New Project

So, a while back, my Hubby and I traveled to the Marshall Islands, which is nearly to Australia. It's funny planning a trip like that from a distance. It's a rather remote and really small place that doesn't have a ton in the way of tourism (and the little bit of info to be found online, we found on arrival, isn't exactly current or necessarily correct).. but we got around just fine and it was an amazing experience neither of us will ever forget.

Since the info to be found on stuff to do in the Marshall Islands was limited, I wasn't 100% sure what to expect, and when planning I tried to manage expectations and not set my heart on doing any one specific thing. And, as it turned out, there were some things we wanted to do which we got to do and some we didn't.

However, one thing that I really wanted to do was collect some sea shells. I'm not sure why exactly, but there was something special about the idea of bringing home pieces of the ocean from halfway around the world that made shell collecting more appealing than if we were to stop at some beach on this continent to collect shells.

We stayed, for the most part, on Majuro. We drove from end to end and took walks as well. What sort of surprised me was how unsandy the beaches were there. I suppose it's from watching too much LOST, but I always pictured remote islands to have gorgeous sandy beaches, and Majuro really didn't.

But, then, we went to Eneko. This was basically a little sandbar of an island, about 30mins by boat from Majuro, which our hotel used as a resort for its guests (probably the only place my Hubby and I went where my brother - who lived there 2 years, hadn't been). Here was the sandy beach and the littering of shells of my imagination. It was simply gorgeous.

And, so I gathered up handfuls of shells and brought them back to Chicago with me. My objective: create a mobile with the shells as my own souvenir from our trip. Then, for Christmas, my Hubby gave me a Dremel (oh baby, you know what I like!) making the dream of creating a sea shell mobile possible. I'm so excited to get started!!