A BIG day

Today we bought airplane tickets. LOTS of airplane tickets.

Julain has to travel to take the USMLE CS (a big, important test) because they only have 5 centers in the country. One of those centers just happens to be Houston, where his sister Marion and her family live. I'm going to tag along on the trip and we'll spend 5 days there. It also just so happens that some mutual friends will be passing through Houston at the same time. We're so excited to get to see everyone!
2 round trip tickets

Now the rest of the tickets have a bit of a story to them.
I've been wanting to go on one of the Sierra Club trips with my dad to Italy to hike in the Dolomites for a long time now. When we went to visit my parents in New Mexico for New Years, they made us an incredible offer. They told us that they would take care of the costs of the trip if we took care of airfare. We were blown away!



We had to wait to get Julain's schedule for next year to start looking for tickets. During this process it dawned on us that we probably won't be in Europe again for a long time. Why not go visit Julian's sister Jess in England. Jules hasn't seen her in years, and I haven't met her yet.



When we first started looking, it seemed that the side trip to England from Italy would be expensive. Then, after getting some great tips from my dad, we figured out that buying round trip tickets from Denver to London, then buying round trip tickets from London to Milan was actually cheaper than buying tickets from Denver to Milan. Crazy!
So that's what we did!!
4 round trip tickets.

Total - 6 round trip tickets in one day

I think I'm in shock. A very happy shock!

A-Basin

The wife's been able to hit up the white stuff a few times this year, but until last week I had yet to do the same secondary to 3rd year schedule craziness. The fact that the Basin has had less snow than Vancouver "looks like it's summer aside from the patches of machine-made snow" lately hasn't helped things. However, I got President's Day off (hallelujah!) and there was a coincidental 2-day 8-inch A Basin snow accumulation over the preceding weekend so we took the chance to ski together for the first time this year. Remarkably, we managed to get up early enough to get a prime parking spot in view of the lifts, spent about 5-6 hours on the slopes, then got back to town ahead of the worst of the I-70 traffic. Good times.

Jeep!!

So I've wanted a jeep for years, but it was just a dream car for someday. Then Julian and I realized that if we don't buy a jeep now, we might not get another chance until we retire. Now is the time to have a car that is awesome, but might just have some troubles. Besides, my car has had problem after problem recently, but the kind that mean the car is only going to have more and more problems. If we have to do some work on a car, which would you rather work on, a Taurus wagon or a jeep? You don't even need a jack for the jeep!