Catch-up Post

It's been a while since I've posted a "normal" post, so I need to catch up on all the things we've been up to in the last couple months. Overall, it's been a good winter/spring and we are trilled summer is finally here!

This picture should've been in my last post. This was taken Christmas morning at the LeBlanc Family get-together at The Gibeault's. We missed Todd and Tim, but it was still a good time.

This winter was pretty decent for snowboarding and I was able to get up to the mountains a handful of times to go snowboarding. I only had my camera with me on two of those trips. On one of those days, Andra called in sick and we went up to Crystal for a twin-date. It was a lot of fun and I think we should go just me and her more often. No boys to slow us down and make us take breaks.

Us all geared up and ready to go.

Riding up the lift on a perfect blue bird day.

Rock on!

Me attempting a 180....I totally didn't land it. Haha.

These ones I did land!

Andra enjoying the sunny day

I also went up to Steven's Pass one day with Bon. We didn't take many pictures. We boarded for about 6 hours straight, no time for pictures!
We've added a couple new cars to our fleet since the last time I posted. The first one is our 1969 Nova. It's in pretty rough shape (interior) and needs quite a bit of restoring. Jaime's done a little work on it but he's been more caught up in the 1968 Chevelle.
We also had a bit of a loss in our vehicle situation. Jaime and I were on our way to a cabin in Easton during the winter and decided to take the old Bronco in case we wanted to do some 4-wheeling while we were out there. When we got into North Bend, it all of a sudden started shaking violently on the freeway going about 65 mph! It was really scary, but Jaime was able to get it to an off-ramp. We had to get it towed back to our house, and then we switched cars and headed back out to the cabin for a nice relaxing weekend.

The Bronco needs a new motor so we'll probably scrap it. We got our $200 worth of fun out of it, besides Jaime has enough projects as it is.

Here are a couple pictures from our weekend trip to the Easton cabin.

View of the partially frozen lake from the state park at Lake Easton.
Here is the cabin we stayed at. It snowed 7 inches over night the first day we were there.

Went for a walk around the lake and forgot sunglasses, here's Jaime squinting. haha.

With the loss of the Bronco, we needed a vehicle to tow our bikes so we started looking into getting a truck. We've still got the old '66 Chevy, but its not the best truck to take across the mountains for our summer camping trips so we needed something more practical. I've always been a fan of Toyota trucks! They're pretty much bullet-proof and they look good too. We decided to save up for a while and put a good down payment on a 2006 Toyota Tacoma SR5 4x4. We got a 4 door for whenever little rugrats come along. It's a sweet truck!

As many of you know, Jaime and I are both huge fans of Supercross. This year was INSANE! It was the craziest season of Supercross I've ever seen, in a good way. Don't even get me started on James Stewart and how ridiculously lame he is because I can go on for hours.

Our annual Supercross party for the first race of the season.

Supercross came here to Seattle in April and it couldn't have come quick enough. We spent all day in Seattle hanging out in the pits and watching some qualifying races.

Me sporting my team Two Two hoodie! I've always been a huge fan of Chad Reed and even more so now that he has started his own team with his own money. That guy has got more heart than almost every other racer out there. Plus, out of all the bikes he could be riding, he chose a Honda! These sold out really fast and I was able to get my hands on one for both me and Jaime.

Me and Jaime all bundled up before the race starts at Qwest Field.

Ariel view of the pits at Seattle race.

Trey Canard broke his femur in a practice race a bit before the race in Seattle. So since he wasn't racing, the Honda guys let people climb up and sit on his bike.

I'd probably kill myself on this bike.

Jaime is a big fan of Jeremy McGrath. Here's him posing with his bike.

Seattle was an ok race, even though weaksauce-Stewart got 1st. He's a fast rider, as long as he doesn't lose control and crash into other racers which seems to happen about 75% of the time. I was really happy though because one of my other favorite riders, Kevin Windham, got 2nd and Chad Reed got 3rd.

In the beginning of the season, I bought tickets for the Supercross finals in Vegas in early May. Thankfully I got them early, because they sold out pretty quick with the season turning out to be so dramatic. We took a little time off work and flew down to Vegas for a couple days. It was my first time to Vegas ever. The race was awesome but Vegas is SO LAME! I honestly don't understand why people rave about it so much! It's such a dirty, filthy, boring place. Maybe it's cause I don't drink, gamble, or "party" all night. Everyone there was drunk 24/7 and stumbling over themselves while yelling and getting in chest-bumping matches with other drunks. What a joke. If I ever go back to Vegas for another Supercross event or something, I will not be staying on the strip. We still had a good time and just had to ignore the stupidity all around us. It was good to go somewhere where the sun was shining!!! I think it was between 90-100 degrees the whole weekend we were there. Jaime got a little fussy, but I loved the heat.

