Fall break... it was long overdue

Well, now that I don't have Cal football to get all excited about...

It's been really nice to have a couple weekends to regroup and relax. After an insane summer/early Fall, M and I are finally falling into a comfortable rhythm. No more insane plans every single weekend day and night. Although November is tentatively booking up, there's nothing so hard core that we'll be exhausted or running ourselves into the ground. We only have 2 weekends of travel (one of which is a week-long trip to Japan for family reasons, the other is Thanksgiving), but the rest of the time we're home. Yeah! We will, undoubtedly, watch Cal and Oregon football as the season winds down. I will happily plan and test out new recipes for Thanksgiving (which I'm cooking this year since my mom will still be in Japan). We will also celebrate our recent escape from the jail of consumer debt by treating ourselves to a "real" vacation before year's end that doesn't involve visiting family members' graves, family birthdays or spending time with our elderly grandparents--all of which was wonderful and time well-spent, don't get me wrong, but not a vacation by any stretch of the imagination. Finger crossed that M can get the time off work and we will be celebrating Christmas in Italy where we will walk around (hopefully) mostly-empty Italian towns, cook yummy food in our rented apartment, drive around the Tuscan countryside and just relax on a D-style vacation.

I'm not sure what other folks consider "normal" with respect to the time between big vacations. Some of our friends go on vacation every 3 months, while others go every 3 years. For M and I, going out of the country on some sort of vacation (at least one week long) is necessary at least once every 12 months (on a rolling calendar basis). Not only is it our life's passion and admittedly much easier for us due to M's job, it is also a big part of how we reconnect while at the same time happily disconnecting from the rest of our lives for a short period of time. In the recent past, we've tried to line up these vacations around our birthdays because December and January are good times to travel for us (rather than summer when everyone else travels and we can't). Accordingly, this celebration will be an all-in-one deal since it coincides with my birthday, christmas and our new debt-free status.

In the meantime though, we've spent our weekends at home reading, planning our trip, talking, biking, spinning, getting back into running, cooking lots and lots of yummy soup and doing uber-fun stuff like steam cleaning the carpets, organizing our wine closet and making goodwill runs. And strangely, it's been so nice!

I love Fall!