. They advertised that this was the

cheapest form of motorized transportation in its day.

One of the first bikes. The company actually started in 1903 in a shed in Milwaukee.

The first bikes looked like bicycles with motors on them. The company name comes from the names of the brothers and friends who started the company. There was four of them.

Here the bikes are starting to get more upgraded.

By the 1920's these bikes were being shipped

all over the world, were being bought and made special for the army, mail

services, and other companies that needed to travel aroun.

This was a cool racing bike. They had special bikes for every use. There were also these hill racer bikes. It was quite a sport in it's day where they would race straight up hills and mountains.
This was a custom designed bike actually built by another person other than
the company. It was a tandem bike.

At the end of the museum they had multiple bikes old and new that you can sit on for photo ops and they had a big theatre in there to help you feel like you are on the open road. We took lots of pics, vote for your favorite bike!

Matt's Hot wannabe biker chic!
Me on the mini bike

Who knew Harley ever made scooters!! That seems to be heresy for them...
This was an army bike probably from WWI, I am reaching for my gun to fight the enemies...
Mr. Hot Stuff!!


Super Mr. Hot Stuff! Who always looks so good in blue.

So we have been debating about learning to ride a motorcycle. The whole thing started when Matt went to test drive these scooters, he sold me on the practical aspects of them. Then before we knew it we are talking about motorcyles and checking out every bike that we come across... Any suggestions out there, should be get a bike? A scooter or motorcycle or none. For me, the appeal of it sounds enticing and fun, but I also come from the ICU environment where we call motorcycles organ donors, cringe... We would love to hear what you think!

AHHHH!!! So much is going on...

So we have a lot of updating to do. The past couple of weeks have been stressful, but it is all coming together for our next assignment. Tuesday we accepted a contract in Fairfax, VA, part of Washington DC. I woke up on Tuesday thinking we may be going to AZ or NM, then by the end of the day had accepted a contract in VA. So it is a roller coaster in this business and there is still lots to learn!! Then all the details housing, insurance, moving, safety in DC, travelling with the cats (or not), nursing licensure in VA, paperwork and certifications, and in the midst of it all we celebrated our anniversary in Door County on Labor Day weekend! More to come in just a second...

Door County Funness!

We spent Labor Day weekend and our 4th wedding anniversary in Door County.

A popular vacation spot for the Wisconsin and the midwest. It is basically a penninsula just north of Green Bay that juts out into Lake Michigan.

It takes about an hour to drive the length of the penninsula.

We stayed in Sturgeon Bay area in a little B&B.

Our first day we went to a county park that has these great
bluffs and little caves formed from the waves of Lake Michigan










Door county has a lot of orchards and wineries. Door county is known for it's cherries, so we tried some amazing cherry wine. The cherry flavor really pops in your mouth I really hadn't had anything like it before. Here is Matt after a little too much free wine tasting, hehe!
Door County has a lot of Maritime museums and businesses. There was this shipbuilding company across the street from our B&B and we were in awe of the huge ships they were working on.

Door County has miles of coast line, so we spent our evenings watching the sunset.


Or not watching it so much!


There are lots of little islands off the coast, we visited Washington Island which is the largest one and the only one that is developed. We rode a ferry over and took our bikes to explore. The island was only 5 miles in diameter.

This was School House Beach, very pretty beach, but a little rocky!

This restaurant was in Sister Bay. Much of Door county was settled by scandanavian immigrants. So there is a lot Swedish, Norwegian and Iceland culture and imports. There is also a lot of artists and galleries in Door County wtih unique gifts and art.

This Swedish restaurant has a grass roof with goats on top that just wander and graze on the roof! The food was just okay, but the atmosphere was fun.


Sister Bay was having a Marina festival that night so after dinner we walked across the street and watched the sunset and then settled in for some fireworks in the bay.

Door county has many light houses to tour.

This was our balcony off our room at the B&B

Our last day we went to Penninsula State Park. They have some great bike paths and hiking paths. I think it was the best bike path I have rode. It was through the forest and along the coast. I would say it ranks with my favorite bike path in Frisco, CO.

We rode through the park to a very popular beach at

Nicolet bay and took a swim. It was a very relaxing day!


This was our last trip for this assignment and it was a good one! We have just a couple of things left to do and then we will be moving on to explore D.C.!!