Australia Itinerary

We are on our way to Australia tomorrow night, New Years Eve.  We will leave LA in the evening of the 31st and get into Melbourne the morning of Jan 2, so we are skipping New Years Day this year.  We will spend 3 nights in Melbourne at the Hotel Tolarno in the beach-y area of the city.  We are renting a car and plan on driving the Great Ocean Road.  We also will drive to Phillip Island to watch fairy penguins come out of the water and treck back to their burrows.

We will then head to the Great Barrier Reef for 5 nights and stay at a Fruit Farm about 2 and 1/2 hours north of Cairns.  This B&B consists of just 2 cottages perched in the trees and uses solar power.  For breakfast, we will be eating exotic fruit grown on the farm.  We are super excited about this place.  We will be hopefully diving on the reef and doing some hiking in the Daintree Rainforest.

We will end our trip in Sydney and stay 6 nights with one of Mike's friends, Jon Reyes.  We plan on going to an Opera at the Sydney Opera House, visiting Hunter Valley (wine area), visiting the Blue Mountains, and just exploring Sydney.

We look forward to sharing our photos when we get back!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Merry Christmas!

We hope everyone had a nice Christmas!!


We spent Christmas in Illinois this year with my dad.  We also spent a lot of time with my best friend, Nicki, and her family.  Our travels went pretty smoothly even though there was an ice storm up there before we left and snow while we were there.  It started snowing on Christmas day!  I was so excited to have a White Christmas.  It's been a long time since I've seen snow on Christmas.  Mike really could care less, although I'm sure he enjoyed the couple of days of snow knowing we would be coming back to San Diego.  


On Saturday, we took my dad and his girlfriend, Deanna, into Chicago to see Blue Man Group and to eat some deep dish pizza at Gino's.  


We only took a couple of photos using our phone while we are in Chicago:

The Nutcracker and Carols By Candlelight

We had a nice Christmas-y weekend.  We took Mike's grandmother to see the Nutcracker.  We always like to take her to a Christmas program every year. 


We also went to Carols By Candlelight.  It's a concert that has been held every year for the past 20 years and the event raises money for local children's charities.  We bought our tickets through a local radio station, so we got meet and greet passes also.  We got autographs from all the performers and a couple of photos.


After the show, everyone gets a candle and goes outside to sing Silent Night.  This was the first year it rained the night of the show, but everyone still stood outside under umbrellas singing Silent Night.

Leann Rimes

Bucky Covington

Autographs from Leann Rimes, Bucky Covington, Little River Band, Buck Howdy, and Jordan Pruitt.

I have no idea which signature belongs to everyone.  We weren't really interested in autographs, just a couple of photos, but didn't want to be the only ones going down the line not getting autographs.

Brittney's Senior Photos

Theresa's sister, Brittney, had her senior photos taken recently by our wedding photographer, Kelley.  Kelley, of course, did a fabulous job!

Happy Thanksgiving

We hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.  We spent ours in Missouri visiting Mike's family.  We had some delicious turkey and smoked ham with all the fixins....mmmmm!  We also went to the KU-Missouri football game at Arrowhead on Saturday.  It's a bummer KU lost, but it was a fun day spent with family.

San Diego Zoo's Baby Panda

The San Diego Zoo has a new baby panda that was born in August. I love Pandas and I love going online to watch the little one. It's especially cute when the mom comes in to tend to the little guy. If you wanna see something that'll put a smile on your face, go check it out.

http://www.sandiegozoo.org/pandacam/index.html

Just look how cute they are:

K-Club Weekend

We flew back to Kansas this past weekend for K-Club (Former KU Athletes) weekend at KU. We usually go back for this every year. It's a weekend for Mike to meet up with his former swimmer teammates, as well as other friends living in the area.

Group photo of swimmers and divers at the tailgate.

Mike, Alex, Quincy, and Brant at the tailgate.

Mike and Matt at Johnny's

Mike and Jen at Quintons

KU-Duke game

Before heading back home, we were able to stop by Brant's house to see his son, Aidan. He's such a cutie!

