NEW POST - YES WE ARE HOME AND ALIVE

Hello. Long time no type. Anyway, yes! Mandy and I made it home from our 28-day road trip. We tried so hard to keep up with the blog, but we were having so much fun it was hard to spend the time at the end of the day to capture everything we did. We had a BLAST. There were so many awesome experiences. For me, it was an American experience. I don't (or rather, didn't) consider myself overly patriotic, but we live in a truly amazing country. The vastness is quite overwhelming. The variety - of landscape, people, culture, dialect, cuisine, foliage, values, architecture, and so on - is astounding. We are at once a very different and unique assemblage of people while maintaining a distinct Americanism. Everywhere we went, we felt the odd dichotomy of feeling like we had traveled yet also feeling very much at home.
We keep saying that we'll get back to the story of our trip. I seriously doubt that. If we haven't done it yet, don't count on it. We still tell stories of things we did and saw on our trip, and I'm sure these anecdotes will work their way into this blog somehow.
It's been a whirlwind of a few months since our return. We moved into a new apartment in Costa Mesa (near to South Coast Plaza). Rob started a new position at Starbucks, managing the beautiful Seacliff Village store in Huntington Beach. Mandy is now sales manager at the Borders at the Block.
AND BY THE WAY SHE IS PREGNANT. WITH TWINS!!!
OK, so I'll tell you now that we had been trying to have a baby since about April. We had a joke that if we determined we had conceived on the road we would name the child after the city. I was pulling for Memphis. It didn't happen. But we both agree that Costa and Mesa are not appropriate names for our twins.

Thanks for sticking with us, in all our lack of reporting.
-Rob