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Monthly Recap: Month 6

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Month 6 brought a lot of changes! We traveled half way around the world to visit home for the holidays. It was wonderful to spend the time with family and friends. Though, we weren’t sure we were ready for all the snow.

Here are our stats for this month.

Countries visited: 2 (Turkey, Ireland, and the USA)

Beds Slept In: 6

UNESCO Heritage Sights Visited: 0  Total on RTW: 34

We traveled by 6 planes this month!

We traveled by 0 trains this month!

We traveled by 0 long distance buses.

Top Moments:

~ We really enjoyed spending time with our families during the holidays. We had assumed we would be figuring out how to get festive on our own somewhere in Asia, but after a change in plans, we had the opportunity to spend some time at home. Lucky us!

Christmas in Dallas
Christmas in Cedar Park
Christmas in Denver

~ During our layover in Dublin on our way home for the holidays, we got a chance to go on a Literary Pub Crawl. It was a great evening filled with laughs, history, and great beer.

Good beer
Literary Pub Crawl

Runners up for Top Moments:

~ We left Turkey very early in the month on our way home. We had a short two hour layover in London on our way to Dublin. It was enough time to grab a quick bite to eat… and a great beer! We were so excited to drink a beer with some flavor!

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Items Missing, Broken, Discarded, or Added and Packing Update:

We were excited to have the opportunity to really re-evaluate the contents of our packs. While we weren’t unhappy with what we had, we hope to adjust some of the clothes, replace things that are worn or stained, and unload some weight. We plan to write a whole blog post about this, so stay tuned!

Books Read: (Have you read any of these??)

Della has read Making Money by Terry Pratchett

Eric has read Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Eric and Della have BOTH read nothing this month.

Oiy… bad month for reading…

Make sure to catch up on all our monthly recaps: Monthly Recap 1, Monthly Recap 2, Monthly Recap 3,Monthly Recap 4, Monthly Recap 5

Flashback Friday: Christmas

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Flashback Friday is a picture series where we “flashback” to some of our favorite memories – from either our prior travel or from home. We hope you’ll enjoy some of our remembrances!

We feel really fortunate that we were able to spend Christmas with our family and friends this year. We weren’t expecting to be able to, which made it that much better!

That being said, we decided to celebrate this flashback Friday with a little throwback!

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Eric celebrates Christmas with his sister Suzanne and their cat, circa 1996

 

Della celebrates Christmas with her sister circa 1993

Della celebrates Christmas with her sister, 1992

Flashback Friday: Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

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Flashback Friday is a picture series where we “flashback” to some of our favorite memories- from either our prior travel or from home. We hope you’ll enjoy some of our remembrances!

This last week, we flew back to the USA. We had a short layover in the Philadelphia airport, which naturally got us thinking about the years we lived in that part of the world! So our flashback for this week is to our visit to Gettysburg in 2009.

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Flashback Friday: Big Bend National Park, Texas

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Flashback Friday is a picture series where we “flashback” to some of our favorite memories- from either our prior travel or from home. We hope you’ll enjoy some of our remembrances!

We are taking a slight break from our travels abroad to spend some time with Eric’s family in Texas. This made us flash back to a wonderful trip we took during spring break of 2011. Eric had been singing the praises of Big Bend National Park for a long time and he finally got Della there… Along with both the Hoffman and Jean parents! This photo is taken from Santa Elena Canyon with the Big Bend Basin in distance. The whole area has unreal desert scenery!

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Flashback Friday: Sunsets over California

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Flashback Friday is a picture series where we “flashback” to some of our favorite memories- from either our prior travel or from home. We hope you’ll enjoy some of our remembrances!

A few weeks ago, we posted a flashback Friday about the amazing sunsets in Africa. It made us think about another amazing sunset that Della has experienced. We also had Della’s sister Dana with us for our adventures recently and she is the one who shared that sunset with Della. We thought we would share it with you! Africa had some awesome sunsets, but maybe its got nothing on California!

This was taken on a road trip from Denver to Dana’s new home in Oakland.

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This one is just to prove we were actually there! 😀

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The Hamptons

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Our flight to New York arrived on Sunday, but our flight to Africa didn’t leave until Wednesday. Luckily, Della’s uncle Richard had graciously offered to let us stay with him and Kathy out at their place in the Hamptons. We figured this would be a great place to relax after all of the stress of packing up the house in June.

We didn’t have a big itinerary in mind for our time out there. Richard and Kathy took us out to eat at Oakland’s restaurant near the inlet, which was fun because we got to sit on the patio and enjoy the sea breeze and views of the boats passing by. They also took us on a driving tour of all the fancy neighborhoods, but it seemed like most of what we saw was the giant hedges everyone seems to use.

We also had a little bit of time to head to the beach. The water was a little too cold to want to swim in, but we dipped our toes in and relaxed on the sand. For our last dinner in the US, their houseguest Freddy took us out to their favorite local sports bar. Della told Eric he had to get one of these sports-themed burgers seen below. Can you guess which one he chose? 🙂

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All in all, the 2 days in the Hamptons were exactly what we needed to get mentally and physically ready to do some globe gazing! 🙂

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Denver to New York via Dallas

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The very first leg of our journey involved a very early trip to the airport. Our flight from Denver left at 5:50 am, so we were up by about 3:30. We had everything packed the night before, so it wasn’t too bad. The only almost problem was that Eric couldn’t find his watch. It took the whole family searching (we had stayed at Della’s parents’ house the night before) frantically to find it at the last minute!

