Hi all,
Wow, what a crazy year so far: school, wedding, graduation, selling one house, buying another, moving, new jobs, and trying to start a new life in a new city. Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve been in contact. I wanted to get you up to speed with our lives but it’s been tough to find the time. I’ll try to keep the details to a minimum since you know how I can ramble on…
The wedding was great. It went off without a hitch with the exception of some lousy weather. But they say that’s good luck. While we were in Annapolis for the wedding, we shopped for and put an offer in on a house there (see the website pics from our showing). It took nearly a month to get all the details strait on the offer and get a signed contract.
After returning from the wedding, I had only 6 more weeks of classes at Western which flew by of course. Then it snowed at my outdoor graduation (don’t you love Colorado). I’m pretty stoked to have completed two majors in three years, graduating Magna Cum Laude (yes, stoked is a word they teach you in honors English, I’ll conjugate it for you later). It feels like last week that I moved to Gunnison to embark on this whole endeavor.
Just over a week following graduation, Kris and I boarded our flight from Gunnison to Spain for our honeymoon where we enjoyed watching the semi final races of the Louis Vuitton Cup (challenger’s series of the America’s Cup). See the website pics. What an amazing experience. Neither of us had been to Europe so everything was new. We explored extensively, the base area which had lots of activities and entertainment. We also went out to see two days races first hand on spectator boats. And the grand experience was to sail on the America’s Cup Experience boat for a half day. This is a 2001 Great Britain challenger’s boat that is lead by a few experienced crewmembers and allows sailing fans the chance to sail on the real thing, hoisting sails, trimming, grinding, and doing all the normal activities on a race boat, even having a turn at the helm. We sailed along side the actual race course and made a couple passes by the starting “box” just as the day’s races were starting. It doesn’t get much better for a sailor!
Visiting Spain was great. We flew into Madrid only to stay there overnight and then drove to Valencia where we rented an apartment on a Mediterranean beach about 5 miles north of Valencia. We got lost a few times while trying to navigate the busy streets, but were happy that we rented a car for the flexibility of it. Port America’s Cup was generally our home base for the free parking and then we would explore the rest of the city via their train system. It’s an awesome area. After a week in Valencia we traveled to Barcelona where we stayed for two days (simply not enough time). We met up with a family friend of Kristin’s who lives there now with her Spanish husband. She showed us around the essentials of Barcelona. We know we only scratched the surface of what Spain has to offer and we will have to return when we can.
We made it home to Gunnison at an ungodly hour of the night (not that we could tell since our brains were scrambled from travel) and within hours, we started packing the house. We returned from Spain on Wednesday and closed on the sale of our Gunnison house that Friday. Not even close to enough time to get done what we needed to. The new owners of the house let us stay until Saturday afternoon when we finally closed the door on our giant U-Haul. We stayed at the luxurious Gunnison Best Western that night in order to get an early start the next day 
beating the heavy Gunnison rush hour traffic. If you think driving a U-haul across town sucks, try driving one that’s way overstuffed, pulling a car on a transport and following a Durango that is also overstuffed, which is pulling a 22 foot sailboat, to the east coast at 6 mpg. 
Alright, I’m rambling… We closed on the Annapolis house on Friday of the following week and started working our respective jobs on Monday. 
The house is still a mess. Five weeks later I finally bought a lawnmower. In another week or two, I’ll buy gas. That’s how it goes now.
Soon we’ll have lives again. We hope to hear from you all soon. Our new contact info is below.
Matt & Kris