Last Day of 2009

I slept a bit better last night, although I woke up at 6am ready to start the day. I was able to go back to sleep and finally got up at 9am.

I headed out on another bike ride. It was 5 celcius outside. I didn't realize it was drizzly until I was already on the road, so I decided to make the best of it. My legs were sore for the first 20 minutes or so, but they warmed up and I had a good ride until the turn around point. That is when I began to get really wet. I was fairly warm overall. My legs stayed warm as long as I pedaled. My feet were the problem. I need to buy some cold weather booties to my cycling shoes. Anyway, it was a good last ride for 2009. I rode 1082.88 km in 2009. Thats not bad, but still pretty low. Thats 672.87 miles. I plan to double that in 2010.

Wow, what a year we have had. Here is a quick summary of the last year:

One year ago today we were at the Sabo's home in Carbondale CO getting ready for a New Year's Eve Bunco Party.

We moved to Italy in April. We've lived here for 8 months living our daily lives Italian style. We've also traveled so many places: Pavia, Torino, Como, Bellagio, Verenna, Bergamo, Verona, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Siena, Montepulciano and other Tuscan hill towns, and Milano - all in Italy. We visited Zermatt, Murren, and Lucerne and Lugano in Switzerland - and viewed my new favorited mountain, the Matterhorn. We visit mad king Lugwig's Neuschwanstein castle in Germany, enjoyed beer gardens in Munich, a castle in Heidelberg and many castles in the Rhine River valley. We also visited Amsterdam Holland. We saw the sights of Salzburg Austria, as well as rode on alpine slides and visited a salt mine in the countryside. In Slovenia we visited Bled and Lubljiano. We visited the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and other sights in Paris France.

So many places and so many wonderful memories.

So, what does 2010 have in store for us? Well, in two days we fly to Paris again, but this time to visit Disneyland Paris for a few days. We also plan to do a week long loop through Switzerland. We plan to visit Rome, Cinque Terre, and hopefully some bits of southern Italy and revisit Tuscany in the spring. We would like go back to Slovenia and head down into Croatia. We want to do weekends in Prague and Barcelona.

We have been given an amazing opportunity to live here in Italy and we are trying to take advantage of as much as we can.

I wish everyone a wonderful 2010 and hope to see many of you when we visit Corvallis in February. Happy New Year to all of our friends and family in the US and here in Italy.