Miss South Dakota Pageant

This last weekend Sam and I went to see the Miss South Dakota Pageant.  We thought it would be entertaining and worth our time.  It did not disappoint at all!!  I told Sam that when we move away from here I want to come back every year around this time just for this pageant.  It really lifted our spirits and was so worth every penny.  It kind of reminded me of a high school production.  The musical numbers really made the whole show.  There were at least 10 different ones.

It won't let me upload the videos from my camera so these are just the ones from my phone but you can get the idea.

These guys were in many of the musical numbers.

The swimsuit competition is always so awkward.

This is Miss South Dakota 2010.

Here are the final 5.  Miss Rapid City is in the gold dress.

This is the winner.  She did a great job and we knew she would at least be in the final 2. I am excited to see her in the Miss America pageant.

Change of Plans

Okay a lot of things have been going on in the last few months. We left Boston since Sam was finished with school. The company in Denver was just leading Sam on and probably if we call them now they will still say that it is still between Sam and another dentist. They are crazy but it worked out for the best because now we are living in Rapid City, South Dakota. Yes, you heard that right South Dakota!! Sam actually started work today at the community health center here. It will be a good work experience for him and he has Fridays off. We will most likely be staying here for the next couple years before we make another move.

We stayed at my parents' house in Utah for a couple months making all the arrangements here so we were able to spend the holidays there. We have come back and forth from Utah to Rapid City a few times and it is very nice to be settled in our own place again. The drive is about 10 hours and we haven't gotten sick of it yet.

You ask what there is to do in Rapid City, well we are still wondering about that but in the meantime we will definitely have a year pass to Mt Rushmore which is only a 1/2 hour away. Hopefully we won't have to make weekly trips there for excitement. We are ready to start our new adventure here and have already been looking into some crazy destinations.

Denver

We went to Denver a couple weeks ago so Sam could interview at a company there. The dental office would actually be in Fort Collins which is about an hour north of Denver. We don't know a lot of details yet but we are planning to leave here in the next couple weeks! Crazy!My sister, Cami and fam were there for the Summer while Juan did an internship. It was fun to be able to hang out with them for the week. Amelia is so adorable and I hadn't seen her since she was 1 month old and Sam hadn't seen her at all. We played lots of card games, Mario Party and Mario Kart and just did lots of hanging out. We didn't do much touring since we are probably moving out there soon but we did hit a couple must sees.Here is a huge 2 story chair with a horse on top of it. We have no idea what the story is behind it but it was definitely picture worthy.We also drove past the very first Chipotle restaurant ever! It started back in 1993. Colorado is definitely the place for us now knowing that Chipotle started there.

Martha's Vineyard

Ginger watched her sister's kids a couple of weekends and so her sister and brother-in-law were really generous and paid for a night at Martha's Vineyard for us a few weeks back. This was the view from the ferry as we went out to the island.

This was at Sharkey's Cantina, a nice little Mexican restaurant. Ginger wanted me to show this picture so that you could get an idea of how big the nacho's were, I wanted to show this picture so that you could get an idea of how goofy I look when I'm eating, win-win.

The next day we drove around the island and this was at the tip of Gayhead.
There are something like 180 of these little houses with different bright colors all in one little village area that they call the gingerbread cottages . They were about the only thing unusual enough to visit, plus we really loved our previous pose so we thought we'd get as much mileage out of it as possible.

Vermont

Our first destination was to Joseph Smith's birthplace. Now, normally, there is no way that I go to some touristy site and walk around with an elderly tour guide, but it was a Sunday, we just got out of church, we're still dressed up and we're visiting the birthplace of the man who restored the Lord's church, the very same church that we just spent 3 hours attending. This all came together to force some immense spiritual peer pressure on me and we ended up going on the guided tour. Not only was the tour the snoozefest that I was expecting, but the guide quizzed me on scripture, questioned my member missionary dedication, and challenged me to share the gospel more... awesome. Of course, he's right, but can't you just make me feel good and pat me on the back for even showing up, I mean come on, I wore a white shirt and tie for goodness sake.

