It has been a busy 12 months for Susan and me. We moved across the country, took 2 international vacations, sold our house in Cincinnati, and visited a bunch of other areas of the US while attending as many weddings of family and friends as we possibly could. Realizing this, we have decided to recap “our big year” and summarize what is hopefully only a start of many big years to come. It has been quite an adventure, even causing me to grow a beard!
We started our adventure the week before Thanksgiving 2011 with a 2-week trip with Susan’s family to Australia/New Zealand. It was a whirlwind through the land down under.
December brought Christmas with the families in Louisville and Delphos along with New Years the nation’s capital, Washington DC. All the while (and into January), Susan was jet-setting around to internship interviews in Virginia, Delaware, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Kansas, and Oklahoma among others.
January brought our first preview of our future home when we visited Logan, UT just before ranking internship sites. We spent a weekend visiting the Cache Valley, checking out Utah State University, briefly looking at Salt Lake City and Park City (during Sundance film festival). A highlight was visiting the Hardware Ranch and the herd of Elk that reside there in winter.
Cache Valley 
Hardware Ranch
The rest of winter and early spring provided a rest as we were informed that Susan matched at USU. We’d be living in Logan for the next year, so spent much of our time planning our next moves.
As April arrived, I entered my abbreviated racing season with a new PR in the half-marathon at the Derby Festival Mini (sub-1:24). Then we celebrated the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, per usual. My racing season was capped off with the American Triple-T (4 triathlons in 3 days) in late May.
The rest of spring and early summer was spent getting our house ready for the market and packing up for our move across the country. We decided to take advantage of our life change, so I took a leave of absence from work and we abandoned our Cincinnati home to go backpacking in Europe for 2 weeks from late June to early July. We were able to visit with some family abroad while flying and railing all over the place. The European Adventure was exhausting and a ton of fun.
After recovering for a few days at the lake, it was time to go west! We drove across the country in about 3 days, hitting some highlights like the Badlands and the Black Hills.
Instead of settling in to Logan, August instead brought trips back to the Midwest for weddings. Susan was matron of honor in a friend’s wedding in Columbus. Just a week later, I was a groomsman in my sister’s wedding in St. Louis. Once wedding season had passed, we were back out west to get into our new routines.
Since we’ve been out in Utah, we have spent a weekend exploring some national parks in southern Utah, including Zion and Capitol Reef. We also spent another weekend up in Idaho and Wyoming visiting the Tetons.
Capitol Reef and Zion National Parks
Teton National Park
Otherwise, we’ve twice been blessed with visits from family, and have explored the Cache Valley on numerous hikes and at local activities throughout September and October.
Bringing us back to November where we capped off the year with another vacation, this time to Disney World.
EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom, Harry Potter World
A couple interesting tidbits:
Countries we’ve spent time in over the past 365 days = 11 (US, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, France, Hungary, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands)
States we’ve spent time in over the past 365 days = 21(+2 for Susan alone)
Oh yeah, and we’ll be visiting the Pacific Northwest soon (over Thanksgiving)…the adventure never ends.
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