I’m headed back to Kamloops today. How is my vacation over already?? I really cannot wait to see Webster, though!

Anyways, here is my annual “Year in Review Post.” I really think 2010 was the best year of my life so far. I know that’s a big stretch to say that, but I really think it was! I went traveling, I graduated university, I ran a marathon, I started working full-time and I had a lot of other great times in between all of that.

It had some ups and downs, of course – what year doesn’t? – but overall it was a wonderful year.

Let’s review, shall we?

JANUARY

• Started my final semester of university.
• Booked a trip to Europe.
• Watched the Olympic Torch come through my city.
• Decided to run a marathon.

FEBRUARY

• OLYMPICS in my country and province (I didn’t actually go down for them but it was still a very exciting time!).
• Trip home where I got spoiled by Eric.
• Was majorly stressed out by school.

MARCH

• Still majorly stressed out about school…
• MOVED!

APRIL

• Ran a 10K
• Finished up my semester
• Said goodbye to a wonderful friend when she moved back across the country
• Did a 7-day hot yoga challenge
• FLEW TO EUROPE
• Visited Amsterdam
• Visited Paris

MAY

• Spent the first two weeks of the month in Europe visiting Italy and Greece!
• Arrived back in Kamloops after a whirlwind three weeks in Europe.
• I ran a 15K race after not running for 4 weeks
• I quit eating meat
• Attended Eric’s cousins wedding

JUNE

• Started working full-time
• I graduated University
• Started marathon training
• Eric moved away. Again.

JULY

• My great-grandmother passed away so I made a trip back home for her funeral
• Continued marathon training
• Eric decided to move back to Kamloops

AUGUST

• Eric moved back
• I continued marathon training
• My mom surprised me with a visit
• Kamloops got really smokey from the forest fires

SEPTEMBER

• I turned 22!
• Eric and I escaped to the ocean for the weekend
• I ran 20 miles!
• I ran a 10K Trail Race

OCTOBER

• I met Lisa and spent five days traveling 300 miles with her
• I RAN A MARATHON
• I recovered from an injury and quit running for five weeks

NOVEMBER

• Eric’s birthday!
• I started working at the hot yoga studio in exchange for free yoga
• I recreated Thanksgiving dinner
• A tragedy hit the community that I grew up in and I had a lot of difficulty dealing with it…

DECEMBER

• We *almost* bought a house – thank god we didn’t!!
• I took on more work than I could handle
• I spent 10 days without Eric and wondered how I ever managed to be long-distance for eight months!
• I had a beautiful, wonderful, fabulous Christmas with my family

Happy New Years, friends. Be safe out there! Tomorrow I will be talking about my goals for 2011 so don’t forget to stop by

Was 2010 a bad, good or GREAT year for you? Why?

You can read about week one of our trip here and week two of our trip here.

Also, if you want to see way more photos then this, feel free to friend me on Facebook!

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I’m going to apologize in advance, as I do the recaps each one seems to get longer and longer with more and more pictures! Whoops!

So, we left off in the beautiful Amalfi Coast. After spending the weekend there, we were back to Rome for one more day before flying to Athens on the Tuesday.

We decided to spend our last day in Rome visiting the Colosseum, this was something that Eric was very, very excited for! Gladiator is his favourite movie of all time.

At the Colosseum we decided to spend a bit of extra money and get a guided tour. It was totally worth it. It allowed us to skip the massive ticket line and learn some really interesting information!

We also got to take pictures with this guy for free (they are usually 1 euro!)

Some things that we learned were that unlike in the movie Gladiator, the emperor would not give a thumbs up or thumbs down telling the Gladiator to kill his opponent, he would either hold his thumb out sideways, which told the Gladiator to cut the jugular or he would curl his thumb in, which told the Gladiator to withdraw his sword.

We also learned that the real victims of the Roman games were the animals. In the eight centuries that they held the games the Roman’s caused three different types of large cat species to go extinct!

After our tour, Eric did some “Gladiator” poses (i.e. preparing for battle) and I almost died laughing when people were staring at him. Tears-rolling-down-my-face-clutched-over-grabbing-my-gut-laughing when I took this photo. It took a few attempts…

We had SO MUCH FUN at the Colosseum, it was super interesting and very, very cool to see!

