2017 Recap

Happy New Year! This past year was one for the books. We celebrated a lot of milestones and went a lot of cool places. It feels like there were three years rolled into one: before marriage, wedding month, after marriage. Let's do a breakdown by month and see where all the time went:

• January
• The entire month was spent wedding planning and designing a 400-level databases course for school. We didn't leave the house much and mostly spent time with Bloomington friends. The photo above is from the Hesitation Point overlook in Brown County State Park, when I stopped through on my way between Columbus and Bloomington one weekend.
  

• February
• We hosted our annual Super Bowl party, said goodbye to our friends who moved to New York, and my engagement ring (that I designed) was finished just in time for Valentine's Day. 
• Eric turned 30! We celebrated at the trampoline park (pictured above) and went out to dinner with friends.
  

• March
• On the day DST changed, I hit a deer on the way to work.
• We spent Spring Break in Florida! We went to Naples, Everglades National Park, Biscayne National Park, and Key Largo. We saw about 100 alligators, a shark, manatees, dolphins, and lots of birds and fish. We went snorkeling at a coral reef, ate cake key lime pie by the ocean, met a chicken in a parking lot, and slept in a garden shed with an outdoor bathroom for a week. The weather was perfect.

• April
• We went to Reds Opening Day! We stayed with a friend who has a really nice view of downtown Cincinnati (above).
• I ran the Hoosier Half 5K race again, we went down to Keeneland for the annual spring meet, and many friends joined me in Bloomington for my bachelorette party.

• May
• The biggest news this year: we got married on a mountain in Colorado! Four of our closest friends joined us at a cabin in Georgetown for a long weekend of celebrating our wedding, Amanda's dissertation defense, and Ryan and Nicole's baby announcement. We hiked a glacier, jumped in a freezing lake after saying our vows, hiked a 12er (Chief Mountain), went to a lot of breweries, saw bighorn sheep and a fox, and just enjoyed being on vacation all together.
• We took honeymoon #1 to Lake Tahoe for 4 days and Yosemite National Park for another 4 days. One of our luggage pieces got lost on the way home, but otherwise we had an amazing trip. We took three boat rides (lunch cruise, dinner cruise, gondola ride), tried stand up paddleboarding, and went kayaking all on Lake Tahoe, which was the fullest it's been in years thanks to the snow runoff. We also did a couple of really cool hikes including one to a waterfall. In Yosemite, we started with Hetch Hetchy, which was even more beautiful than Yosemite Valley and way less crowded (but all of the park is off-the-charts gorgeous). We did a 17 mile day including an 11 mile loop hike, ate the famous brunch at the Ahwahnee (and even stayed one night there, and the front desk gave us a room with a balcony facing Half Dome - insane), and gorged on waterfalls. We also forded a river twice on that 11 mile hike and lost all our oxen.

• June
• We got married, again! We invited hundreds of our friends and family to join us for a party weekend in Bloomington and a couple hundred of them took us up on it (most of them didn't know we'd gotten legally hitched two weeks earlier - surprise! - and we had a traditional-looking ceremony that we wrote ourselves and included some vows based on what we'd said in Colorado). It was so fun to see everyone for Friday night drinks at our favorite brewery, spend all day partying on Saturday, and then keep the party going on Sunday with a boat ride on Lake Monroe. The boat had a slide, the weather was absolutely perfect, and we found a great spot to enjoy the water.
• We took honeymoon #2 to Newfoundland, Canada. It was just as much fun to tell people we were going to Canada for our honeymoon as it was to actually go, and we got lots of weird looks for carrying four giant winter coats with us in the Indianapolis (and Raleigh) airports when it was nearly 100 degrees outside - but it was 40 degrees in Canada so we had to bring all our winter gear! We spent five days driving 1300 miles around Newfoundland and saw icebergs, humpback whales, moose, a beautiful national park (Gros Morne), a geologic reference site, and watched the first sunlight on the entire continent.
• We flew from our honeymoon to a conference in Chapel Hill, NC, and it was nice to be back walking around campus and enjoying the town.

• July
• We stayed home just long enough to celebrate 4th of July with friends; we took another boat ride (without a slide this time) on Lake Monroe and had a party at our house.
• Then we headed off to spend the rest of the month in New Mexico! We spent a week in Albuquerque and two weeks in Taos. Eric mostly worked on his dissertation and I mostly explored all of central NM, which is stunning and culturally interesting. The only problem is that there is no AC in NM - at least not in either house we stayed in - which made things rather uncomfortably hot. The place we stayed in Taos was right next to the Rio Grande and we watched hot air balloons nearly every morning (pictured above). There was also a popular hummingbird feeder and we watched half a dozen hummingbirds battle each day.

• August
• At the end of July and beginning of August, we drove home via Colorado and Michigan. We visited Great Sand Dunes National Park (awesome), stopped in Denver to see one of our groomsmen, stopped in Kansas to see friends who moved to teach at KSU, and saw both the Nebraska and Iowa state capitols. We stayed a couple of days in the Upper Peninsula in a cabin with a friend and had the pleasure of once again being in the UP on the coldest, most terrible weather days of the summer (40s and windy and rainy, ok, when it had been in the 70s right before we got there). We went kayaking on a river to Lake Superior. Then we went to Ohio and visited Kelleys Island, which had interesting geology.
• I went to Hopkinsville, KY, to watch the total solar eclipse, which was probably the coolest thing I've ever seen.

• September
• We went to the Bloomington Hot Air Balloon Festival with friends. I somewhat accidentally won tickets to see U2 in concert at Lucas Oil, so we went and it was an awesome show. The next weekend we took nearly 20 people camping with us at Shades and Turkey Run state parks. We went to the second-to-last Reds game for Bronson Arroyo's retirement party - he sang a concert (of mostly Pearl Jam covers) and the fireworks show afterward, timed to his favorite music, was one of the best I've seen. We also attended Ryan and Nicole's baby shower and I got to be the official photographer/paparazzi.

• October
• We went to the Colts game where Peyton Manning's jersey was retired. Eric bought the tickets as soon as the retirement plan was announced and surprised me with them later (Peyton Manning is my favorite athlete of all time). I went on fall break while Eric went to his main conference. I was sick the whole time, but visited friends in Fort Wayne and saw my brother in Chicago and did touristy things there and near Lake Michigan. Late October was one of the prettiest falls we've had and I spent a lot of time driving through McCormick's Creek state park looking at leaves.

• November
• Two of my college roommates came to visit us for Monon weekend and we went to the game. We didn't win but got to ring the bell before we lost it. Also at school later in the month, I helped host a math and computer science conference.
• We hosted Friendsgiving and Thanksgiving and both were wonderful. We also went hiking and to an IU basketball game with family.
• I turned 30! We did an escape room, had cocktails, and went to dinner with a bunch of friends. Extremely fun even though we didn't escape the room.

• December
• Eric traveled a lot for interviews and I spent time adventuring around town. Most of the rest of the month was taken up with visiting friends and family across Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. We celebrated Becca's 30th birthday in Indy, then the next weekend celebrated Ryan's 30th with a surprise party and fast gas-powered go karting. We celebrated Hanukkah with my grandparents and Christmas with everyone else. We played in the snow in Sandusky and looked at Christmas lights and did a snowy hike. We took a bourbon tour in Kentucky with Eric's dad. We got in another IU basketball game. We hosted a New Year's Eve party and watched a lot of the World Darts Championship.