I realize that I am going about this a bit backwards — but it makes sense in my head to do it this way, so bear with me.

I want to start by sharing about our New Year’s celebration and the end of 2017.

What can I say about 2017 that hasn’t already been said? It was a year filled with ups and downs, for us and many others. Though we spent much of the year in beautiful California, we did travel to some fun places — Hawaii, Nevada, Minnesota, Arizona.

We saw some pretty amazing things (the big ones that stick in my mind are the sea turtles and leopard sharks). We learned some things about ourselves and determined more about our futures.

We loved ~ we lost ~ we learned ~ we felt pain ~ we felt joy

We spent our last days of 2017 with some old friends.

They came down to spend the weekend in San Diego, and we are still living here! So, lucky us, we got to see them for a weekend of fun. After spending Saturday evening downtown, we decided that New Year’s Eve should be spent at Stone Brewery, where we took a brewery tour.

Delicious food, tasty beer, a beautiful setting, and awesome company? Not a bad way to celebrate the end of 2017.

Andy and I both agreed that it was a refreshing treat to spend time with people who are so easy and fun to talk to — we were thankful they came into town when they did and wanted to spend time with us!

New Year’s Day was a relaxing one for the Wandering Dolphin crew.

Andy and I tackled a puzzle we got for Christmas — and it (embarrassingly) took a good chunk of the day to complete.

But we felt good about it when it was done!

I know I haven’t talked about our amazing Christmas adventure yet, but I felt like it just made more sense to fill everyone in on our New Year’s celebration while it is still fresh.

Stay tuned to hear more in a two-part story of our holiday adventures. And cheers to the coming year! 2018 is going to be quite the adventure.