Alaska: DAY 1

Okay so the we are not in Alaska just yet. We are in Bellevue, just outside of Seattle.
The first day of our trip started early. Keralyn was up by 5 am, so that meant that our dog, Fisher, was chomping at the bit to get outside and yell/bark at the chattering squirrel in the back yard, and relieve his bladder. This meant that I was now up also. We had finished packing the day before but some how we must have been short on luggage because by the time we left the luggage had grown by 30%. I think this is due to the magical properties that women seem to hold over luggage. We set out on our adventure with two doctors that I work with. The first stop was to the bank, where one of the doctors was going to make a deposit. He slid his debit card in the machine and then proceeded to turn around and talk to us. In the meantime the ATM had spit his card back out and after a length of time determined that the owner of the card must not really want the card back, so the machine decided to suck the card back in to be kept until the bank opened at 10. This was a great way to start the trip.

Finally we were on our way traveling down interstate I-15. We were traveling in a passenger van, which I might add was very comfortable and seemed to hold our sudden expanse of luggage pretty well. We veered off on to I-84 headed toward Boise, all was going well. I decided to get out my Ipod and watch a movie to help pass the time. When I looked up I noticed that we were getting passed by everyone. At first I had thought that the driver was asleep.  I made a quick maneuver to redirect my gaze through the rearview mirror to check on the driver's status, his eyes were open. Phew! I then started listening for anything to alert me to the status of the van, maybe it was on its final leg. Nope.  After noticing that everyone else in the van was looking around wondering why we were driving slow, with half the van in the right lane and half on the shoulder of the interstate. I piped up and asked what was wrong. It turns out that when the van gets below 1/4 a tank the van loses power and gets sluggish. I wondered why the doctor driving was not concerned, he just very calmly stated that we would need gas and hopefully this would fix the problem, it had happened once before in the winter. Now, this might just be me, but if I was going to take a van on a 2000 mile round trip with 2 other couples and I had any thought that my van might not get us there or that we would need to drive at 30 MPH to get there, I would have been getting the van fixed before the trip. Anyway, we finally got gas and it did fix the van. We never let the tank fall below half again. We had heard that bad things on trips come in 3's so we we were actually happy to get 2/3 out of the way.

The third mishap would not have to wait much longer. About another 8 hours into the trip the same doctor who got his card eaten by the hungry ATM monster and whose van decided to enter the snail olympics, got a phone call. Apparently his daughter and son-in-law stopped to check on things at the house and discovered that the upstairs toilet was over flowing and dripping down to the basement, that's 4 stories and a lot of water. #3 was finally here, Hallelujah! Amen! Time for the trip to begin.

We arrived in Bellevue; my GPS brought us straight to the hotel.  We ate dinner, walked around the temple grounds and went to bed--only to be awakened at midnight to the police yelling at some guy in the parking lot about leaving a bar with a weapon in his back pack. Who knew that staying at a hotel one block away from the temple would have been so exciting! I felt like I was on my mission in the inner city of Houston.  Keralyn and I just rolled over and went back to sleep.

We feel blessed to be traveling with other couples who felt it was important to begin this trip with a prayer and know we are being protected.  We can't wait to see what tomorrow's adventures hold for us!