Best of 2005

Our fondest memories from 2005...

Our fondest memories of 2005: Long ride home from Baja, diving back into work...

Ryan's 30th birthday-- celebrated with family by swilling vodka and dancing to Russian music at Fandorin, and with friends during a weekend trip to Sonoma (competing for who gets what room through an olympics of board games?? "hey, its my birthday!").

Eunice's 30th birthday-- started with a bittersweet trip to Tahoe cut short when we heard about the death of our dear friend Tess, continued with a backpacking trip in Santa Cruz, and culminated in an evening boat cruise on the Bay with friends and family (Dad said to the captian: "I want to go under that bridge" as waves crashed over the front of the boat!).

Terry's 60th birthday-- celebrated with family in a beach house in Galveston, Texas.

The celebrations continued all summer. We danced: under the dome of City Hall in our evening-wear finest at the Black & White ball, under the fireworks to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at Stanford's July 4th celebration. We swam: jumping into the Pacific with Jesse and Lee during a trip to LA, at night in Lake Sonoma from a camping spot accessible only by boat. We even flew: finally collecting on a fantastic wedding present of a "flight to Monterey for hamburgers" from Alexander and Sheryn.

Ryan also finally saw something other than SAP headquarters during his frequent business trips to Germany-- an afternoon of wine-tasting in the Pfalz, and a weekend hiking the Swiss Alps around Wengen. And then there was the stop-over on the way home from Germany to join the Sabato Boy's annual outing to the US Grand Prix in Indianapolis.

The big trip of the summer was to Indonesia. We remember evening strolls down Kuta Beach, the terraced rice paddies and magical Hindu temples on the mountains of Bali, the charming artist's town (and monkey hangout!) of Ubud, the open air luxury of our bungalow at the Alam Jiwa, our first glimpse of our catamaran (the Moggy) and quirky Captain Don, the sun setting over the volcanoes of Lombok, diving into the magical colors of the coral reef, breaking down cultural barriers with the Muslim children in a beachside fishing village, and finally arriving at Komodo and tracking real-life dragons through the desert.

Upon our return, we connected with long-lost family at Pohley's wedding and bid Adam and Rachel farewell to San Francisco as they headed off to New York. Eunice even had payback for all those boys weekends as she headed to Utah for a girls weekend at a Green Valley Spa.

Back in Indonesia, we had spent some of the long hours between the Indonesian Islands deciding that we were as ready as we were ever going to be to start a family-- two months later we discovered that we were expecting a child!

We wanted to celebrate the holidays sharing our news with family and friends-- it was too soon to spill the beans during a Thanksgiving trip to Vancouver to visit Eunice's family, but we finally told Ryan's Bay Area family in person over Christmas by giving our parents "grandma" and "grandpa" frames containing our first ultrasound.

What better way for us to celebrate pregnancy than with our favorite kind of travel: a big roadtrip-- we spent a couple of dusty days camping in an old miner's cabin overlooking Death Valley, and drove into a posh Hollywood hotel for New Year's Eve... Our last one we'd celebrate with a family of 2!