New Places, New Year

Quite a bit of time has passed since our last blog post. Like most of you, we have been very busy with the holidays and the travel that comes along with it.

The weekend before Christmas Tracy was in London to see Leslie and Guy. She had a wonderful time walking the streets and seeing all the sites. It was especially beautiful since all the shops and buildings had Christmas lights and decorations up. Tracy was amazed at the size of London, you could definitely spend weeks and weeks exploring and still not see everything. Leslie and Guy were wonderful tour guides and it was so fun to see them both!

Upon returning from London on Sunday evening what Tracy really needed was a good night of sleep before piling into the car to head south to Eindhoven on Monday. We were invited to spend Christmas with the kids and Marja and Maarten. What she got was a 2:30 am wake up call because the Seahawks were facing the 49ers in Sunday Night Football. This was the first Seahawks game we were able to watch since we left Seattle. We watched the game with a pizza and toasted the Hawks victory with a fine Belgian beer before heading back to bed.

We spent Christmas in Eindhoven with the Koopmans/Weisbeeks. It was great to see the kids again. We missed our own families and our traditions but it was wonderful to be in a full home and experience a Dutch Christmas. Marja and Maarten spent hours in the kitchen creating an amazing meal and we spent hours playing games, doing art projects, and helping the kids with an entertaining Christmas cookie sale.

New Years Eve in Amsterdam is 4th of July in the United States on steroids. We were advised that the city is like a "war zone" as midnight draws near. Not only are there organized fireworks shows in the city, but seemingly everyone is lighting off bottle rockets and other very loud fireworks wherever they please throughout the entire day. In fact we heard fireworks in our neighborhood every evening for a week leading up to NYE and for the week following. We figured "when in Rome" and decided to brave the streets. We had dinner at a nice Mediterranean restaurant along a canal where we had a view of people across the canal lighting off fireworks from their third story apartment and then tossing them out their window. After dinner we stayed at the restaurant for a private expat party to ring in the New Year. It was a rainy and windy evening which probably kept the fireworks to a bit of a minimum and many of the revelers indoors. We made it to just past midnight and then headed home. We were welcomed back to our apartment by dozens of people still in the streets in front of our building lighting off fireworks. Once they ran out they resorted to just lighting garbage on fire to create a small bonfire in the middle of the street. It definitely made for an entertaining evening.

The bonfire in front of our apartment. That is a police car to the left of it. He just drove right on past.

After a single day of work in the new year for Nick, we decided it was time for a vacation. So we packed up and boarded the train for Paris. A few hours later we were checked into our beautiful hotel and were ready to see the sights and stroll the streets in search of Steak Frites. We joined Leslie and Guy for three nights in the City of Light and of course Paris did not disappoint. Among numerous other sites, we walked the Seine, climbed the Eiffel tower and descended into the Catacombs. We of course left ourselves enough to see during a return trip or two in the future. We'll be back in Paris in early March for the Paris half marathon. Seeing the always traffic clogged streets of Paris cleared out for 50,000 runners should be quite the site.

We had a foggy day for our Eiffel Tower visit.

Eiffel Tower light show.

The view from our hotel room. Right in the heart of Saint-Germain des Pres.

This past weekend we participated in the Egmond Halve Marathon. Which provided us with a number of firsts. It was Tracy's first half marathon in over a decade, it was also the first time we've been to the beach here. It is not uncommon for the Dutch to hit the beach year round on a sunny day "just to have the wind blow through their hair". Well, the wind was blowing through our hair. It was also a cool 25 degrees F before the windchill. We did luck out though and it was a beautiful sunny day, despite the cold temperatures. The run was unlike anything either of us had ever done. After a few kilometers in the village of Egmond, with plenty of supporters lining the streets and their balconies, the pack descends onto the beach for 7 kilometers along the North Sea. At the halfway mark the runners make their way to a path in the dunes to return to Egmond. Despite the cold temperatures we both enjoyed the run and are looking forward to continuing our training for Paris and other runs.

As wonderful as 2012 was to us, we are very excited for what adventures 2013 holds. We know it will be a year filled with travel, work challenges and triumphs, new experiences, new friends, and visits from friends back in the U.S. We can't wait! Happy New Year everyone!