We were ripping through the woods in this rugged six passenger golf cart with another couple (he took the picture) and this Elder/tour guide (not the same one that made me feel really good about my scripture studies), I just thought it was pretty funny. The other couple was taking pictures of all the sites and what do Ginger and I want to remember. Hey, we all have priorities, ours are just dumber.

Forget the monument, what you need to take from this picture is the fact that I set the timer on our camera, put it on this wall and ran up those stairs to pose with Ginger, all in under 10 seconds.

The next day we, of course, had to go to Ben & Jerry's. Ginger was pretty determined to be Ben in this picture, I thought she had some weird affinity for the the hat or something, but she's telling me it was the shorter face of the two, very practical of her.

This is the flavor graveyard, which is what it sounds like, flavors that didn't quite appeal to the masses. There were definitely some interesting concoctions.

Now this is a very special find. Let me introduce you to... the world's largest filing cabinet. I'll give you a moment to take it all in. This is our favorite so far, incredibly ridiculous and absurd, made even better with the rust and the half opened drawers.

Mary had a little lamb

We were reaching on this one, but Ginger's nieces were staying with us and we couldn't travel too far, so this was the best we could do. Besides, Natalie was weirded out by the largest set of wooden praying hands that I wanted to see. I know, unnecessarily oversized religous artifacts and the opportunity to traumatize my niece, how did I get talked out of that.

This is supposedly the schoolhouse that Mary and her lamb went to. Brooke and Natalie were kind enough to act it out for us. They were surprisingly very excited and actually regretted that they didn't have costumes to go along with their reenactment... um, yeah. It was about this time I was having a few regrets of my own.

We wanted to see Mary's house, but it was burned down by arsonists a couple years ago and all they have now is this monument in the town center of Sterling, MA.

So that was our visit into the world of nursery rhymes. It was fun, but I'm thinking our next trip needs to be somewhere in "Guinness Book of World Records" territory. I would love, for one day, to just visit something so horrendously ridiculous and absurd that it makes people question my ability to reason and make judgements, not that people don't already.

Plymouth Rock

Not quite sure what we were expecting, but it wasn't this mausoleum. I think on the plaque it said pilgrims landed here and killed the rock and now this is it's eternal resting place, who knew. By the way, that is Ginger standing inside.

This is the actual rock itself with "1620" carved into it and to lend some perspective I have crouched down in front. Now granted, I have a huge melon for a head, but the rock is tiny. I think that with a really good grip and some stretchy pants, I could lift that thing. The best part is that there are all these pennies that are thrown around it like some kind of weird wishing rock. I just like the idea of people being confused by the fact that they actually chose to stare at a rock and then thinking there must be something more, so they pelt one of our oldest national treasures with pennies and turn it into the equivalent of a mall fountain.

Yes, I was voted most photogenic in high school, why do you ask? My gosh, what is going on here. It's like my own Benjamin Button happening and I've reverted back to my baby hair. Anyway, this was actually after visiting Plymouth, we headed down to the Cape and went to the tip and it was a little windy (hence the Bert and Ernie hairdo). On a side note, what's with highly prized coastline property being inundated with mini golf courses? I guess you go to the beach and suddenly you have a yearning for salt water taffy, bad driftwood art, and mini golf. So that was our Saturday outing, it was fun and hopefully next time we'll get to see something a little more unusual.

Gillette Castle

Some how I was designated the official tour guide of our family and I forgot to mention our trip to Gillette Castle (actually I didn't forget, but someone "persuaded" me to revisit our trip). Apparently some guy, William Gillette, was a famous stage actor back in the late 1800's and early 1900's. He created the role of Sherlock Holmes for the stage and at the height of his fame and fortune, decided to build a castle for himself in the middle of Connecticut, go figure. This is the great hall... this is the back...and this is the view from the back.

