A very TWILIGHT Birthday

Hey guys trilled  to have these to galls along to talk about birthday Twi-Ventureswith Rebecca Gober and Courtney Nuckels (Co-Authors of the Night Marchers series)

            We are so thrilled that The Book Mystress is allowing us to join in on the birthday festivities this month! When we were offered the opportunity to do a guest post to help ring in this great 1st birthday event, we jumped at the chance. Before we go on with our guest post we would like to start this off right so we need everyone's help... Grab your favorite party hat and a slice of cake (don't worry calories don't count on birthdays...) and join us with your best- slightly off pitch (well at least if you are like me)- singing voice:

♬♪HaPpY BiRtHdAy to you,  HaPpY BiRtHdAy to you, HaPpY BiRtHdAy dear Book Mystress, HaPpY BiRtHdAy to you! ♬♪

            When The Book Mystress gave us the prompt to write a guest post about Birthday Memories we were thinking, man this should be easy-peasy! Being BFI's (that is Best Friends Infinitely), we have celebrated 16 years of fun filled birthdays together. Our birthdays are less than a month apart and with our unusually strong gift for finding trouble when together, many of our celebration memories (or exploits) are extremely colorful. The hardest part of deciding what to write about with this prompt is picking just one memory. Should we talk about the time when we hitched a ride across a lake on some random strangers canoe in search for some burgers? Or the time we snuck out during a sleepover only to have the living daylights scared out of us on our return home when Courtney's mom jumped out between two cars in the driveway? She so caught us red handed! Oh and there was that time when we nearly got lost during a birthday hiking trip in Montana and could have sworn we heard a bear in the woods. All of these were certainly memorable but I have to say that the most memorable birthday happened only this past year...

            As avid fans of YA fiction this past year we got to take the pilgrimage of all stalker pilgrimages to Forks, WA and Vancouver, Canada for an early birthday present to ourselves. Along with our bestie, Annie Brewer (who also happens to be an aspiring author), we set forth last year on an adventure of a lifetime. Knowing that Breaking Dawn was due to film the following week, we decided to start our fun in Vancouver. After doing boo coos of research we found some estimated locations for the Cullen's house (from New Moon) and Jacob's house. We started off with the Cullen's house, which was actually for sale at the time, and boy you should have heard Annie scream when we first saw it. It was awesome; I wish I had a tape recorder.  Anyhow, we enjoyed seeing the house but with it being in the middle of a fully developed neighborhood the sight didn't really pack the punch like we thought it would. Even though we sort of ignored the rope and no trespassing sign to steal this shot...

            After a few minutes of ogling the place where Robert Pattinson had once called his 'fake' home, we headed in search of Jacob's home. This one was a little trickier since we only had a street name, which we heard through the grapevine. (Let me tell you, these addresses aren't readily available, you have to stalk people on Twitter, look up past blog posts, ask complete strangers etc. to find them.) When we finally found Jacob's home we were all screaming and jumping up and down like grade-schoolers. Jacob's house looks just like it does in the movie. If you look at the picture below, you can just imagine Taylor Lautner morphing into a wolf in the background.

From left to right: Courtney, Annie, Beckie

            To top off our visit to the Black's residence, we picked the perfect time to show up and ended up striking gold! We ran into a paid tour guide who was there with a group as well as the owner of Jacob's house. We got the scoop there, the big prize that we had been looking for, the location of our next sight, Bella's house. When we found Bella's house, we originally weren't sure if we should get out of the car since there were a few men standing outside. (We didn't know if they were security.) Anyhow, we mustered up the nerve to approach them in an attempt to get close up pictures of the home. We ended up meeting two of the stunt men and a locations crewmember. Like the total dorks that we are (proud of it), we begged the locations guy to take pics of us in front of Bella's house. The locations guy was so nice, he appeased us, allowed us to talk his ear off and gave us each a leaf from the fake tree that is set right outside Bella's bedroom window. What a keepsake right? By the way, they call the tree, Jacob's tree since it's the one he climbs in New Moon to get into her window.

            We would love to go on talking about our memorable birthday- Twilight road trip adventure but we don't want to take the spotlight off the birthday girl (The Book Mystress); with us rambling on with too horribly long of a post. So we will share just the highlights of the remainder of our road trip to Forks: We found Port Angeles and took pictures in front of Bella Italia, stalked the Dazzled by Twilight stores, made fools of our selves in front of the Welcome to Forks sign, begged the Forks information hostess to allow us to take pictures inside Bella's truck bed (she obliged, what a rocking lady,) and completed the full Twilight Forks scavenger hunt.

            After which we headed to La Push where there happens to be a real sign that says: Treaty Line, No Vampires beyond this point. We combed through First Beach and topped it off with a hike to Second Beach where we ended up stranded in the woods with no flashlight in the middle of the night all alone singing Jesus Loves Me to keep our fears at bay. (PS: The night hike was all Courtney's fault, we came out of it exhausted, thankful to have survived and covered in mud. We looked absolutely ridiculous checking into the hotel that night. In addition, the hotel room only had one double sized bed for the three of us. Thanks a lot Courtney! :)  The picture below though was worth the nightmare. What an unforgettable sunset to top off our journey and one of our best birthday memories ever!

We want to say thank you again to The Book Mystress for letting us crash her party. Thank you to all of you awesome reading enthusiasts for sharing in our memories. We can't wait to see what this next year has in store for this amazing blog.

Also, as a present to you all, we have made our first book Night Marchers free for this event. In addition, we donated some copies of Redemption, our second Night Marchers book and some signed bookmarks for some of The Book Mystress's giveaways! We hope you win one!

Love Always,

Rebecca Gober and Courtney Nuckels

Co-Authors of The Night Marchers Series

www.nightmarchersbook.com

www.facebook.com/nightmarchers

Get Night Marchers Free on Amazon and in all e-reader formats at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/96612