After touring the Colosseum we toured the Palatine and Roman Forum – it was so cool! Some of these structures date back to around 70 A.D.!!!

That basically took up our last day in Italy, we were really sad to be leaving Italy as we both loved it, so rather then go to bed we headed to a restaurant, shared a couple of bottles of wine and looked through the videos and pictures we’d taken so far and reminisced about the first two weeks of our trip!

It was a great way to end our time in Italy.

I wasn’t sure how much we’d like Athens, some people said it wasn’t that great and with the riots and all I was a little concerned. But we LOVED it! Definitely right up there with Italy as one of the most fun and most beautiful places that we visited!

We also had a super nice hotel in Athens with a big balcony!

Oh, and the Greek Food, we can’t forget that. O M G! We ate a lot of good food while we were on vacation (a lot, a lot) but I think the Greek Food tops it. The tzatiki, the calamari, the souvlaki, the pita bread, the greek salad. Yum, yum, YUM!

Ah-ma-zing!

OK, moving on from the food….

So our first day in Athens we headed up to tour the Acropolis, which was pretty cool!

It was HOT in Athens though, around 30-35 C (85-95 F). I was a hot mess that day!

One temple that we visited had a totally random turtle chilling there! We have no idea how he got there as there was no water anywhere nearby.

After the Acropolis we did some wandering around side streets and a lot of souvenir-shopping, there was some great shopping in Athens and we bought a ton of souvenirs and gifts for family and friends there!

Our second day in Athens we did the Athens One Day Cruise, which takes you to three Greek Islands. This cruise was VERY costly, and while it wasn’t worth how much money we spent, it was cool to see some Greek Islands: We visited Hydra, Poros and Aegina.

On the island of Hydra there are NO cars, just donkeys! We saw one lady getting all her shopping bags loaded onto a donkey to go back to her hotel because the donkeys also serve as “taxi’s” on the island.

In Aegina, we went to a fish market and ate some fresh squid and fish!

It was a long day, and that evening on the ride back to Athens we sipped on wine and watched the beautiful sunset.

And that night we admired the amazing view that we had of the Acropolis from our hotel balcony!

The next day we did a bit more shopping and found a cool costume shop where Eric tried on a Gladiator costume.

And then it was back to the airport and back to Paris! We arrived in Paris that evening and we immediately felt… comfortable and “at-home”. Like I said in the week one recap, we really warmed up to Paris our second time back. Maybe it’s because we finally mastered the Metro system or because a place that had been scary and overwhelming after only a few days in Europe felt familiar and comfortable after two weeks of jetting from new place to new place.

Whatever it was, we decided that we actually do really like Paris on this second trip back and we hope to return one day!

Our very last day in Europe we took a day trip out to the Palace of Versailles. Of ALL the tourist attractions we went to in three weeks this was by far the busiest. We must have waited in line about 1.5 hours to buy tickets and then get inside the palace.

After spending about an hour wandering through the palace we saw the Hall of Mirrors:

And the King and Queen’s Bedroom:

We then headed out to see the star of the show, the gardens:

Since we were there on the weekend, we got to see the fountains going off and as we wandered through the gardens they had classical music playing. It was so fun wandering through the gardens with our arms linked pretending that we were dukes and duchesses from the 18th century

Versailles was definitely very cool and I’m so glad we made the time to go out there!

On our way back to the train station Eric insisted I take a photo with this giant container of Nutella since we all know I have a bit of a weakness for Nutella…

Once back in Paris we decided we were going to go for a nice dinner to celebrate our very last night in Europe. So we headed out to the Il St. Louis in search of somewhere great to eat.

Here I am on the other side of the Notre Dame Cathedral during our walk to the Ile St. Louis.

We decided to eat at a Medieval Times themed restaurant that had a set amount for each person with unlimited starters, cheese and wine. Yup, unlimited wine! That may have been the main reason we picked it…

And three, yes three, bottles of wine later…

…we decided it would be a good idea to go see the Eiffel Tower one last time. So we giggled our way to the nearest metro stop, got off when we saw the Eiffel Tower come into view and found ourselves on some random bridge staring at the Eiffel Tower, goofing around and taking photos for about an hour.

