Alright, before I give you all the great news about New Jersey, i'm going to start by giving you the background information of what has taken place the last 9 months; in the hopes that it will make you appreciated the next post.
As most of you know this past year was our last year at BYU and as time passed Travis and I were trying to decide what we wanted to do after we graduated from BYU. Unfortunately Travis had a few student loans from before we were married so we decided to audition to dance on a cruiseline, since they pay really well and you don't have any expenses while you are there (plus free travel). We were so excited about the idea and started preparing to send in audition videos. (extremely exhausting let me tell you). The worst part wasn't even preparing the dances, it was edition the clips to send in, but after many breakdowns (i had taken some editing classes so i decided to do the work myself) the discs were finally ready to be mailed out. We sent our resume, headshots and video of our dancing to Royal Carribean, Princess and Crystal Cruises (we had never head of Crystal Cruises but decided to send it just becuase we had already put the material together). And then the waiting began...
A few weeks after sending in our videos Travis and I were talking about our future plans and the more we talked to more we realized we didn't actually want to dance on a cruise ship since it meant a minimum of 6 months on the boat at a time and we were eager to begin our professional career. Luckily we decided this on our own, because as time passed we never really heard back from any of the cruise lines.
Around the end of February Travis and I decided LA would be a fun area to live so we began contacting studios in the area to see if they were in need of any new teachers. We came in contact with some great people and around April we set up appointments to check out their studios in June. We were feeling really blessed by this point to have everything work out so smoothly, but decided to keep investigating just to see if anything better came our way. We decided to give a fellow BYU tour team alumnist a call since he left BYU about 6 or so years ago and basically has been able to accomplish everything we want to do (his name is Mayo). So we called Mayo and spoke with him and long story short he told us we should consider moving to New Jersey to work at Roger's Dancsport Center (which is where he started teaching after he left BYU) and gave us the contact information for Gary McDonald. Mid May we called Gary and things sounded promising, we set up a meeting with Gary while we were in Blackpool, England at the beginning of June. We met with him in Blackpool, things were great and we decided to prepare to move to New Jersey and set up a preliminary trip in August to check everything out.
During all of their meetings with Gary we received a call from Crystal Cruises. Crystal Cruises offered us a position as a rotating dance instructor on their cruiseline which means that about once a year they will send us on a cruise (all expenses paid) plus pay us to teach on one of their ships. We were elated!! We are now going on a cruise in September to the Mediterranean and couldn't be more excited (more information to follow).
A week before we were scheduled to fly to New Jersey for a visit we called Gary to just iron out a few details of our trip when we received some less than stellar news. He said that he possibly wouldn't have room for us at his studio anymore, but that he would help us get a position at a nearby studio. While we would still be in the area, the main reason we wanted to move to New Jersey was to actually work at Gary's studio. So needless to say we weren't quite as excited for our trip anymore.
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