Elliott and Lara - Travelogue

2009 Recap

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:29:00 -0500

This was written by Lara on elliottandlara.com.

It's that time of year again when we repent for being bad bloggers and give a quick rundown of the last year.

Last March (2009), we decided on Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX) for med school and started making plans and preparations for our move. But before leaving D.C., we had a few adventures that haven't made it on our blog.

Spring in D.C.

In March-April, we were visited by Rachel, Hyrum, Caleb, Adam, and Lucas; Camas (and Bethany); Spencer and Emeline; Andrea and Dave (apologies if we missed someone, but it was awhile ago and these are all the pictures we could find!).

The Great Outdoors

Another April highlight was the Cherry Blossom Festival. Growing up, I'd heard my parents talk about the cherry blossoms in D.C. and I kinda thought, eh, what's the big deal? Turns out they're really that lovely.

Also in April: Virginia Beach with danje. You can't help but have ridiculous fun with those guys.

In May, we went rock climbing on Sugarloaf Mountain with Chris and Leigh. We were trying to get some practice...

...for our camping and rock climbing trip with them and others in Pennsylvania in June. On our way back home, we visited Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water, which was fascinating.

Cooler Than Being a White House Crasher

A couple weeks later, we went to World Refugee Day (after some internet sleuthing to find tickets), where we attended a presentation and afterwards had lunch with and met Khaled Hosseini and Greg Mortensen (and a few surprises, like Anne Curry and Angelina Jolie, who were both very pleasant in person). We were definitely outclassed at the event, but it was inspiring to meet so many good people doing so much good. We left ready to change the world.

Goodbye D.C, Hello Paris!

Later in June, I ran my first race ever (except for the Hot Dog Run in Valdez when I was a kid, but I don't think that counts). It was a 5K, and Elliott was a fantastic cheerleader.

The last day of June was the last day of work for both Elliott and me. The next day, we finished loading up all of our belongings into a single Relocube and got on a flight to Europe, where we spent a good chunk of our savings on a glorious two week trip to France and Greece.

Someday we'll get an account of our trip written up for all the Internets to see, but for now we'll say this: Paris, Athens, and Santorini were fantastic. (Both good food and skinny dipping may have been involved.)

Roadtrip to Texas

When we got home from Europe, we got in the car and drove to Houston. En route, we stopped in North Carolina for a couple days to see the nephews.

Down the road, we stopped at my Grandpa's in Georgia. Elliott and Grandpa had never met each other, so I was glad we got to spend a couple days with him.

Medical school begins, life ends

We only had a couple days between arriving in Houston and Elliott starting med school orientation, so we tried to make quick work of our move-in. For purposes of quiet and security, our choice of a third floor condo was a good one. But as we hauled everything we owned up three flights of stairs in Houston in July, we were seriously reconsidering our decision. (Especially when it came to lifting our crazy-heavy-retrotastic-Craigslist-acquisition treadmill.)

Elliott started school at the beginning of August, and his parents came down for his White Coat Ceremony two weeks later. It was great to have them as our first houseguests in Houston!

School is organized into blocks for Elliott, each around six weeks long, with an exam at the end of each block. Between one block ending and the next beginning, there's usually the better part of a week of no school, which is perfect for having adventures!

After Block 1, we spent a day in Galveston, then went to Austin for the weekend and saw its awesome weirdness, bats, capitol, hiking trails, and a geeky computer museum.

After Block 2, we went camping/rock-climbing with several other BCM students (as part of Baylor's Wilderness Medical Society) just west of San Antonio. A cold rainstorm hit late in the night, and only one person in our large group managed to stay dry. Elliott and I switched spots partway through the night, so both of us had the chance to sleep in the large puddle in our tent. However, the following day turned out sunny and pleasant and absolutely perfect for rock climbing. On our way home, we stopped in San Antonio for a few hours, where we had dinner and explored the River Walk.

The next day was Halloween, and we attended Baylor's annual celebration, Coffeehouse, a variety show put on by the medical students. A great time was had by all. There was a costume contest and we took second place as Kanye West and Taylor Swift (losing to a pretty awesome Russel from "Up").

To continue our winning streak, the next week we brought the prize-winning hummus to a "Stuff White People Like" party thrown by our friend Lauren, and received spectacularly ugly sweaters for our efforts.

Long December

Elliott and I spent most of December apart; I was in Alaska, helping my Mom after shoulder surgery, and Elliott was in Houston with his nose to the scholastic grindstone. It was great for me to be with my family and great for Elliott to be able to focus on school, but it reminded us that we'd much rather be with each other than not.

A couple days after Elliott's Block 3 exams were over, I returned from Alaska. I'd been home 18 hours when we loaded up and drove to North Carolina for Christmas. Elliott's whole family was gathering and we were the final two to arrive, bringing the total to 15, including our four nephews and our brand new niece, who we got to meet for the first time during our visit. It was so great to all be together and we had a great Christmas!

