Haven't we done this before?

Reinhart is in Christchurch, New Zealand, awaiting his flight to McMurdo and I’ll be on my way to NC any day now. Our picasa page is all caught up so you can check out and see what we have been up to this year (http://picasaweb.google.com/sailmaia), or you can wait for Reinhart to start posting new Antarctica photos. I may be uploading some pretty nice pictures myself in about a month. You may remember, Reinhart and I joined Splendido’s crew in 2007 for the sail from Hampton, VA to Tortola, and I will be getting the opportunity to do that trip once again this November. I’ll be back in NC for Thanksgiving and looking for fun stuff to do in December…ideas?

Wow, that was a busy summer!

Goodness gracious, 6 months and no updates! Since the last update, Reinhart was busy with USAP work, and I was quite busy doing contract agricultural inspections. More importantly, we had a blast of a ski season with visits from friends, wonderful trips home to Austria for Reinhart’s birthday and to North Carolina for Erin & TJ’s wedding, and a summer of hiking throughout this beautiful state of ours. You can check out our pictures on our google picasa photo page (viewable for everyone), at http://picasaweb.google.com/sailmaia. I’m sure I’ll be uploading a lot of photos in the next week or so, as I’m preparing to get everything caught up before our busy winter season. Reinhart will be heading back down to Antarctica mid-October through mid-January. I’ll be doing whatever suits my fancy; my options are endless, but it doesn’t appear working in Antarctica will be one of them. I will be keeping up with the blog, though....I promise...

Back in Denver-metro

Reinhart and I weathered our division just fine. I had a great time with friends and family in NC and he had a world of new exciting experiences in Antarctica. I picked him up at the airport on January 29, and it was as if he had only been gone a week. Since then, we’ve been having a blast skiing and hiking on the weekends, but we keep forgetting to take pictures now that we are together all of the time. There are no new pictures on picasa, but if you haven’t seen Reinhart’s pictures from Antarctica, please check them out (link right).

We’ve experienced 3 seasons in Denver so far and can say that if we knew how awesome the weather was, we’d have moved here a long time ago. The weather is almost always sunny, dry, and warmer than I expected, with the cold and snowy Rockies protecting us from the big weather systems. We have wicked warm winds which blow a great deal of the time, and remind Reinhart of the foehn winds in Vorarlberg. We’ve heard the spring can be a bit of a bear, bringing cold weather and heavy snowfalls from Canada down into Denver; so we’ve gone ahead and put on our snow tires and await the March snows.

So far, we’ve been skiing in Breckenridge (gorgeous but windy), Vail (awesome but bad parking), Keystone (with Mackey, Dewey, Brooks, & Rich), and Arapahoe Basin (very few skiers on their steep slopes but slow lifts). I took a hard fall at Keystone (I’m just fine, guys), slid down an entire run and badly bruised my calf…it looked bad for my nose as well for a day or two, but it is just fine. Reinhart is working hard on his condition; he wants to be able to do a bump run from top to bottom without exhausting himself. Y’all know me; I’m just happy skiing a few hours and then calling it quits. It’s a hard decision where we want to go back to next; they all have fabulous pros and very few cons. Maybe Breckenridge this weekend if it isn’t too windy and Keystone if it is. We know we’ll be joining Karen and Chris at one of the Summit County resorts in early March and we are really looking forward to seeing them.

I’m still hoping to join Reinhart in Antarctica next season. The positions will open up in March, so I should know something by late spring. We’ll update you when we know something new.