Getting ready to move :( Christine coming to town :)

Well, as some of you may know, our landlord is selling our condo in Hillcrest so we have to move. We are moving on Wednesday Oct 29th to Little Italy. We will be in a 20-story new high-rise (although only on the 2nd floor). The building has a roof-top pool, hot tub, etc. As of October 29th, our new address will be:

425 West Beech Street

Unit 312

San Diego, CA 92101

Here is our building, we are in the lower part between the two towers:
We are not thrilled about having to move again, however we do like the Little Italy neighborhood in San Diego, you get the downtown lifestyle without all the crazy clubs, parking problems, and traffic, etc that are down in the Gaslamp part of downtown.

The area is very dog friendly (everybody seems to be walking a dog around in Little Italy) and our unit is dog friendly too, so we might be able to finally get our dog that we've always wanted!

Our building will be 2 blocks from the Little Italy light rail station. So when we don't carpool, Jim can just hop on that to work instead of taking the bus like he does now. We can also take the light rail to the movie theater/mall at Fashion Valley, etc.

And we are only 3 blocks from Sante Fe Depot where we can take the Amtrak Surfliner to Anaheim/LA and the Coaster Commuter Rail to the Del Mar fair and races.

(Jim will also love living just 1 mile from the terminals at the San Diego airport!)

Tomorrow night (Friday) Christine is coming into town from Boston for 9 days! She is a great friend of Colleen's who used to live in San Diego (She was the Maid of Honor in our wedding!). We have a lot of fun things planned, we are running the Light Up The Night 5K in Balboa Park at 7pm on Saturday (a night time road race!), then after that we are going to a Halloween Party at our friend Ryan's apartment. Also planned, we are also going bowling next week in the East Village part of downtown, and Saturday Nov 1st is Colleen's birthday! (Too bad she has to take the CSET test that day for her teaching credential!) We can't wait to hang out with Christine, we hope she doesn't mind a bit of mess as we move that week! We will be really busy but it will be a lot fun!

Coming up the following weekend on Nov 8th-9th we are camping and canoeing on the Colorado River with 12 friends, so we'll be sure to post more about our adventueres in moving, with Christine, and for our canoeing/camping trip!

NORTH CAROLINA

We had a great time visiting our family at my cousin Johnny's wedding near Asheville, NC on the weekend of Oct 11-13! Since I am a State worker, I had monday of Columbus Day off. We flew out Friday evening, went to the wedding on Saturday, explored western North Carolina on Sunday and Monday, and flew back Tuesday moring and went to work. What a whirl wind weekend!!!


We were so busy at our own wedding in August that we didn't get to spend much time visitng our family, so we were really excited to spend time, gossip, have some drinks, etc! Grandpa Harper thinks so highly of Colleen, he even asked her for a dance!



After the wedding, we went camping for a few days and explored around the moutains and foliage. We camped in Pisgah National Forest

We hiked up a trail to Looking Glass Peak. Here is the trail head, a view from the trail, and a view at the peak:

After we hiked the trail, we stopped by this waterfall. We spotted a koala bear dressed in red in the tree on the left:



















We drove on the Blue Ridge Parkway and saw foliage in the mountains, here are some pics from it:
















Here is Colleen running on a trail!!!

On Monday we went white water rafting on the French Broad River. Normally they have Class III rapids but due to the 2-year drought the water level was low and the rapids were tame. When the guide pulled us off to stop for a break, there was a 12' rock to jump off of into a slow part of the river, the water felt really good! It was very rural on this river, it was about 30 minutes north of Asheville and very little development visible at all from the river. Since we couldn't bring our digital camera on the raft because it obviously isn't waterproof, we don't have any pictures of it, just this picture of the river as we drove away from Hot Springs, NC. Our rafting guide had lived in the San Diego area. And of the 6 people on the raft, 5 of the 6 were from southern California.

After rafing we had dinner, dessert, and coffee in downtown Asheville. It is quite the little artsy liberal mountain town for being in the south. We had a great time on the trip and we were sad to fly back to work on Tuesday morning! We woke up at our campsite at 5:15 am to catch our 7am flight back to San Diego. Unfortunatley we were at work in San Diego by 2pm and we worked 6 hours. Uggg. We had fun visiting our family and exploring around such a beautiful part of the country!