Life in General

We've been pleasantly surprised at how much we enjoy living in Houston, despite the failed promise of pleasantly warm winters.

Living inside the loop has been a nice change for Elliott (who went to high school in the suburbs), and living adjacent to the Texas Medical Center has made it easy to commute to school, go running in Herman Park or around Rice, and visit places like the Rothko Chapel.

Elliott is able to bike to school most days, and with our purchase of a bike for me, we have started going on biking adventures together. (Last week we discovered an amazing city park--complete with hills and unpaved backwoods "mountain" trails--in Houston.)

Also of late, we have been engaged in several home improvement projects, which we will be unveiling in later blogs.

It's been a good year and we've been able to do lots of fun things, but right now, most of all, we're hanging in there as medical school and the job hunt grinds on.

We haven't died, we promise

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:32:00 -0500

This was written by lara on elliottandlara.com.

The other day David A left this comment on our blog:

you know why i love your blog? because every time i get sad that it's been a full month since obama's inauguration, i can visit your website and relive the historic experience as though it happened yesterday!

Well David, we were doing it just to keep your heart happy, but I'm afraid we can't hold out forever. I've resisted. I've stalled. But the time has come for another post.

Since Elliott's parents live in New York City we visit fairly regularly, and the last few visits have been a bit passive and lazy. But two weekends ago we went to NYC with C & L (pictured below), neither of whom had been since they were pretty young, so it gave us a fresh excuse to get out in the city.

We walked the Brooklyn Bridge.

We stood in a line in the cold for over an hour just to get some Grimaldi's. And it was worth it. Hype or no, that's some GOOD pizza.

We went to the Natural History Museum (but we didn't see Ben Stiller OR Owen Wilson OR any freaky Egyptian tablets).

We stood in a line in the cold for over an hour to get Broadway tickets. We saw Mary Poppins and I felt 8 again (in a good way).

We rode tandem bicycles in Central Park.

We stood in a line in the cold for a mere 20 minutes to get our yearly dose of red meat a la Shake Shack burgers. (No offense to you West Coasters, but...it's got In and Out beat.)

Photos from the Inauguration

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:13:00 -0500

This was written by elliott on elliottandlara.com.

We came home exhausted, and even now our bodies have not completely recovered from the ten hours of walking in the cold after little sleep. I had wanted to share some of the thoughts that I had during the ceremony and speech, but they will have to wait, as we'd like to post this before it becomes completely irrelevant.

Dannii and Jess, who live in Northern Virginia, came up the night before for a sleepover and to join us going downtown (as we can walk to our subway line, and no one really knew what to expect with parking). Check out their version of the day's events here.

Some living in DC had no interest in the inauguration. Others had interest in going, but would rather watch it on TV than battle the crowds. Others went in spite of the crowds. Perhaps there were also some, like me, who went because of the crowds--the chaos, the energy, the confusion, the masses both battling and celebrating with one another, the conflict of will against weather.

(Plus, we don't own a TV, and the idea of going to CiCi's Pizza to watch it--which is what we did for the opening of the Beijing Olympics--wasn't particularly appealing. Trust me.)

We tried to enter the mall from the north, but it turns out that "whatever you've read or heard before can't be counted on" (so said a security guard). We were re-routed, with thousands of others, through a 2-mile freeway tunnel to the other side of the mall.

It felt strangely post-apocalyptic and very surreal, marching through the darkness through empty freeways and tunnels, amid sporadic sounds of excitement and police sirens, watching the thousands of darkened figures, downcast from the cold, trudging ahead.

I promised Lara no references in this post to the word "phallus," so don't expect any. But we ended up closer to that side of the mall, once we managed to get in.

The director of the National Cancer Institute, in an email to all employees, described this day as a "milestone day for our country, as we formally welcome the Obama administration--and we celebrate, once again, the peaceful transition of presidential power." Being there in the mall in person--and watching that transition of power take place--was a powerful reminder of the liberties, freedoms, and stability we enjoy as Americans, of the inspired nature of our Constitution, of the cost and sacrifice that earlier generations made on our behalf, and of the roots of our great nation. Seeing Obama speak was also a powerful reminder of how far we have come. There were many thoughts and emotions that afternoon, and I was moved and grateful that Lara and I had the opportunity to be there.

(It was also fun to see my great uncle Bob participate in the swearing in!)

After the inauguration, everyone was flooding out of the same area, so we didn't want to attempt any of the immediate metro stations. We returned to the same freeway tunnel for the first leg of the trip home. (Dannii reports that we walked about 18,000 steps, or 10+ miles, in all.)

It was a great day. We hope you all waved to us from your living rooms. We were waving back.

2008 Recap

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:31:00 -0500

This was written by lara on elliottandlara.com.

When we got married, we wanted to be cool like everyone else and document our lives in a we're-a-cute-little-family blog. A year after the fact, we're finally getting our first post up. (If this starts to sound like Seriously So Blessed, please tell me.)