It was so worth it!

A little blurry… Blame the wine…

The next morning, bleary-eyed and hungover-as-hell we trekked to the airport for our 10-hour journey back to Canada!

Whewie, I hope you guys enjoyed reading these recaps because I sure did enjoy reminiscing about our trip! It was seriously the BEST TIME EVER!!

I saw things that I’d heard about my whole life (Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Colosseum etc.) and made memories that I’ll never forget. Oh, and I laughed. A lot! I hope that we make it back to Europe one day but even if we don’t I’ll know that we did it once and it was amazing.

It’s a long weekend in Canada and we are heading out of town for the weekend. Eric is a groomsman in his cousins wedding! I’m not really looking forward to spending two more nights in a hotel – we’re hotel-ed out – but I’m a sucker for weddings so it should be fun!

Have a great weekend everyone! Oh, and it’s great to be back to blogging XO

You can read about our first week in Europe here.

Also, if you would like to see A LOT more pictures then I’m able to share on here, feel free to friend me on Facebook.

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Week two of our trip was spent entirely in Italy. Needless to say, I LOVE Italy now!

We last left off in Florence! So the following Monday morning after spending the weekend in Florence we jumped on a train to head up to the beautiful Cinque Terre, which according to Rick Steves is the Italian version of the French Riveria.

On our way to Cinque Terre we stopped over in Pisa for a couple of hours to see the infamous Leaning Tower of Pisa.

And of course had some fun doing the traditional pose in front of it that 1,000 other tourists were also doing at the exact same time!

After a few hours in Pisa, we continued our journey to Cinque Terre, which is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen in my life. If anyone ever has the chance to go there (or anywhere in Italy for that matter) do it!

Cinque Terre, which means five villages or towns, is a group of five small villages along the northern coast of Italy. The five towns are connected by a 7-mile hiking path that goes right along the ocean. Visiting Cinque Terre and hiking through the five towns was the part of our trip that I was most looking forward to!

Funny story about our first night there: We had an amazing dinner overlooking the ocean and enjoyed 1/2 a litre of wine with our pizza and salad! Afterwards we decided we wanted a bit more wine, but when Eric went to go order it there was a miscommunication with the waiter and we ended up with another LITRE of wine.

So… 1.5 litres of wine later….

In the hilarity of our mix-up, we befriended the couple sitting next to us and ended up chatting with them for almost two hours! They were a very well-traveled couple from Boston and gave us all kinds of wonderful advice about our traveling and next trip. It was really nice to have an extended conversation with other people who spoke English!

After dinner we enjoyed some MORE gelato while sitting on the rocks and watching the sunset.

The next morning we were planning on setting out on our hike, but we woke up to POURING rain, so decided to take a “rest” day. We spent most of the day inside, playing cards and napping.

We stayed in a fabulous little B&B in the town of Vernazza, the second last town in Cinque Terre, it was recommended by Lauren and she told me they had a fabulous breakfast included but it was even more fabulous then I expected. Check out the awesome cappuccino I got the first morning we were there:

Unfortunately, our second morning there it was ALSO pouring rain. But, we weren’t going to let the rain stop us, we were determined to do the hike anyways. But, after reaching the first town we learned that the trail was entirely closed other then the first section due to the rain. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I was in-tears-disappointed.

We tried to take the best of it and hiked the first part (which was more like a leisurely walk) and then took the train through the five towns in order to explore them. I didn’t have a rain coat with me (silly) so I bought this lovely blue poncho: Hot, right!?

After spending a few hours exploring we were both soaking wet and ready to go back to our hotel. Now, the ONLY problem with Cinque Terre is it’s the kind of place where there is NOTHING to do if it’s raining. No museums or sightseeing, it’s all about the outdoors; beaches and hiking. So with the rain I disappeared into the internet cafe for an hour or so.

When I emerged the sun was shining for the first time in two days! By this point it was about 4:00 PM so there was no way we could do the entire hike but we could do the last part, which apparently was the most difficult part of the trail.

