We had ourselves a Jersey Shore marathon this weekend. It was awesome!

The word “situation” will never be the same again.

We’re at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, with a clear sight at slot machines (weird city) and waiting to board the first plane towards home. This is the end of our 6th visit to the US. We’ve had a great trip, did and saw some things we’ve done and seen before. We went to Bedrock City again, but this time in the snow and with 2 little girls. It was fun. And we’ve stayed in Vegas 3 times this trip. And we hope we’ll never be here again. Don’t like Vegas. 4 times is more than enough…

We attended a wedding in Vegas, which was fun and weird. Bride, groom and the bridesmaids were all dressed up and we were in our jeans, because we didn’t bring anything else. Although Linda said they would change into their jeans right after the wedding, she did have some difficulty saying goodbye to her dress.

For her bachelorette party Linda and I went to Men of X in Hooters. We put dollarbills into men’s underwear. Something we both never did and never want to do again. It was fun, but the touching and all that could’ve been skipped, as far as we were concerned. But it was a fun experience.

We went to the Grand Canyon together with Peter, Linda and the girls. In the snow. It was our second time there, but snow really adds something. Even though you can’t really hike trails. We saw a lot of deer on our walk and good views of the canyon. And Peter finally proposed to Linda there.

In Bryce in was snowing pretty hard, so we gave it a second chance the next day. Bryce is pretty, snow is pretty, it was pretty good.

Sequoia was impressive, but we couldn’t walk very far because of the old and icy snow. Zion was okay, Yosemite was okay, Death Valley was beautiful just like last year. We didn’t really like the 2 hours we spend in San Francisco and although the La Brea Tar Pits were nice and the Warner Brothers Studio Tour was good, we don’t want to visit LA again, either. I guess big cities are not for us.

We had a lot of peppermint mochas at Starbucks, at a lot of good food, with the occasional yucky stuff in between (Wienerschnitzel hotdogs? Don’t do it.) Drove past roadkill skunks and our car smelled of it for miles afterwards, saw a bald eagle in Utah, saw Mormons in Utah, finally got to buy some booze in Utah and stayed at a very nice hotel in Springdale, Utah  (Desert Pearl Inn).

We had a great trip and now we’re broke. Well, not really, but no US-vacations will be in our near future. So our suitcases are packed with Ranch dressing and Icebreakers. The photos are on Flickr, we need to add some more, but we’ll do that at home. With a kittie on our laps (well, it will be a black kittie on Marjon’s lap, probably. Between her and the computer, because that is his favourite spot. The little jerk.)

Ivon and I started a photography course this week. Every other Thursday we’re gonna learn how to make better pictures with our digital camera’s by doing everything (almost everything) manually. The first lesson was fun and this weekend we’re going to have to do our homework. Because we had a lot of birthday money saved up and we couldn’t think of a good way to share the camera, we decided to give ourselves a new toy. A new Canon Eos 450D, but cheaper, because the new version is out already. Yay!

This year we won’t be home for Christmas or New Year’s. We will be spending Christmas in Vegas, but we’re not sure about where we will be celebrating the new year. Might be Death Valley with just the two of us, a bottle of champagne and no telephone or internet. We’ll see.

We can’t reveal the reason behind this yet. If you really want to know, you can always email us

We always thought that Germany was the America of Europe. But it’s Sweden. I have never seen this many classic American cars, not even in America. Every day we’d see about 3 of them, just cruising around. There was a barn we drove past a couple of times that had a bunch of them standing in front of it and a rebel flag hanging in the back of the barn.

And the most American thing; they had Rachael Ray. Unfortunately was the tv channel it was on, blocked…

In case anyone noticed we were gone. We were in Sweden, in a cabin in the woods. We wanted to see a moose (elk) and we got to see one, from our livingroom window. Yay. Pictures of the animal failed.

Rest of the vacation was mwoh. Tourist season hadn’t started yet, so a lot of the museums or other things to do, were closed. And it was not warm enough to sit outside and enjoy nature. We even had a couple of days that had rain, rain and more rain. On one of these days we saw the elk, so that was good.

Somewhere this afternoon Tiwa, our cleaning guy, called me to ask if we were home tonight, because he wanted to come over and talk to us. I already knew from somebody else he had to go back to Thailand, but I didn’t know it would be this soon. We knew this day would come, since Silvester died last year October.

He came over and told us he would be leaving for Thailand within the next couple of weeks.  He brought a bottle of wine over to thank us. He didn’t need to do that, we were the ones to thank him for cleaning our mess.

He told us it was all going too fast for him, Silvester dying, the house being sold and now him needing to leave for Thailand. But he made peace with that, and now he is looking forward to going back to his family. His dream is to run a guesthouse over there. I hope he’ll succeed. He’s a nice guy and deserves it.

The other weird thing is, that I somehow just now realised Silvester is dead. And that makes me sad too. Some changes in life are just not good.

With my new iPhone! Now that I have a proper car charger/aux-thingie I can enjoy internetradio in my car, I can use the internets wherever I want, it has fun games, it contains a bunch of my music, text messaging is fun and apparently you can also make phonecalls with it. Have to try that one soon too

Yesterday the painter finally finished his work! Yay! We have a ceiling and a good wall! Today our cleaning guy cleaned up the mess (yay for him too!) and now we’re ready to move all the stuff back into the kitchen from our living room. The only problem is that we don’t have good light there, only a small lamp above the stove and that’s it. Ah well. We have a ceiling!

The change is not as dramatic as it was yesterday, but there is progress. Except for our living room. We now moved the microwave and fridge in there…