2008 was a great year. Some of the highlights:

We got married! What started off as a pipe dream became a reality with our low-key wedding in Hawaii in January 2008. (This morning, exactly one year since the big day, Elliott rolled over and groggily said, "Uuuhhh. I wish we were in Hawaii." Amen.)

After a couple weeks of adventures on the Big Island during our honeymoon, we returned to real life. After our long life in Provo, we moved up in the world...to Salt Lake, where we got to live with Elliott's grandpa for about six months. I worked at the Center for Change and finished up my last class at BYU while Elliott did programming and web design work while studying for the MCAT.

In April we donned our caps and gowns and, only 7 years after starting, graduated from BYU. I guess it pays to stick around that long and get to know the faculty, because Elliott was chosen to speak at his convocation. It was definitely a proud wife moment.

Elliott was offered a job as a research fellow with the National Institutes of Health, and we were both ready to get out of Utah and head to the east coast. In July I quit my job at the Center (and I won't say I didn't cry), we packed up our stuff into a metal 6'x7'x8' cube, and we moved across the country. Our drive from Salt Lake to Washington DC took ~5 days, broken up by stops to see family, an amusement park, a German colony, and an unbelievable thunderstorm that made us fear for our lives (Elliott said it even put Houston tropical storms to shame). We were kept company by books on CD by David Sedaris
and Michael Pollan
(as we ate a steady diet of roadtrip food).

When we finally arrived in Maryland, we had 2 days to find an apartment and move in before Elliott started his new job. After a whirlwind morning, we decided on a little one-bedroom apartment in the upstairs of a single-family home. It took a while, but we've fallen in love with our tiny little house--even the sloped ceilings and faux wood paneling (the inspiration for this site design).

After a few weeks of being in Maryland, I found a job in marketing with a trade association, where I sometimes write, sometimes research, and all the time try to figure out what to do in my job.

We moved into a great ward and we both have callings in the youth program. It's refreshing and exciting and sobering to be in a congregation as diverse as ours. We have countless doctors, one of the country's leading economists...and we also have war refugees and people without enough food or clothes.

In our almost six months in the DC area, we've come to like it a lot. We've played tourist downtown and tried out some interesting restaurants. We've also hiked in Shanendoah National Park and white-water rafted on the Gauley in West Virginia. Elliott presented a poster at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Philly and I met him there afterwards for sightseeing and cheesesteaks. We have intended to have even more adventures, but much of the fall and early winter have been dominated by...medical school interviews.

It looks like we're finally out of the woods there, and Elliott's lucky to have acceptances from some great schools. The next big sigh of relief will come when we have a final decision made about where we'll be spending the next four years.

Which reminds me of another recent adventure. Back in November Elliott was en route from Ohio (interview) to New York (interview). Coming around a dark bend in the freeway at 75mph, a deer suddenly materialized in his headlights.

I was in Boston for work when my phone rang and Elliott said, more or less, "The car is totaled. I'm okay. I just hit a deer. My phone's about to die, I've got to go." The second sentence helped, but that's still not a call you ever want to get.

As he claimed, Elliott was okay, the car was not. Elliott drove home in a rental but once we had to give that back, it was no-car-time for us. But both of us take the bus/metro to work every day, so we figured it wouldn't be that bad to hold off on buying a new car. Seeing that where we ended up going to med school (NYC vs. Ohio vs. Houston) would seriously influence our vehicle of choice, we signed up for a zipcar account and bought ourselves some time before we have to make that decision.

For Thanksgiving, Elliott's whole family (minus one sister and brother-in-law) converged on DC. For three days, there were 12 people in our one bedroom apartment. We have one bathroom. We have a microwave-size countertop oven. We have a two burner stove. It was cozy. And it was a lot of fun.

We live almost perfectly central to Elliott's family but couldn't be much less so to mine. Our Christmas trip to Alaska was scheduled to take 17 hours on the way there, 12 on the way back. The trip home was a pretty good estimate. The trip there was off by...almost 24 hours. Most of which was spent in Seattle, waiting for the storm to pass and de-icing fluid to arrive. Nothing says holiday cheer like SeaTac a la hurricane-shelter Superdome. We were among the very lucky ones and couldn't have been happier to get out when we did.

We had a good time in Alaska. Elliott got to meet my brother who's been gone on a mission (and Jeffrey concedes I chose well), I got to show off my cross-country skiing skills (Elliott was as good as me by the end of the morning), we went sledding, we got to help my parents celebrate their 30th anniversary, and we got to celebrate Christmas with my entire family. While our downhill skiing trip had to be canceled (nothing says "indoors" like -20^o), we got to experience that post-workout soreness that only comes from three days of the Wii.

We traveled home the day of the 31st and, because of a short flight delay, we weren't able to make it to downtown DC by midnight like we'd hoped. Instead we headed toward home and unlocked our door just as we heard the downstairs neighbors counting down. We dropped the suitcases with just enough time for a New Years' kiss.

And with that, we'll call it a year.