2013 In Review

So, 2013... where did it go?  Looking over pictures to put in this blog, it seems like all this stuff happened in a much shorter time than a year.  It probably has to do with being in transition for so much of it... I lived in our house for less than half the year!  My plan was to find one picture from each month, and I was successful except for one month (so I cheated and put two in another month, haha).  Ready?  Here we go!

January:

Martin and I began the year with a furry addition to the family!  My cat Oreo, who I adopted as a kitten in Louisiana in 2008, had been living with my parents in Virginia while I was in England.  They drove across the country to visit for Christmas, and brought Oreo to live with us in Tucson.  She has been a lot of fun to have around the house, and has bonded with Martin to the point that she even comes when he calls or whistles!

February:

 

 

A few exciting things happened in February (so picking one picture was hard), but this is me (and an instructor) hang gliding in Phoenix!  Martin gave me the hang gliding trip as a Christmas present, and we scheduled it on President's Day weekend.  After hang gliding, we continued north to Flagstaff, where we learned to snowboard at the Arizona Snowbowl.  Martin caught on much more quickly than I did (he skateboarded as a kid), but by the end of the day we both could make it down the hill in at least a somewhat legitimate fashion. :-)

 

March:

 

 

With both of us leaving for deployments later in the year, Martin and I took a 10-day vacation to Maui for some fun and quality time together.  March is a great time to visit Maui, because humpback whales breed and give birth in the warm waters during that time frame.  We saw tons of whales, some of them very close to our boat.  I took a surfing lesson, and Martin (who must have a hidden talent for photography) caught my most successful moment on camera!  Now I'm going to cheat and post a second March photo (because I don't have one for May...).

 

 

Another one of the many, many awesome things we did in Maui was drive a 4-wheeler up into the mountains to a beautiful lake with "homemade" waterslides.  The water was cold, but the experience was totally worth it!

 

April:

 

 

Before Martin left on his deployment, we took a short trip to visit his parents and sister in Las Vegas.  We had a great time hanging out with them and playing with our 3-year-old nephew, Jason.  Vegas has special significance to us not only because it is Martin's home city, but because he and I first became friends on a TDY there in January of 2010!

 

May:

 

Apparently May was too busy for pictures, but that is understandable as Martin left on his deployment and I left for a 2-month TDY in Alabama.  If you are wondering about what happened to Oreo, I met a really awesome new girl in my squadron who agreed to house-sit for us while we were both TDY/deployed, so Oreo is not alone!  We are so thankful to have Kat living in the house so we don't have to worry about it (or Oreo) while we are gone.

 

June:

 

 

So maybe a 2-month TDY in Montgomery, Alabama, in the summer doesn't sound like too much fun, and there were parts of it that were not.  But, the awesome part is that one of my best friends from England was in my class!  I was so excited to hang out with Alex again (she moved to Boston a couple years ago) and spend time catching up.  We found a lot of cool things to do on the weekends, like go kayaking down a river, check out fun restaurants, see movies, and go to Destin, FL (Crab Island pictured above).

 

July:

 



 

While in Alabama, we had a 4-day weekend for the 4th of July holiday.  My parents had already planned to spend the weekend camping at Lake Junaluska in NC, a retreat center where I spent many summers with my youth group in middle and high school.  Since I was only 5 hours away from the lake, it worked out perfectly for me to drive up and meet them there!  Even though it poured rain for most of the weekend (note the clouds in the picture), we still had a lot of fun together and found some breaks in the rain to walk around the lake, go kayaking, and visit the beautiful Biltmore Estate in nearby Asheville.

 

August:

 

 

At the end of July, I traveled back from Alabama and did a quick-turn for another TDY in August, this one at Fort Huachuca (in Sierra Vista, AZ, just south of Tucson near the AZ/Mexico border).  I spent 3 weeks there and absolutely loved it.  Sierra Vista is about 2000 feet higher in elevation than Tucson, and running along the ridgelines at sunrise was breathtaking.  I also had the great surprise of having another overseas friend in my class, this time a girl named Lauren from Aviano Air Base in Italy, who I had hung out with at my last European Weather Conference in Germany in 2012.  Lauren is an even more accomplished traveler than I am, so naturally we decided to go on an adventure to the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, in northern AZ and southern UT.  The long drive was totally worth it, as it was hard to pick just one picture from all the beautiful places we saw!  The shot above is me on the Bright Angel Trail, heading down into the Grand Canyon from the South Rim.

 

September:

 

 

As you can guess from the picture, September is when I arrived in Kuwait and had my first couple off-base trips.  I was pretty surprised at the number of American companies and restaurants that are well-established in the malls here.  There is a Cheesecake Factory, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Texas Roadhouse, Victoria's Secret, and yes, of course Starbucks.  I have not eaten at any of the American restaurants because we try to take advantage of the opportunity to try things we don't have at home, but I hear they are not bad.

 

October:

 

 

This picture is from the boardwalk near the beach where Doug and I went to see the sunset before dinner one weekend.  I don't know what the lit-up tower is, but I thought it was pretty with the city skyline at sunset.

 

November:

 

 

 

Some of you probably saw this one on Facebook already, but I'm limited in photo ops out here, so give me a break, haha.  The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Doug and I drove to another base in Kuwait to visit our "parent" unit and learn about what they do at their base.  A lot of the drive was empty desert, but then we found a pack of camels right by the road!  We were very excited and of course jumped out to take pictures.  We must have been exciting for the camels as well, because they were very curious and came over to check us out... so we had to jump back in the car really quick!  They eventually got bored and wandered off the other side of the road, but we got a lot of great pictures first.  I think camels are one of my new favorite animals. :-)

 

December:

 

I already wrote about the best thing that happened in December (visiting Martin!) and posted my best pictures from that trip, but here is one I didn't post: a C-17 landing at sunset, just before we took off to fly back to Kuwait.  Working with the Army is fun and interesting, but spending time at an air base reminded me just how much I love being around airplanes and working with air operations... guess I joined the right service! :-)

 

2013 was a busy year, and as always, I am thankful for the people I shared it with and the experiences I had.  I am looking forward to what will come in 2014... Martin and I will both return home to the US, I will finish my masters degree, we are going to Ireland to see Penn State's season opening football game in August, and hopefully much much more to be planned! :-)  Maybe 2014 will be a more consistent year for blogging too...