Labor Day Weekend in Napa Valley

Napa Valley during Labor Day tends to be hot and crowded, that's what I'd heard anyway. It seemed to be neither this year, once again our travel luck was with us. We were having some pretty warm, humid weather in San Diego before we left. Once we landed in Oakland and stepped outside, we were hit with some "cold" air. Ahhh, it was so nice! I ended up having to buy a sweater in Napa, because it was a little cool at night.

We got to Napa on Friday and visited the tasting rooms in downtown Napa. Saturday and Sunday, we visited wineries in the valley. Napa Valley is gorgeous with lots of wine and lots of great restaurants! Next time we visit, we are thinking of staying in Calistoga.

We didn't take as many pictures as we normally do, pretty much just one day, but if you are interested, they are all here: Napa Photos.

I read a book before our trip and it helped me learn a lot about wine and winemaking. It is a great book that is informative and funny at the same time. The book goes through 2 guys' personal experience at several tasting rooms, but then will break away to educate you about wine. If anyone is interested it is called A Moveable Thirst.

Our Summer

I decided I needed to make a post, can't believe I've neglected the blog for 2 months. Does anyone ever read this anymore now that we are all on facebook? Even my parents are on there.

Well, we spent most of our summer enjoying San Diego. It has been really humid lately and I'm looking forward to our fall. We usually have several visitors in the summer as well, this year Mike's mom and sister and a few of his friends came to visit. We made a trip to Napa Valley over Labor Day weekend and had a great time. I'll post some photos next week.

Mike currently has a friend in town and we went out for a walk on the beach last night and caught one of the best sunsets I've seen in a while. We see a lot of great sunsets (as we post a lot of pictures of them), but this one was just amazing!

San Onofre Camping

Campsites in the campgrounds along the beaches are hard to come by in the summertime. They are all usually reserved far in advance. We ended up getting a spot last night at San Onofre. We could only get the one night, but we had a great time.

Last night's sunset, we love our sunset pictures!

San Onofre Nuclear Station (aka "The Boobs") in the distance.

San Onofre Beach, lots of surfers.

After our night of camping fun, we went to San Clemente for lunch and to walk on the pier.

Mike Completed His First 70.3 Triathalon

Last weekend, Lawrence held the second Ironman 70.3. For those that aren't familiar that's a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and 13.1 mile run. Mike participated and finished in 5 hours and 10 minutes. I was out there to cheer him on all day.

Transition 1 - where they come out of the lake and grab their bike.

Mike and Mike suited up for the swim.

The beginning of the swim course at Clinton Lake.
Mike coming to the end of the bike course.
Mike running to the finish line.

Alaska Photos

We had a wonderful time on our cruise. The scenery up there is gorgeous. I'm glad we got to see the glaciers, those were definitely the highlight of our trip and the real reason we chose to go on the cruise. We saw Hubbard Glacier from 400 feet away on the ship and we hiked on Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau. It's amazing how much of the Mendenhall Glacier has retreated , even since the 70s. Hubbard Glacier is constantly moving, so we got to see a lot of calving and hear lots of "White Thunder" (when the ice breaks off it sounds like thunder).

We saw some wildlife, including several Bald Eagles and a mountain goat. We did not get to see any bears although there were 2 spotted on our train ride in Skagway. We were in one of the last cars, so they were out of sight by the time we came around.

If you want to see more pictures, you can check out our web album.

Our ship anchored in Icy Strait Point. The Hubbard Glacier

Hiking on the Mendenhall Glacier

Water flowing through the glacier

An Eagle's nest

Alaska Bound

We are off to Alaska on Monday for our 11 night cruise. We have a balcony room at the end of the ship. We have booked our excursions and plan to go hiking on a glacier in Juneau, visit the Misty Fjords, and have a private tour of Skagway. We end our cruise in Vancouver and plan to stay there 2 nights before flying back home.

5 Mile Hike

It was a warm, sunny day and we took advantage of it by going on a little hike in a canyon preserve close to our house. Mike has a cool little GPS watch that calculates our time and distance, check out our stats at this link.

We came across some cute ducklings...
And the protector of the ducklings. He came out of the water and just stood there as if to make sure we didn't get too close.Some cool vegetation...And a juvenile rattlesnake...I was a little nervous to walk around him, but finally did so after 2 other people came by and walked passed him like it was no big deal.