ALASTAIR + LALEINIA

 When Alastair and I dated, we never did long distance. I mean, we only dated for 3 months before we got engaged, but still, we never did long distance. I never imagined we would have to do that in our marriage. 10 weeks apart....sucks. It's the absolute worst. I highly do not recommend it! It was nice to see family and to gain weight on American treats (oh, Taco Bell, you have my heart!), but it's not worth being apart from your spouse. I've rarely been homesick. Maybe 2 or 3 times. But I was missing "home," the familiarity of my favorite face, my best friend, my home, and Emre's dad. Emre can throw quite the tantrum and his tantrums during the summer were next level intense. It was exhausting! I even called Alastair late at night, crying, and we were trying to find flights two weeks early. But I soldiered on and lasted the full 10 weeks. So you could probably sense how excited I was to finally be in London. I've never lived there, but it felt familiar...

We're at the end of the first year, so we only had one long weekend left for some traveling. We decided it was finally time to check out Frankfurt. So we booked flights to Luxembourg, cause it was cheaper and Frankfurt isn't far at all. We're just crossing off countries one weekend at a time! Once again, we picked up our rental car and drove to see a bit of Luxembourg before going to Frankfurt. Alastair's family lived there for a time, so it was fun to place the location to the memory. Like, in Luxembourg, we went to these old tunnels where Alastair's family went. Emre was pretty scared, he thought there were going to be dragons. So he had Alastair hold him the whole time. We walked around a bit while Alastair bid online for next year's classes. The next day was spent touring Frankfurt via bikes. After spending some time finding a parking spot, we walked to a corner store and grabbed some stroopwafels. We love those things! We rented the bik...

I've had a marathon on my new years resolutions, goals, bucket list, all sorts for many years. There was one time when I was semi close, in California I was training a little and ended up throwing my back out really bad playing football, which stopped any and all running for a long time. Well, five weeks ago I had been running for around a week and was enjoying it so I looked online for marathons and signed up for the one in Geneva! I trained relatively well given the short amount of time I had before the race. I made sure to get some runs in during our trips to Malta, Mallorca, and Cinque Terre/Switzerland. I ran hundreds of kilometers and did my longest training run of 32km about two weeks before the race. I loved checking the data after each run on my apps, really fun. Running has become kind of addicting. I'm really enjoying getting fit, pushing myself to go further and faster every time. I'm really motivated to minimize the effects of aging! My progress with p...

We really went big for our birthday celebrations this year. How could we not when both our birthdays were situated with weekends and breaks! Alastair had midterms and also a few days off for the holidays, so we took the opportunity to go on a trip. Alastair decided to rent a camper van and for us to go on a road trip. I have always wanted to go to Cinque Terre, so it was dream come true to go there for my birthday! It's about 9 hours away, so it was quite the drive. On Friday, we left after Alastair had finals and had to run some errands. Alastair had to see the dermatologist to get some moles checked. It was a bit nerve-wracking watching him check each mole (Alastair has a lot!) and to finally know that everything is fine! After the checkup, Alastair took Emre to pick up the van while I finished packing. About an hour later, we were ready to go! They got me these massive golden balloons, it was so sweet! Alastair closed the door of the van to reveal a massive, provocative ...

We're celebrating our last 20's birthdays by going on trip. Since Alastair's fell on a weekend, he found some flights to Mallorca. We haven't explored too much of Spain, especially getting out of Catalunya. We had an early flight; Emre watched Paw Patrol and Alastair and I listened to music. We were making each other laugh so hard, I felt like such an immature child. But it was a good way to start our vacation on the right foot! It was a short flight, only 30 minutes of flying. We quickly got our car and made our way to the mountains. I was expecting Mallorca to be very tropical, flat, and filled with palm trees. It wasn't what I imagined! There are mountains, very rustic and outdoorsy! The only annoyance were all the cyclists. Like, a ridiculous amount! At first, it was really cool to see a herd of cyclists. After passing a dozen of them, I was over it. Everywhere we drove, especially going up the mountain, cyclists were there. We passed hundreds, I'm not ...