The Ohrvalls | The Life and Times of

I know it has been a long time since I last posted anything on here.  There has been a lot going on, and not going on here in Guam.  Honestly, I have just been lazy for a few weeks with blog posts.  But I am trying to get myself back into the groove now. So Christmas in Guam was unlike any other Christmas I have ever experienced in my life.  While I am used to light displays, yards covered in plastic and inflatable ornaments, and cold weather, we didn't get much of that here.  There were only a couple houses that actually put out Christmas decorations and the temperature here was the same as always, a steady mid-to-upper 80 degrees during the day.  Needless to say it was a little difficult getting into the Christmas spirit.  But Christmas did come and go like it always does! This year Matthew and I decided to take it easy on gift giving because we are planning a trip to China in the new year.  We got ourselves one big gift (a Keurig machine) a...

It is inevitable that here in Guam you will have just as many good hikes as you do bad ones.  Well our hike with the church youth and a  few adults turned into a little bit of both and then a lot of ugly! We started off our day meeting everyone to got the the start of the trail at about 8:15 in the morning on a Saturday morning. (This was last Saturday the 7th.)  We piled into a few cars and the 3 Jeeps that were going to go into the trail and rode to the start of the hiking trail.  We split into groups of hikers and riders but since there was hardly any riders (and I was interested to see what it would be like to ride a jeep into the trail) I hopped into a Jeep and rode with them.  We had a few hiccups on our way in but overall we made it through the first 1/2 mile easily until we stumbled upon this: Well I shouldn't say stumbled because this group of people are the hikers that we split up from in the first place.  They had reached a muddy section...

A couple weekends ago Matthew and I went ventured out and did a Jungle tour on UTVs.  It was arguably the most fun that either one of us has had since we have been here on Guam.  We got to drive our own UTV (Matthew did most of the driving) through the jungle and over the red dirt in the rural areas of Guam.  We went to the Tarzan Falls in the southern portion of the island and we got to see the falls from the top and then hike down to the bottom to see it from there too!  We spent a little over 2 hours riding around and feeling like we were almost going to tip over the UTV at some points.  It was awesome!  We went through mud, did doughnuts in dry red dirt, and got stuck going over huge ruts and rocks. I posted a few videos on youtube since this blog was giving me a hard time with uploading them. Here are the links to see them: http://youtu.be/EBguu1kmpAA http://youtu.be/KaVOgvJPUOc ...

I know it has been a while since I posted but there are good reasons for that!  I finally got jobs!  Yes, I said jobs as in plural.  I am now tutoring 2 students and substitute teaching at Guam High School.  So since it has been so long since I last posted anything I need to go back and tell you all what Matthew and I did for Thanksgiving. We knew that we were not going to be going home this year so we decided to find something to do so that we weren't sitting around missing family.  We decided upon volunteering at the USO to help others during their time away from family.  Nothing makes you feel better than helping someone else when they are in the same basic situation that they are.  At first we were supposed to man the drink station but then there was much more need in the back preparing the food.  We shuffled back there and Matthew got to work carving Hams and I was in charge of distributing and covering the trays that held the carved turkey...