We hope that as you read this post you are happy and healthy this holiday season. As we near the end of 2011, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to write and catch you up on our latest adventures.

After a very emotional send-off from Bucharest last December, we spent Christmas and New Year in France with Fabien’s family. We spent about six weeks in Europe, visiting friends in France, Germany and Luxembourg. It was wonderful to catch up with family and old friends (some who we hadn’t seen since our wedding in 2006) who have started families and are building homes of their own. We spent some time in the south of France with Fabien’s parents and then spent a week skiing in the Alps (you have to- it’s a European tradition!)

With our boxes stored at Fabien’s sister’s place, we flew to the U.S. in early February. Then we spent about a month in Jacksonville, Florida with Jenny’s family getting outfitted for our U.S. Road Trip. The first order of business was to get Fabien’s immigration papers sorted out and luckily, everything went quite smoothly. Then, we had to find a car and get the gear for our “expedition” across the States. Our trip was amazing- we saw so many natural, historical and cultural sites: Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Blues Trail which took us through Mississippi to Memphis, Hot Springs in Arkansas, cowboys and rodeos in Texas, the amazing national parks of the West (the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Yellowstone, Glacier, Crater Lake, and the Cascades Highway to name a few), the California Coast and the Pacific Northwest. We also had the wonderful opportunity to visit many friends across the country and to see Jenny’s family in Oregon and Washington. We made it to Vancouver, B.C. and then turned around and drove back across the country to Florida before making our way up the East Coast. We covered more than 25,000 miles in 7 months on the road. You can read all about our adventures on this blog.

In early October we finished our road trip and flew back to France from Boston. We spent three weeks visiting family and friends and coordinating the shipment of our stuff to the United States. Since October 30^th, we’ve been settled in Massachusetts. We rented a small apartment for two months in Gloucester (the oldest port in the U.S.) It’s a charming little fishing town with pretty beaches. We have used this time to get reorganized after our trip and to start the job search. The last six weeks have been focused on finding new jobs. It has been more challenging than we expected (tough economic times and the end of the year), but we’re optimistic that we’ll find something in early 2012. Jenny’s family is coming to spend a New England Christmas with us and then we’ll move to Brookline (a close suburb of Boston) at the end of the year.

Thank you everyone who supported (and hosted!) us this year on our big adventure. We’d love to hear from you and hope to see you soon (somewhere on this great planet.) Our door is always open.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Jenny and Fabien