Honeymoon

A few months ago we started talking about our honeymoon. It took a few different ideas, but finally we thought of the perfect plan. Go on a semi-unplanned road trip with the motorcycle. 

For the sake of record keeping, we took a quick pic of the odometer before we left. 

Nimrod, all packed and ready to roll.

It was an amazing trip. We did a lot of things. 

We rode on our motorcycle... 

We went to the end of the road, South Padre Island, TX...

We got a little windblown a few times... 

We rented fat bikes and rode down the beach for hours... 

We were very much in love... 

We watch the sun set over the ocean... 

We endured a 93 degrees and sunny day of riding across Texas... 

We found our namesake...

We ate amazing food.... 

We camped a lot.... 

We rode out over Lake Pontchartrain... 

We watched the sun set over New Orleans... 

We enjoyed being married.... 

We canoed in the Louisiana swamp (and saw a baby gator)...

We ate amazing BBQ in Birmingham... 

We went out on the town on music row in Nashville... 

We saw some beautiful cars.... 

We toured Mammoth Cave.... 

We camped in Mammoth Cave National Park... 

We outran some storms...

We drank a lot of chocolate milk... 

We kayaked into a cave... 

And in a storm... 

We dropped by St. Louis... 

We looked out at the world from the top of the arch...

And finally rode off into the sunset. 

We came home quite sun kissed and happy. 

12 days, 3700 miles, and 13 states later, it was a spectacular honeymoon. 

A Lake Sunset

A lake sunset is a perfect occasion for taking your little brothers out in the canoe. 

And to let your fiancé use your iPhone to take cool pictures of you while you are doing so. 

We each only get so many sunsets, catch as many as you can. 

Jason Aldean and Horses...

We had a pretty fun and full weekend. After spending Friday and Saturday on wedding prep while Josh was at work, I was more than happy to dress up and take him out for his early birthday present. Jason Aldean and Jake Owen in concert!!

Ok, maybe he took me on the motorcycle, but still. 

It was a sold out show and the place was packed! Once we found our seats, my mother's side of my genetic material came out and I was cheering and dancing and screaming with the best of them. :) 

Sunday I didn't have work so we made the trek out to visit Uncle Doug and Aunt Sherry. In addition to having cows, a barn, chickens and wide open spaces that made me feel right at home, they have horses! This would be yours truly on a horse for the first time in like 10 years. 

When I was a teenager riding horses for hours on end I used to imagine how nice it would be to go horseback riding with some guy who liked me. Yep, it is pretty much even better than I imagined. The perfect way to spend our last day off together before we get married in t-13 days! 

The Wabash Bike Ride

This post could also be entitled "The Recycle Bike Shop Epic Century" as well as quite a few other things, but I figured I would save the epic-ness for the actual post instead of just the title. A few weekends ago, the guys from the shop as well as Josh and myself set out to ride our bikes down the Wabash trail from Council Bluffs to Shenandoah. The goal was to ride the 45-50 miles out, camp and cook out, then ride back the next day. 

The Wabash is a beautiful trail and we had experience with the first 15 miles of it from the Taco Ride last summer. This being the first bikepacking trip for all of us, we were pretty stoked. 

It was also Baby Jayne's first time out of the garage since last year. We got a bit of a late start, but headed off, enjoying the weather, the scenery and our company. 

Pulled off at Minneola for a rest break. Minneola is the home of the famous Tacos for which the Taco Ride is named after. Pushing past Minneola, the trail became much less traveled. Eventually it became so sandy there were a few times we had to get off and push the bikes while leaving footprints in the sand. 

We did get a few hours of nice weather and lovely scenery. Then, about the time it got dark it also started to rain. We struggled on through the ever increasingly muddy trail and the last 12 miles took us almost 2 hours because of how horrendous the trail had become. I was never so happy to see the lights of a city as I was to see Shenandoah rise up out of the darkness about midnight. 

Rolling into a very asleep town at midnight thirty, soaked to the bone with no idea where the campground is always makes for good times. We found this shelter (which turned out to be where we were supposed to camp anyway, we just didn't know it) and moved the picnic tables to set up our tents. Of course there was no grilling out during a downpour, so we did our best with cooking over our little camp stoves until we all ran out of fuel. With the food we had managed to cook settling in our bellies, we crawled into wet sleeping bags and conked out. 

Josh and I had to leave earlier than the rest of the group the next day because I had to be at work by 3. After our experience with the trail and the rain the night before we decided to take the highway back. We got directions and a very hazy map from a gentleman in Shenandoah and gave it our best shot. The awesome thing about the highway was that it was paved, so we could make much better time and not sink in like on the trail. The tough thing was the hills. Baby Jayne (like a typical tandem) really grinds her way up hills and we used our granny gear more than once. The rolling hills and the fog made us think of what it would be like to bikepack in Ireland or Scotland. 

We met up with the trail again at Silver City and did the last 15 miles back the way we had come. Sure was nice to be on flat again and once we got within 5 miles we could almost smell home and put the pedals down. Literally. My phone was pretty fogged up from all the moisture it had been through on the trip, hence the fuzzy pictures. We counted it up and between riding out and back and a few little side tours, we went 100 miles. My legs were pretty sore, but it was a blast. I knew I had lost my mind when, while struggling up a hill, I heard my own voice saying, "You know, we should bikepack through Ireland sometime...." Many thanks to Mike Turman from Recycle Bike Shop for taking the awesome pictures (the not blurry ones)!

This Week

This week is only half way done, but already it has been full. One of the most exciting things is Josh got us a new camera. I was super excited to see how it worked taking pictures inside, hence the following snapshots. 

