New couch & mandolin!

Heather and I had our new couch delivered yesterday, check it out:





Last week we splurged and purchased a Mandolin. (as seen in the above photos next to the electric violin) The Mandolin is tuned like a violin, but it has frets and can also play chords. Heather and I fight over it constantly, she has a Guitar background, and I have a violin background. We may need to get a 2nd one...

6 months strong!

Yesterday Heather and I celebrated our 6 month anniversary by taking a quick trip up to Park City and eating lunch at the Hungry Moose Cafe. We had limited time, as we invited a handful of friends over to celebrate the day at our place. Heather made a delicious curry and green papaya salad, Ro made some pad thai, Chong brought chocolate and lots of people brought wine.

The party ended a few minutes to midnight, just enough time to cut a few inches off our frozen wedding cake and watch our wedding video. I'm looking forward for the next 6 months, I can't wait to finish off the rest of the cake, it is still delicious!

Planning process of our 3rd trip to Costa Rica.

Heather and I are currently in the process of planning our 3rd trip to Costa Rica. We will be taking things a bit easier this time around, no more being jammed into public bus seats made for elementary school children, and no more shoddy cabinas! Not to say that we don't enjoy traveling cheap, its just gets tiring after a while...

We have decided to spend a full week in mid-June living in the small town of Nuevo Arenal. Arenal is located about 20 minutes from our future home site and is known for its large expat community & great kite surfing winds on Lake Arenal. (Lake Arenal provides Costa Rica with over 80% of its electricity, both hydro and wind!) We are renting a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house. We decided to go the house rental way so we could prepare more food at home and have a home base to travel from. We will also be renting a 4x4, so we can explore the country side in our free time.

Thanks to the $700 in vouchers from Continental Airlines from our last trip, we felt we could splurge a bit more on this one. With that in mind, we decided it was time for Heathers Mom to see what Costa Rica is all about, so she is coming along with us!

The next step is to research activities to do while down there. I have heard about some amazing caves in the La Fortuna area. We will definitely hit up Monteverde this time around as well. Toss in a canopy tour and a river rafting expedition and I think we are golden!

Three more contentental divide blogs:

http://www.divideride07.blogspot.com/
http://www.jamieandlee.com/
http://www.continentaldivideride.com/

Tour of the Snow Cave

Yes, we know that it is not an igloo! From here on out, I will refer to the structure as a snow cave.

We had originally planned to share this adventure with our friends Kevin, Heather and Gardner. Unfortunately, these lovely folks had something come up and couldn't make it. If you guys are reading this, the cave is still up there, let's go up and share a meal together, eh?

Here is a little video of the cave that we put together. This was right before we snowboarded down the trail and at this point we were quite exhausted.

Snowboarding from the Snow Cave!

Here is a fun video we put together yesterday. We snowboarded from our snow cave, down the Butler Fork trail and back to the car. Riding with a full pack is a considerable amount more difficult than not, by the way. The same goes for bridges and ravines, oh my! It was a very fun run, though.

Enjoy!

Our Igloo and snowboard

Heather and I decided to go build an igloo and spend the night up butler fork in big cottonwood canyon, we built our igloo on the side of a hill near the dog lake / desolation lake fork. Temperature at time of departure from SLC was 61 degrees, we used the air conditioner on the drive up the canyon... the snow was wet, and heavy, classic spring conditions.

Heather making her way up:


Me in my glacier goggles, it was a nice and sunny day, temps in the low 40's very little wind:


Really wet snow:


Self shot of Heather:


Heather going over the bridge:


Our destination! Dog lake to the left, Desolation to the right:


Snow pile done, starting to dig out the inside:


Heather digging out the Iglo:


All done! About the size of a good 3 man tent! We laid down a tarp, zipped our bags together and slept on two full size thermarests for insulation:


The view from inside:


Lunch!


We emptied our bags in the Igloo and retreated back to the car... to get our snowboards and snowboard gear:


I took the helmet cam with us, and recorded the descent back, quite a ride! I'll get some video footage together in the near future... :D