We were able to have a short layover in Dallas which was excellent. Eric’s sister Suzanne made the drive out to the airport so we could spend a little time with her. We enjoyed seeing her, especially because next time we do she will be a mom!

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We arrived into LaGuardia in NYC where we took the M60 bus into Manhattan.  From there we were able to get on the 6 line to meet Jon (a friend of ours from college). We had an enjoyable afternoon with him, seeing his apartment, meeting his dog, and eating at the Third Avenue Ale House where we both sampled local brews from New York.

In the evening, we took the 6 to the E out to Jamaica where we caught the LIRR out to Bridgehampton where we will spend our first few nights away from home with Della’s uncle Richard! We have never been to the Hamptons before and are excited to relax by the beach and pool.

Underrated Destination: Oakland

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We had the privilege of visiting Oakland this last weekend. Oakland often gets overlooked in favor of San Francisco, but we thought it was a fantastic city with lots to enjoy. It is, of course, blessed with the presence of Dana, Della’s sister, which would make most places awesome. Though, Oakland was pretty fun in its own right!

Downtown

We thought the downtown area was quite nice. Pretty clean and easily walkable. There were plenty of places to eat and nice outdoor gathering areas. We spent an afternoon exploring much of what the area had to offer.

Preservation Park

This park has 16 historic buildings. Some of them were there originally and others were moved to this location. The houses are all currently in use housing things like non-profits, cafes, legal offices, etc. They were beautiful houses and the park was very pleasant. Our only complaint was that the signs were mostly worn off so we weren’t able to read all the information!

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The signs were mostly worn off.

China Town

Oakland has a bustling China Town with lots of good-looking shops and eateries. We were bummed we didn’t get to try one of the Cambodian restaurants we spotted.

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Lake Merritt

Lake Merritt is in a great central location. It has a wonderful walk/bike trail all the way around the lake. There are great views into downtown and across the lake itself. The general mood around the lake was busy and merry. People jogging or strolling around with kids or dogs during the day and barbecuing, listening to music, or picnicking in the evening.

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Oakland Cathedral (Christ the Light)

On the northwest side of Lake Merritt, you can’t help but notice the amazing Oakland Cathedral. This was on of the more architecturally interesting cathedrals we have been in! Once inside, you’re struck by the amazing amount of natural light and the way everything inside draws your eyes up and to the depiction of Christ at the front. It is somehow created by all natural light coming in through grating behind. This is definitely worth a stop.

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The church is the amazing building on the left.

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That image is all natural light coming in from the outside

Lakeside Park

The park is located on the northern end of Lake Merritt. It is a very pleasant park that includes a free botanic garden. We wish we could have explored the park more, but in the late afternoon it decided to rain on us.

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Grand Lake Theater

The Grand Lake Theater is a great old theater in Oakland. It shows current movies now (we saw Divergent.. it was only OK) but has been around and showing films since 1926. It was beautiful inside and out. We definitely recommend seeing a movie there!

Source: http://www.renaissancerialto.com/

If you have a chance to visit Oakland, we recommend it!

Special thanks to Dana for hosting us!  Check out her blog at http://biketheway.blogspot.com/ and maybe even give her a donation to her Climate Ride coming up! 

 

Brewing Up Some Fun at Beer Bike

enjean2013 2 Comments

As part of planning for our trip, we’ve read that it’s fun to visit local festivals. We were in Houston visiting some friends and heard of a festival called “Beer Bike” that same weekend that sounded interesting. We like beer and bikes, so we figured we’d check it out

  • Where: Rice University campus
  • When: Saturday March 29 at 11 AM
  • What: Some sort of bike race between different groups(dorms??). We think there was chugging involved too.
  • Who: Mostly Rice students and alumni. Most wearing colorful t-shirts with funny slogans. We hate to say it, but some seemed slightly inebriated for it being so early in the morning!

There were three different bike races among the groups. It was a little hard to follow the results from our vantage point, but it seemed like one of the groups was clearly better – the ones wearing maroon and gold. If we had to choose a favorite team, we definitely would have chosen them!

 

JUST KIDDING

As most of you reading this blog probably know, Beer Bike is not just a random festival we stumbled upon. We are Rice alumni, and Beer Bike is one of the biggest events of the Rice social year. A lot of alumni return just to see the races, so we wanted to come to see both the event and reconnect with friends.

The “team in maroon and gold” is our “residential college” (for those unfamiliar with the term, think the Hogwarts houses in Harry Potter”), named Will Rice. We are the only college to have swept the three races at one event – and we have done it five times! Unfortunately, this year we only won two of the three races, so no sweep but still a good showing.

It wasn’t technically practice for going to a random festival in a new city, but definitely a fun weekend!

Special shout out to Jenny and James for hosting us, and to Caitlin for driving us to and from the airport