The Ultimate Girls Vacation--Bali!

At the end of September I was able to go to Bali for 8 days with 2 of my best friends. Ladies you've gotta try this!! Its one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Let me paint a picture for you; 1000's of shops in a row (you barter for EVERYTHING), amazing 2-4 hour massage/spa treatments for 20$ and awesome activities like riverrafting and biking through the mountains and villages. The next few pictures will take you through my amazing trip.


We were on our way to go riverrafting when the road closed down to let this funeral processing through. This picture is of a hand made casket, when they get to the burial site it will be burned. At the head of this tower was 8 white oxen.

508 steps down to the river, so beautiful!

This picture was taken from our river raft. The entire mountain side was hand carved. It went on for miles!

This was taken while we were biking through the villages. The entire family/extended family lived together in compounds. They are so poor but happy. This was their school bus.

One of the many schools along our bike trip. They loved to see themselves on the screens of our digital cameras after taking their pictures.

This is Gabby and she is smiling for you. She is very talented; she played the harmonica and took a bow afterwards.

Elephants feel like a giant hairy pig. This is LaNita Copeland and Me on Gabby.

yep she stinks.

James bugging me about how much money I am going to spend at the shops just around the corner. No, actually this is at the monkey forest. 100's of nots so shy monkeys surrounded us. They can open your purse!

This woman was selling us peanuts to give the elephants. 1$ for 2 lbs of nuts. Isn't she beautiful!

Cooking School. So stinkin spicy gave us "Bali Belly" Good but holy moses.

One of the many dance shows we saw. Different

Did your heart beat just speed up? This is one of the millions of outdoor shops. The purses hanging there are hand woven and the vases are hand beaded. We watched as a 12 year old girl sat and made a beaded purse. Oh and those purses are 3$.

I had so much fun and am so thankful for a loving husband that took care of the kids for a very long 8 days (for him) The combination of the scenery,culture, and people was literally paradise.

Hey now, he's a rock star......

It's not too often that big name celebrities find their way over to Guam, but we were psyched to have Smashmouth here in concert this week. Jordan and his friends wanted to be right up front, while Dad stayed back. Near the end of the show we were shocked to see the lead singer of Smashmouth Steve Harwell reach down in the crowd, and pull Jordan up on stage! Yes, our very own son was a rock star for about 2 minutes. See the pictures and video below to see for yourself. His friends were almost as excited as he was. They were heard saying: "Dude, Jordan, you're island famous now." Jordan's shirt was drenched with both his and Steve's sweat, so Jordan refused to wash it.......but Mom vetoed that resolution. Needless to say Jordan said it was the "best night of his life". Here are 4 pictures of the event followed by a link to the video, so ROCK ON!!!!
He's a little freaked out when he's first pulled up on stage.

Startin to find his groove.....

Then Steve hands him the microphone...not quite sure how to take the reigns as the very temporary new lead singer of Smashmouth

Finally, they just decide to finish the song together. To see the video of this, just click the following link.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=GKLjZKeIY9w

PS. In case you're wondering what song you're listening to, Smashmouth broke from their own music for a couple Van Halen cover songs. This happens to be the end of Van Halen's "Aint talkin about love". This new version in no doubt now our favorite!

The kids rejoice that we FINALLY found the watering hole! We have this book on hiking in Guam, which gives directions/descriptions of the fun places sort of "off the beaten path". We found awesome waterfalls to jump off last year (see our Dec 07 blog) from this book, so we tried it again. It was 2 miles each way on a very hot day, so as you can see above the kids were psyched to finally make it.

Near the start of the hike when we were sort of.....lost you could say. Seriously, the book gives weird directions, like "turn left at the abandon dump truck" We thought the author might be joking.....

He wasn't. We finally knew we were on the right path in the maze of tracks and fields when we saw these trucks.

Anyway, when we finally made it, the kids were ready to play. It's a deep natural swimming hole, and it even had a rope tree swing. Here Andie is swingin away

And of course Emma had to give it a shot too.

Jordan's turn

We also went to Spanish steps again a few weeks ago, here we are hiking thru the jungle with the Bunches and Copelands to our favorite snorkeling site.

The girls prefer to play on the beach and look on as family snorkels in the background.

Halloween 2008: The girls w/ Tori Bunch as fairies ready to spread happiness and peace.

Jordan and the Copelands and Dillon Bunch.......not exactly spreading happiness and peace

Fairies and bad guys all came together in the end though to show off their sweet haul of Candy.

They still kept a fair amount even after the "parent tax".

Finally, we attended the Navy Ball a couple weeks ago. The girls were so excited to see Mom dressed up to go to a "real Ball" (they were thinking of the balls they've seen on the disney movies etc). They wanted to go so bad. Anyway it was fun to get dressed up and be with friends in a formal setting like that.....once in a while at least.