Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone! We both had a wonderful holiday home with our families. Mike got to Michigan on the 21st and spent a couple of days with his family, cross country skiing around the backyard and getting ready for Christmas. I was able to visit Grandma and Grandpa'a house one day, and well, my Dad and Grandpa we wearing the same pants, its hard to tell they are related huh?
By the time Christmas rolled around I was ready to eat, open presents, and see everyone who I have not seen in a long time. This was real fun, and then it was time to go up north! It was Kelly, my Mom, and Dad for the first couple days and then my buddy Nick came up as well. We had a great time relaxing, hanging out in the snow, and one day we all headed over to go cross country skiing at Hanson Hills. Below are a few shots:
Nick skiing
Mike skiing!
Caroline had to wait until the evening of the 23rd before she headed home. She had a great time seeing her family and partaking in the Dove Christmas Eve holiday tradition. And in true Dove style, all of the Christmas presents were opened before the night was over and everyone already knew what presents they were getting. So, come Christmas day, all there was left to do was eat chocolates by the fire and relax. On Sunday, after being home for only three days, Caroline had to catch a plane back to the East Coast, or so she thought... An unexpected blizzard ended up canceling her flight and the earliest she could get rebooked was Wednesday night! So Caroline made the supreme sacrifice of missing a few days of work to have an extended holiday and spend extra time with her family :-)
On Wednesday night (or early morning), Caroline got back to our place at 1:30am, got a few hours of sleep, headed to work for 10 hours, and then headed back to the airport to pick up Mike. And boy was she happy to see him! After being together long distance for two years, you'd think we could easily be apart for a week, but we've just gotten so used to having each other around that it's not so easy anymore!
We rang in the new year by having a few friends over to celebrate. Mike made an awesome spinach-artichoke dip that everyone loved. And Caroline ate a huge bowl of ice cream (out of the wonderful new ice cream dishes that Mike got from the Forish white elephant), and was ready to go to sleep by 12:30.
On Sunday we went on an exhaustive run up Mount Toby (remember those pretty fall pictures we showed a few posts back). The scenery was much different this time around, with bare trees and a covering of snow/slush on the ground. We ended up running (with maybe a little bit of walking) the 3 miles up the mountain, climbing 900 feet along the way. Walking back down topped our trip to a total of 6 miles in about an hour and a half and a great way to end the weekend!