We stayed here at the Luxor. We had an amazing room with a beautiful view of the city and mountains.

The Supercross race took place at Sam Boyd stadium. We got there at about noon and stayed until 10:30pm. Long day, but it went by so fast.

Jaime with a sweet Toyota dirtbike.

Watching the qualifying races, trying to keep cool in the shade and with ice slushies.

Me with a Thor Toyota truck. Too bad they weren't giving it away.

Old school Honda

Rockstar trophy truck
Jaime with an old Honda

Jaime in the classic bikes trailer

While we were walking around the pits, we saw Justin Barcia (who is my favorite Lites rider). I told Jaime to go ask him for a picture, but instead he did a creeper shot. He told me to wait till he was walking past him and then take the picture. Haha..it cracks me up. Jaime said he didn't want to bother him because he had just got done riding a qualifying race.

Ricky Carmichael and Ryan Dungey.

Ryan Villopoto ended up winning the championship title and my boy Chad Reed got 2nd. Not bad for his first year running his own team. We had a great time and hope to go back for the finals next spring!

All loaded up in the new truck on our way out to Tahuya.

Me, Jaime and Kevin taking a quick break. Brent and Aaron are just out of the picture.

Stopping off to eat massive amounts of food on our way home after a hard day's ride.

On May 14th, our 20 year old kitty Zolta passed away. My mom called me and said that Aaron had noticed her acting different, J'll spare you the details. But it was alarming enough that they took her to the vet immediately. This cat has only had to go to the vet ONCE that I can remember in her life. She's always been very healthy. So this scared me quite a bit knowing how old and frail she's gotten in the last few years. About an hour later I heard the news, she had to be put down. It was very sad. We've had this cat as a part of our family since 1992.

Here's the first picture we have of her after we found her wandering in our backyard.

This one was taken about a year & 1/2 ago and probably one of the last pictures I have of me holding her.

And here is a nice portrait of her. We miss her so much already but know she is much happier where she can run and play again. RIP Zolta kitty.

This year we found out that our regular spot for Memorial Day weekend wasn't going to work out. All of the dirtbike trails are closed until June 15th at the earliest because of all the late snow. I did some research and found there are some trails out by Lake Wenatchee that would be open up until you hit snow. A few weeks before Memorial Day, we drove out there to scout it out and look for campsites. The lake is gorgeous! But the beach is always very windy and pretty chilly.

Me and Andra hiding from the wind.

Memorial Day weekend this year was a huge success. Everyone was all worried about the weather which turned out to be just fine. We had a few times where it sprinkled for 10 minutes or so and that was it. Party cloudy the rest of the weekend.

Here's the truck loaded up on our way over Stevens Pass.

Ree & Leanne's truck and ours.

Pit stop at Safeway for morning doughnuts.

We ended up finding a better site than the one we originally found a few weeks before. The new site was right next to the trailhead of the trail we'd be riding most of the weekend. It was also large enough to fit the 20+ people that were coming out. (Believe me, its not easy finding a campsite that large!)

Here's part of the site where we called "tent city." And this is only about 1/2 of the tents.

Sitting around the campfire.

Dustin, Jaime and Franco working on one of the bikes.

Jaime about to take Elliot for a ride. Ree holding Matthew who was patiently waiting his 50th turn.

Jaime and Matthew. This little boy is crazy!! I love him! He wanted to be riding on Jaime's dirtbike the whole time. I've never seen a little guy love riding on a dirtbike that much. He's fearless.

Brent, Jaime, me, Leanne and Aaron on a ride (Aaron taking picture) Leanne hadn't been on a bike since 2008 and she did amazing!!! I was impressed with her skills after taking a few years off.

Brent and Jaime.

Me and Leanne in background.

Jaime popping wheelies in the camp site.

Good thing he did this before more people showed up because this whole area was covered in tents a couple hours later.

On Friday, the weather was nice all morning and then out of nowhere, a huge wind storm came through. It lasted only about 7-10 minutes but it knocked tons of trees down. It actually knocked a tree down about 25 yards from our campsite!! It literally shook the ground when it hit, it felt like an earthquake. I have to admit I was a little scared after that watching all the trees above us swaying and hearing trees going down all over the place. Thankfully the storm was short-lived.

Here's the guys hauling the tree out of the woods that fell near our site. It was dead and dry so we used it for firewood!

We found out a few hours later that the storm knocked down trees on the Forest service road to get to our campsite. Jaime saved the day with his chainsaw. Him and the guys drove down there and started hacking away at the trees.

Here's an awesome HDR photo Aaron did that shows how pretty the Lake Wenatchee area is. This picture was taken along the trail we were dirtbiking on.

That's all for now....Here's a picture of me and Jaime from a couple months ago. I don't straighten my hair often so this is a rare photo!