"Let me just see if this thing works" turned into getting a perfect shot of the same questioning face my Dad always made when I tried to feed him leftovers. Such good guys, even after questioning they both happily eat whatever I put on the table, no matter how interesting it looks... 

25 more days and the school mistress will be banished forever. So proud of this guy and how smart he is. :) 

An upcoming wedding coupled with occasional bursts of better weather mean back to running and working out for this girl. There are not pictures of Josh and his team taking the championship in the church basketball league or of me and two lovely ladies trekking out to Wahoo to find another wedding dress (long story, the first one came in on order over the weekend and the company that is now out of business sent the wrong dress, good news, I have a dress and God really provided) which would be the two highlights of the week hence far.  And there you have it. The top three pictures Emily gets within two days of having a camera again... 

Last Week...

I know I haven't been blogging much lately. But I have been super busy. To put it mildly. I had a chance to sit down and write out just a few of the things I did last week, to show that while I might not be blogging, I am certainly not just sitting around doing nothing either... :D 

Last week I:

• Rode my bike 10 miles to my fiance's house
• Worked on changing the spark plugs in a truck for 3 hours (in the freezing cold I might add)
• Put 50 hours into the work time card
• Planned my wedding ceremony
• Cheered for my MVP/All League basketball player
• Gained a pound for the wedding :) 
• Had breakfast with two of my three summer co-workers (summer starts at Compass June 3rd!)
• Met with some of my favorite Goal Buddies from Partnership for Our Kids and got a whole stack of "Thank you for helping us meet our goals!" cards
• Cheered for Creighton in their last game of the season
• Taught 4 art classes at 2 different schools
• Bought my shoes for the wedding
• Sat out on my deck and watched my man use his new grill to make the most delicious chicken I have eaten in ages
• Bought a wedding ring
• Was told by a random stranger that from now on I should tell everyone I am from Mississippi, because all the pretty girls are from there
• Went to dinner with my (almost) brother and sister-in-law from WI and my darling (almost) niece
• Drove home for the first time in 2 months to spend Easter Sunday with my family

And since all that was last week, here are two pictures that made me smile from this week. 

Caught telling secrets at the farm... 

Kind of enjoying writing my name these days... 

So there you have it! Just a tiny taste of the whirlwind called my life right now. Please feel free to leave a comment and tell me the highlight of your last week or two! 

A Musing From Compass

                  By the end of next week I will have been officially at Compass for 16 months. Considering how many years others have invested in the ministry that seems like a short time, but it is a long enough time for me to have been challenged and changed. Before I moved to Omaha to work at Compass I had never lived in a town. Much less a city. Much less North O. The first few months I caught myself driving until the city ends and on random country roads just so I could look for miles and not see buildings or hear cars and feel like I was home again. But I quickly grew to love things about my neighborhood and living in the city, such as being able to walk to the store and bike to work. As I learned more about city life and living/working in North Omaha I discovered many things that I loved. But I was also faced with many I did not. Before I moved to North Omaha I thought I knew about troubled kids and hard situations. I am from a broken family myself and was a freshly graduated Education major. I mean, they tell you what you are going to face, right? Before I came to Compass I had some knowledge about statistics, but when I started working here those statistics grew faces. For the first time I knew children who didn’t have enough to eat at home. Children whose parents left them home alone all night. Children afraid to walk home 2 blocks in the dark because of gang violence. And these were not just children on the news or in someone’s mission letter, these were MY kids. The ones I saw every week, who I prayed for, whose teachers I had conferences with, who I laughed with and cried over and who I loved. These were not just situations I heard about, these were MY kids. A few weeks ago I was at a  school, meeting with one of my 1^st graders in a class I help mentor. We have a few minutes to chat one-on-one with the kids and I was asking him about his school attendance. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “I wasn’t here because my Daddy got shot. I was at his funeral.”

                Brandon Heath wrote a Christian song entitled YourLove which talks about how God’s love is all that matters. In one line he says, “Though my innocence was taken, not everything is lost.” Before I came to Compass I was innocent in a way. I had never personally known children whose parents were druggies. Or whose siblings or cousins or parents had been killed by an act of violence. I came from a sleepy little town where no one answered their front door with a gun strapped to their hip. Being at Compass changed all that. My innocence was taken. I saw with my own eyes homeless families, children being drug from one home to another because no one can pay the bills, drug abuse, 10 year olds raising their siblings. But not everything was lost. God gave me a verse this week that greatly encouraged me. 1 John 4:11-12 “Dear friends, since God so loved us, so we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.” We love because He first loved us. We don’t conjure up love and fix the worlds’ problems, we simply allow ourselves to be vessels through which God gives His love to the world. Sometimes it feels like a losing battle. How can I make a difference? My love never can, but God’s love flowing through me is always enough.

                On Sunday afternoons we have Kid’s Church. For an hour or so the kids get to come and learn about Jesus and living for Him. This year we have a student who is a foster child. I don’t know her story, but she has mentioned living in more than one previous foster home. In recent months one of our volunteers decided to start coming every week instead of once a month. This little girl has latched on to the more frequent visits and attached herself to this volunteer like glue. Last Sunday as we were lining up to go home she said to me, “I really like Miss------. She is my favorite person. I love her. I really want her to be in my life.” With tears welling up in the back of my eyes I responded, “She is a part of your life Sweetie, because you can see her every Sunday at Kids Church.” “Oh… yeah!!” and with a smile she was gone.

                My innocence is lost, but not everything is. In fact, much is gained. In the last 16 months I have been given a rare chance to see how little my own efforts can accomplish, and how far God’s love can go when we allow Him to love through us. Even if it is just an hour on Sunday afternoons, when we focus on Him and let Him use us to love, it is always enough.