We also heard about this abandoned amusement park in Connecticut called "Holy Land" and rumor has it that there is a giant Bible open to the ten commandments among other attractions... come on, that is just begging to be seen. Unfortunately this was the entrance which was gated off and we just didn't feel right about breaking into a place called "Holy Land," so we left without seeing anything too holy but a few statues near the entrance.

However, we did see these three guys that told us to get our food storage in order and when we turned back to see them, they were gone... strange, but very appropriate advise. So, that was our trip to Connecticut. We spent the night and went to the beach and visited Yale too. It was a fun weekend.

More Humongous fun

Our search for pointless continued and it took us to Maine. We started out by heading to Portland where we wanted to go to a Mexican grill called Costa Vida, because honestly, the only thing that motivates us more than the absurd is food. Ginger loves Cafe Rio in Utah and Costa Vida is a copycat version of it. We were really surprised to see that there was one up in Maine. We had tried it before in Utah and didn't love it, but it's hard to find good Mexican out here so we thought we'd give them another chance. Sadly, it was really disappointing. Luckily, we had a gigantic bearded man in plaid to look forward to.
This is, of course, the legendary Paul Bunyon. If you look real close you'll see that Ginger is pulling her best "Where's Waldo" and is actually in the picture. We couldn't stop laughing as soon as we saw him. I think the people of Bangor, ME thought we were crazy, but let's be serious, these people live in a city that celebrates American folklore by erecting a ginormous plastic statue of a lumberjack and pass by everyday like it's normal. Yea, we're the crazy ones.

It so happens that Bangor is also the home of Stephen King and according to a lot of people this is where he lives. You can see the bats and the webbing on the wrought iron fence. We took these pictures from the car, we didn't want to run out there and be crazy.

Meet "Eartha"

Keeping up with our theme to see different tourist attractions, Ginger and I went to Yarmouth, ME and visited the DeLorme Map Store. They're very proud of their gigantic, record breaking, rotating globe, Eartha. We were surprised to see so many people there, I guess it wasn't the hidden gem that we thought it was. Of course, we were there during the city's clam festival (and hey, if you're going to throw a party for a mollusk, you better expect the mobs to come). It was more fun with all the people though.
There were a couple of Bohemian hippie types that were just sitting there with these awe-inspired looks on their faces. Not to stereotype, but I'm pretty sure they were inspired by more than that globe, I mean it was cool and all, but those two looked like they were ready to start a new religion and worship that thing. Of course, we also had the nerd that was showing off with all their geography knowledge pointing out all the rivers and mountain ranges... OK that was actually me, but believe me, people were impressed. The globe was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. I think they said it was 41.5 feet in diameter. It was pretty cool.

Strange and Unusual Sites to See

We have decided that we want to start to visit some strange and unusual sites in the New England area. There are a lot of great things to go see around here. Some people may think it is a waste of time but not us, we live for pointless destinations.

Our first stop a couple of months ago was the World's (used to be) Largest Chair. I know you may be a little jealous, which you should be! It stands 16 feet tall and is located in Gardner, MA. Sam was going to try to jump up on top of it but it was too rainy. I didn't feel like going to the hospital because he slipped and fell trying to get up on the giant chair. This was the tallest chair for a while but then was beat out. The tallest chair is now in Alabama standing at 31 feet. The 16 foot tall chair is good enough for us even though I would love to see the 31 footer. Here is a little article about the chair wars, if you are interested.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/CIVIchair.html

This last Saturday, the paper house was our destination. It is located in Rockport, MA. It was built by a man in the 1920s as his summer home. Heck, why wouldn't you want a home made out of newspapers! They used about 100,000 newspapers. The framework to the house is wood, just like any other house, it has a regular wooden floor and wooden roof. The shingles on the house were newspapers and almost everything in house is made out of newspapers. The newspaper was rolled up with varnish on it to make the furniture. It was pretty interesting to see all of the different pieces of furniture they had made. Making the clock, they used newspapers from all 48 state capitals at the time. It was amazing how detailed everything was.

Well these were the first of many trips. If you ever hear about anything crazy in the New England area, let us know, I am sure we would love to go and check them out!

Paper House