Spokane

We made it to Spokane.  It is supposed to take 11 hours to drive here from Salt Lake, but it took us 16 with two blown-out tires and a car sick child.  It was a pretty miserable day!  We are so grateful to my parents who hauled up all our stuff in a trailer and Ashlyn who drove with me in my car.  She seriously was turned around for the majority of the trip entertaining the kids and meeting their demands.  She even got a rash from the seat belt on her neck because she turned around so much!  She saved the day.

The first week in Spokane we all felt a little disoriented.  But we are slowly digging out and getting settled.  I feel like I can get around a little better now, and it helps that I bought a GPS.  There are so many beautiful parks here and most of them have splash pads, so we have been visiting the park a lot.  Spokane's weather doesn't warrant so many splash pads though, it hasn't been very warm here yet and it rains almost every day.  The landscape is beautiful though, there are tall pine trees everywhere.  If you drive just two miles up the road from us you leave the city and enter the "country," there are rolling green hills covered with pines and dotted with beautiful white farm houses for as far as the eye can see.  There is a very high concentration of farms here and we are excited to go pick local produce.  The air always smells clean and pine-y and there is never any traffic.

Jack is with a great group of residents.  Several of them have kids, and we have been hanging out a lot with them already, I am sure we will all be great friends by the time this year is over.  We really like our new ward too.

Jack is on his surgery rotation, which conjures up awful memories for me from 3rd year (re: 120 hour work-weeks) but today he went in at 6:30 and came home by 1:00.  What??  I think this is going to be a great year for our family.

I haven't taken many pictures yet, but here are a few from a morning we spent in Coeur D'Alene.  The Iron Man was the next day so it was a little crowded.  The iron man swimmers in their wet suits were astonished to see Hannah swimming in the freezing water!