I’m SO glad we were able to do at least this one part of the hike. The views were unbelievable. About 15 minutes into the hike here is looking back on Vernazza:

After hiking for awhile it became clear why the trail was closed when it was raining. It was a very steep trail with a lot of very narrow parts that were literally right on the edge of cliffs!

One part of the trail was washed out entirely! Eric walked through it with his shoes on and his feet got soaking wet, I took my shoes and socks off to walk through this part:

Here I am at the very end of the hike in Monterosso, the last town of the five. This was, by far, the most gorgeous hike I have ever gone on. I will never ever forget the amazing views of the beautiful Mediterranean sea!

The next day after our hike we were up bright and early to jump on the train for five hours and head to Rome!

As most of you know from my quick update while in Italy, Rome wasn’t exactly what we expected it would be. But we’ll get to that.

After a long train ride we were once again in a big, bustling city! It was a bit of a shock after quiet, little Cinque Terre. We dropped our stuff off at our hotel and headed out for some exploring. We went to see the Spanish Steps and grab dinner and had big plans of seeing Vatican City and the Colleseum the next day.

Unfortunately, our night then took a very nasty turn because we arrived home from our night out to discover that our hotel room had been broken into and our backpacks completely emptied out and rummaged through. Our stuff was spread all over the bed. For those wondering, we were staying at Hotel Beautiful 2.

Obviously this was a very stressful for us and led to a late night and a long morning the next day. Thank god we had all of our cash, passports and camera’s on us. Unfortunately, Eric’s credit card, ID and my iPod were taken. The owners of the hotel were very courteous and refunded us our money even though we still stayed there that night.

The next day we spent a few hours visiting the Canadian Embassy and the police station, which didn’t go so well. Even though Eric had already cancelled his credit card the Rome police were VERY persistent that he needed his credit card number for the police report. Obviously, we didn’t have it memorized and when we called the credit card company they said that under NO circumstance should they require that for a police report! Weird, right?! So after all the walking back and forth no police report was created and we finally made it to Vatican City in the early afternoon.

Vatican City was pretty spectacular, but with the drama of the previous night/morning we didn’t fully appreciate our visit and kind of rushed through it. The Sistine Chapel took my breath away though. We couldn’t take photos in the Sistine Chapel but here are some photos from other parts of the museum:

Here are me and Eric in St. Peters Square. We just kind of sat there and stared for awhile it was so magnificent:

After we were done there we rushed to the train to head to Sorrento. Originally we were supposed to spend two nights in Rome but we both kind of just wanted to get out of there, so it was off to the Amalfi Coast for the weekend!

Our home base (where our hotel was) was Sorrento, it was absolutely gorgeous there.

Our first night there we ate the most amazing dinner we’d had yet and after dinner we were brought to complimentary shots. We sniffed them and they didn’t smell like anything so we threw them back. Well, don’t be fooled by the non-smell because this stuff was strong! We later discovered it was Limoncello, which is an Italian liqueur that is usually served as an after-dinner digesto. Interesting!

Our second day on the Amalfi Coast after doing some wandering around Sorrento we headed to Pompeii to hike the infamous Mt. Vesuvius, which was decideingly unexciting considering it’s a live volcano!

After 30ish minutes of walking straight uphill we reached the top, which wasn’t what I was expecting for a volcano, but still kind of cool to imagine the huge hole full of lava!

Finally, on our last day on the Amalfi Coast we took a boat trip to the island of Capri, which was beautiful but also very expensive and touristy!

We had an amazing lunch with an even more amazing view.

And then we spent the afternoon lounging around on beach chairs that cost 18 euros each to rent!

I really wanted to go swimming because the water was SO beautiful, but there were a ton of jellyfish and I was scared of getting stung, so I just waded in to my knees!

And this concludes the second week of our trip! I know this blog post was extremely long (and it took me almost 2 hours to insert all the pictures – I NEED to find a good blogging tool for the Mac asap) but I hope you enjoyed it if you managed to read the entire thing!

Italy was honestly amazing, I loved every single place we visited there and was continually astounded by the views, especially along the coast!