Grant and Katie: 1st Year of Marriage in Review

For our recent road trip to Seattle I downloaded a number of podcasts to listen to while I drove.  My favorites were always those done by Radiolab, self described as "a show about curiosity. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience." Recently during a bus ride to a job interview, I heard a Radiolab podcast about a man named Nicholas Felton, who decided to record his entire year, everything that he did, and create "The Feltron Annual Report" at the end of the year as a way of seeing what he actually did, where he spent his money, who he spent his time with, etc.  For example: Different methods of transportation: 23.  Total different locations reported: 258.  Most encounters with one person: 226.  It is in this spirit that I write this post.  Katherine and I have been married for over one year.  What was that year like?  What did we do?  Where did we go?  While we did not keep detailed data for the entire year I spent some time reflecting and compiling data, and here it is, the 1st Annual Grant and Katie: Year in Review.  Hope you enjoy!

It made sense to me to start off with the question, where did we go?  So in a simple graphic, here is our "Location Summary." 

This leads to some obvious questions, like:
1. Hours spent on an airplane: 87
2. Number of countries visited: 4
3. Number of continents visited: 2 1/2
4. Number of U.S. states driven through: 3
5. Favorite city of the year: Seattle
(Runner Up: Victoria, B.C.; Utila, Honduras)


6. Amount of time spent living out of a suitcase: a total of 4 months
7. Longest consecutive time living out of a suitcase: 102 days
8. Number of hours spent playing Settler's of Catan: not enough
9. Most times throwing up on a single airplane ride: 4
10. Worst movie seen while flying: Green Lantern

Next, we go to one of the most sacred and commonly used marriage metaphors... the bed.
1. Number of different beds slept in the past year: 34 (a different bed every 10.74 days)
2. Most comfortable bed slept in: Carmel Valley Ranch, Room 258
            (Runner Ups: Hotel Ballard, Seattle, WA; Our Bed!, Pacific Grove, CA)
3. Best view from a bedroom: Qualicum Beach, B.C.  (Runner Ups: Inn at Laurel Point, Victoria, B.C.; Utila,  Honduras)
4. Number of nights sleeping on Cole's twin bed together at Christmas: 2
And now for something completely different, the "Best Of":
1. Best phrase: "You just wrinkled my brain"- Troy, Community
2. Best movie seen in theaters: "Midnight in Paris"
3. Best movie seen at a midnight showing: "The Hunger Games"
4. Top 5 Best Meals (chronological order):
            i. Gluten-Free Burger; The Westin, Vancouver, B.C.  
            ii. Chang's Spicy Chicken; P.F. Changs, Pacific Grove, CA  
            iii. Chilaquiles; Comida Fer, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, C.A.  
            iv. Yemenese Food; Unknown Restaurant, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
v. Goat cheese filled jalapenos wrapped in bacon; The Matador, Seattle, WA
5. Best Outdoor Adventure:
Katie: Scuba Diving in the Caribbean at the 2nd biggest coral reef in the world; Utila, Honduras
Grant: Climbing Super Slide (5.9) at Royal Arches in Yosemite, CA. 5 pitches with Rob Simpson
6. Best coffee shop: Cafe Trieste; Monterey, CA 
7. Best concert: Young the Giant at The Moore; Seattle, WA
8. Best citing of David Beckham: L.A. Galaxy vs C.D. Motagua; Tegucigalpa, Honduras
9. Best book read together on a plane to Ethiopia: "The Hunger Games"
10. Best time drinking rum on a Caribbean beach: Tela, Northern Coast of Honduras
11. Best disc golf shot: Brent Smith; Ace on #11 at Carmel Middle School (March 10th, 2012)

And now,  the "Most of" list:
1. Most listened to music: 
    Grant: Ben Harper
    Katie: Young the Giant
2. Most disturbing thing witnessed: Small goat's throat slit by an Afar warrior; Ethiopia
3. Most disturbing thing eaten: See #2
4. Most watched show: Community
5. Most frequented coffee shop: The Q Cafe; Seattle, WA
6. Most crazy looking fruit: Lychee
7. Most visited restaurant: Comida Fer; Tegucigalpa, Honduras
8. Most fun day of the year: March 26th, 2011


All in all a good year.  If it had to be summed up in one word, I guess "nomadic" would be about as good as any other.  Hopefully this next year will be a little bit more settled, with lots more Settlers. I can't end this post with that.  That joke was horrible.  Stay tuned for more on our second year of marriage.  Ok, that's a better ending.

http://www.adventureprotocol.com/

Our Key-Less Life

As many of you have heard, Katie and I decided to not continue our time in Honduras.  This is due to a variety of reasons, primarily concerns of safety.  If you want more information on that, here are some articles:

http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/Homicide/Globa_study_on_homicide_2011_web.pdf

http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=769249&publicationSubCategoryId=200

So there we were, at my parent’s house in Pacific Grove with no jobs, no apartment, no car payments, nothing tying us down…for those of you who know us, the choice was pretty obvious.  We simply followed the famous advice of Horace Greeley when he said, “Go [North] young [married couples], go [North] and grow up with the country”.  It is the new Manifest Destiny (without the ethnocentricity, justification for war, or destruction of multiple people groups); vast opportunity lies before us as we follow in the footsteps of Dorothy to the Emerald City.  

So we packed up everything we owned into a 14 foot U-Haul and on February 16^th, 2012 we began a trip of nearly 1,000 miles on a route we had taken before (2006: Travis and Grant’s epic trip to visit Andrew at SPU, record time 13 hours and 15 minutes; 2010: Smith Brothers and Katie’s trip for Stone Wedding/Christmas, 16 hours).  First thing upon arrival we stuffed everything into a small storage unit, received a set of keys, and began our 10^th week in a row of living out of a suitcase (we are now approaching our 12^th as I write this…how many weeks until we qualify as “nomads” on our taxes?).  My brother and his wife graciously accepted us into their home and our life in Seattle began. 

            I have described our current life to people before using a small and extremely common object: keys.  We don’t have any.  Scratch that, we have one, to a lock on a 10’ by 11’ storage locker with 99% of our worldly possessions in it.  No car keys, no apartment keys, no work keys, no bike lock keys; our life is nearly key-less.  Not sure what this means exactly…right now it feels like complete dependence on others, very little cash flow coming in, uncertainty in every area of life, and a seemingly endless job search...in the future we will probably remember it as a simpler age, romanticized by Father Time.  Realizing this, Katie revealed to me that she actually had the ability to time travel, so we went to the future, wished we were in the past again, and went back, appreciating our newfound simple and romantic life.

www.adventureprotocol.com