Construction Ahead!

As you can tell, my Blog is currently under construction. I will be taking some time to work on it with the help of Kate Darowski. The only problem is I, for some reason, cannot find the time.

I am so behind on all of my posts! When loading my pictures from my camera on to my computer today, I realized that I have pictures back from December I haven't loaded.

I will be posting little clips of what has been keeping us so occupied. I am so excited for this week though. I get to go to...

Las Vegas


California's beaches

The Jay Leno Tonight Show
AND . . . DISNEYLAND!


I will be going with Kate, Racheal, and Danielle. It is kind of a celebration/goodbye trip for both Kate and Racheal. They will be leaving in August and September for school and I will miss them both VERY MUCH!
We had to make Disneyland our destination because Kate, in her 23 years of life, has not been to Disneyland. We are all so excited and know that we will have plenty of pictures and hilarious stories to share!

Girls

Big Changes! Melissa is getting married in like a month. And Angela is Graduating and will be leaving on a mission this summer.

We got together for our 6th annual St. George Trip and well . . .


. . . Somethings never change!

Hawaii! Tons of pictures . . . but still not enough.

We were so excited about going to Hawaii, it was my first time to Oahu and Joseph's first time ever. We loved it! For the first two nights we stayed in busy Waikiki. Joseph learned to fish from a native and enjoyed fishing for the whole day :)

We went and hiked Diamond Head

I had to get a picture of this guy :)

The view from the top is amazing, you can see everything

Our Juice Boxes

After our hiking fun, we came across a banyan tree. This entertained us for like 15 minutes ha ha.

For the last 3 days of our trip we went and stayed with the Wesley's and got great hook ups. Sister Wesley got us into the Polynesian Cultural Center for free! It was such a fun day.

They teach you games and activities the islanders play. The funny thing is we kinda got stuck in an Asian group for part of the day.

We learned how to throw spears and of course Joseph was the best out of the guys ha ha . . . really though.
Pretty waterfalls and scenery everywhere you look.
Okay so I have a question. . . There are lots of Asians in Hawaii (well known fact), but whenever they take pictures they make peace signs with their hands. Why is this? We loved it so much we took pictures like this too.
Joseph making fire
The Beautiful LDS Temple. It is currently closed for remodeling, I wish we could have done a session.
Joseph and I LOVED the passion fruit that you find everywhere. We had Passion Fruit on our ice cream every night. It is soooo good!
Our much missed friend KATE! She is currently at school at BYU Hawaii and she graduates in April. I have missed her and it was so fun to spend 3 days with her in Hawaii and have her get to know Joseph. We went surfing, boogie boarding, pie eating, . . . it was great!
The peaceful beautiful beach. We both want to go back :)
A woman at the PCC made this rose for me out of palm leaves. It was fun to watch because she did it in like 20 seconds and didn't even pay attention to what she was doing.
After a fun day on the beach

So we don't have many beach pictures because we wanted to be careful with our camera and really enjoy the beach. This is when we were just watching Joseph and Keli'i play because the waves were too huge and scary for us to play in.

Anyway, we were way high up on the beach and this wave crashed and came so high on the beach that we were panicking trying to grab my sandals, my phone, the car keys, the camera, the boogie boards, our clothes . . . Too much to grab so my camera got wet. I was so sad!
We went home and put the camera in rice and 2 days later it worked great! Too bad it was when we were on our way home.

We had a lot of fun and decided we would open our restaurant in Hawaii. Well we are now in Arizona and enjoying the warm weather. We miss our family and friends a lot, Love you all!

Oregon

I know it has been a while, but as you know, things have been CrAzY. So I will now try to do some updating . . . We made our decision to move to Arizona and really do this, we dropped out of our classes and decided to take our well needed vacation before our crazy move. We packed for Oregon and Hawaii, a 2 week vacation, in about 30 minutes and began driving to Oregon. We had to go to Oregon because I have never been and it is a favorite vacation spot for the VanCotts. It is Beautiful there! I have a lot of great pictures to post, I will try to narrow them down.

