FRIDAY, one more to go

Yesterday*

In the morning La and i went shopping! girl Time! haha.. we went and got her some "mommy" pants (she is due in Sept with a boy). I got two shirts as well. After returning home we all went kayaking, down the St John river!!!! yes! i was so excited!! :) Now this isn't any normal river.. its huge!!! haha The kayaking place is on base.. which was pretty cool cause I've never been on a naval base before. Steve and Rory road together, Elena and I and La and future baby. The day was perfect! Nice weather, calm water, warm water.. and no one else near by. As we headed out I wanted to take off! but Elena insisted we go slow because she was afraid of falling in. Apparently there are manatees in the river but we didn't see any. On our way across we saw some jumping fish and two egrets. And then all of a sudden ( i must have hit the shore line with my boat or my ore) My boat tipped over slightly knocking Elena off and into the water!! ah! she started screaming but her life jacket held her up and i quickly reached down for her rescue! She was fine, just a bit wet. But sadly we lost one of her shoes?!!!? haha one was floating and the other must have been eaten up in shallow sand. As we continued the cool breeze felt awesome. That was about it for the excitement that day. We are dinner and watched "the day the earth stood still" ( i believe that is what it was called).
Friday (today)
I thought yesterday was great.. but today was pretty awesome!! :)
I woke up late for once :) around 815 or so. ( i know that doesn't sound late but when you have two little kids running around at 6am you dint sleep in) Then Steve, Rory and i decided to go for a hike! yay! i love being outdoors :) La and Elena stayed at home to have girl time and ended up going to a garage sale or something. woop woop. So we took off for our hike. It was in Georgia which is about an hour and 20 minutes north of Jacksonville Florida. The swamp/national recreational area was called "Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge". Not only does it have an awesome name "okefenokee" it was awesome! I'll post some pictures when i get home. The drive wasn't bad at all cause Steve and i talked about missionary experiences and he pumped me up for leaving in about 15 days or so :) Once there... We had a choice between about 7 trails. So we decided to drive around and get an idea of what they looked like. (the only sad part about the east coast is ITS FLAT! so hikes are more like long walks) any who.. we passed a lot of trails because they were flat... boring.. and looked like little or no animal sightings. While driving we came upon a beautiful deer in the road which ran away before we got near it. We decided to start our adventure on a hike called "boardwalk". It was a fairly short hike but since we stopped every few minutes to check out the wild life and we had Rory with us.. it took about 2 1/2 hours or so.. haha. It was an awesome experience and we had fun. (i have pictures of all these animals and will post them soon) We saw a funny looking turtle sitting in the middle of the walk way.. his nose was long and looked like a witch. The hike was all on a wooden path on top of a lush-muddy-swamp like ground. OH! and the word Okefenokee means "Land of the Trembling Earth" pretty cool right.. probably due to it's unstable landscaping. Then we saw 4 snakes in the waters below. 3 of them were black snakes unknown to its real name but they were pretty cool... and the last one was a brown one that Steve spotted and said it looked like a wolf snake i believe (which is apparently aggressive and venomous) yikes! There were dragonflies everywhere! and i mean EVERYWHERE! of every color.. green.. orange.. blue mixed etc.. and they were big. We saw spiders everywhere too.. big and small... a few really large water spiders and one with this crazy white patch in the middle of his web.. check out the pic later. We watched a few cute frogs and we even found an owl. The owl was the coolest because it was right up in our face! He was pretty but his eyes were creepy!! the way it blinked and every once in a while winked and gave us this evil eye stare!! night mares!!!! haha.. but i got a few good shots and some camera recordings of it. Oh and its wing span while flying away.. so beautiful :) We didn't get to see any alligators :( but we did get to see a pair of eyes peering from the water.. so we considered that as seeing one in nature :) It was really really hot so a shower was definitely needed but at the end of our hike we found a town about 4 stories high so we went up and the breeze was so wonderful and the air was thinner and better.. so we sat there for a while cooling off... Rory was basically falling asleep so we ended out hike once we got back to the car.. which was fine.. i was getting a bit tired myself from the sun. *later* we just finished playing a board game called hmm i forget but it was really fun.. Steve won!! grr.. i was fairly close again to winning but failed. so that's about it. bed time and tomorrow is my last day with Steve and then back to California. O and at Okefenokee you can rent canoes, kayaks, and motorboats to go through the actual swamps!! we really wanted to go but got a little scared due to the many snakes and gators found in there.. but i think one day it would be tons of fun. Being right there next to the animals!! woo hoo :) ok night,
<3