We stopped in Idaho to sleep for the night. The next morning I was wanting to wash my hair so Joseph nicely went to the front desk to get some mini shampoo and conditioners . . . this is what the nice lady at the front desk gave him :)
Pantene Pro-V, pretty Classy
I loved this waterfall
Huge Octopus at the museum
When the tide goes down you can walk out on the rocks and they are covered in starfish, crabs, anemone, all kinds of things.
We pretty much sat on the beach every night to watch the sunset
There are beautiful Lighthouses everywhere
It was such a fun crazy trip because we never knew where we would be sleeping the next night, or what we would go do, we just kind of did whatever. We decided we wanted to camp one night so we brought all of our gear and camped on the night when of course there was a storm. Everything was soaked! We were up all night and that is when Joseph's tooth started to give him trouble.
You can't see enough beautiful views, its amazing.
Oh and of course I have to end with this. It was the night before we left to Hawaii and we knew our loaf of bread we packed and ate many pbjs with was going to go bad, so Joseph wanted to try something. We went and parked on the beach, ripped up pieces of bread and he threw them near our car and on our car. We had birds attacking us forever and one almost got Joseph's finger. This was my favorite picture!
We loved it and hope to go back again. I will post Hawaii's pictures soon. We love and miss you all!

Our APX Cancun Trip

At the beginning of January we got to enjoy a free trip to Cancun because Joseph sold more the second half of his summer than the first. It was beautiful and warm, of course.
It was a short trip but oh so sweet. This picture is of our resort which, as you can see, was beautiful and relaxing. The first day we were there we traveled to the Chichen itza ruins. It took like 6 hours to drive there but it was totally worth the trip.

So once you arrive you walk through jungle and trees and out of no where appears this great temple. It is beautiful! I was a little sad though because they don't let you walk on the temple anymore, we missed it by 3 years.Next to this temple there is a great field where they would spend their lives training and practicing to play someday. You have to hit a ball through that hoop with your shoulder or hip to make points. Its crazy!
The worst part is that the losers of the game are sacrificed and the winners are consider to now be gods.
It was all fun to learn about, Joseph was my own little tour guide. He was telling me about all of the buildings and the games and I didn't get why he knew all of this and I didn't. "There was a documentary on the history channel about all of this." I think he enjoyed it a little more than I did.



Here is us with all of our APX friends ha ha, Rick and Leah, Jake and Ashley, Me and Joseph, and Sandra and Steve. Rick was Joseph's manager last year and is now his regional manager and Steve is Joseph's Co-Manager this year.








So before we left we met this 18 year old who was selling things to provide for his family (mother and little siblings), it is fun to listen to joseph speak spanish. I am grateful that he can because I feel like they look at me and expect me to be the one to speak and are surprised when he can speak perfectly and I am the one struggling.


Here is a fun video with a ruin that we both agreed looked like it belonged in Jungle book :)

After seeing all of the ruins they took us to this amazing sink hole where they had stairs down to and an area you could climb up to, to cliff jump.
It was a lot of fun and not at all what I expected. I have another video, but Joseph scared me on this one.


Continuing on our first day we made it to a restaurant with the tour bus and once we finished our meals Joseph and I decided to go and walk around the real villages of Mexico instead of sitting and watching the dances. Thanks to spanish immersion I was apart of those dance perfomances.

We stopped for a drink at a restaurant and found a bunch of guys playing volleyball, They were really bad haha.




We thought of joining them, but got distracted by the cute little kids trying to sell us the things their parents made. We didn't have money to give them but we remembered I had packed tons of gummies in my back pack.

It was a surprise to me when we got them all together to give them treats. They immediately started arguing and fighting for certain treats. When we pulled out our little cereal boxes, some of them wouldn't accept the gummies because they would only wanted the cereal. It was odd for me to see. The little girl in the green shorts nudged her brother when he wouldn't take the gummy and told him to take it. It was fun to interact with the natives.

We then made our long drive home. It was a long day, but full of new things to see.









I am sad, but I dont have pictures of our second day. We rented these little 2 men speed boats and drove through the jungle until we made it to a popular place to go snorkling. We saw prettier fish in Cabo on our honeymoon, but joseph still made it fun. We aren't allowed to feed the fish, but that doesnt stop joseph and his corn pops in his swim suit pocket. These fish are so used to people around them so it was scary to have them pretty much attacking you for food. I think joseph got bit 3 times ha ha. He also freaked out this group of 3 girls who didn't want to snorkle or something. He made sure to leave a ton of food right where they were. They were screaming like they were being eaten alive and you could here joseph snickering out of his little snorkle still under water being all sneaky ha ha.

Our last day was our beach day! Joseph and the guys still went swimming every night because the water was so warm. They made up games to play, but before getting in the water Joseph told them to try going under the water, and closing your eyes and imagine a huge shark coming at you with its mouth open. Apparently you are supposed to see how long you can stay under the water. That made it a little less appealing for me to go swimming when I couldn't see anything.

I don't know why, but I don't have any pictures of us on the beach, oh well, It was a great Trip!