2009 Year In Review

If you read this blog all year long, you'll find nothing new here, but just in case you haven't caught all of them this year, here's the very condensed 2009 King Year In Review!

Happy Holidays to our Family & Friends!

2009 was another busy year for us!  Our year started and ended in North Dakota where Nathan continues winter work with Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  In between, we visited a combined eighteen states plus the District of Columbia.

Amber continues working for IBM, where she leads teams in the U.S. and China.  She completed her Project Management Professional (PMP) training in May and filed her first patent the same month.  Amber is taking her office on the road and is working remotely full-time as of November.

Nathan worked at Pipestone National Monument over the summer.  The work was both challenging and enlightening.  The site is used today as it was in generations past, for the collection of a sacred stone used for making smoking pipes.  You can learn more about Pipestone and its significance on the web at www.nps.gov/pipe.

Amber spent a long 4th of July weekend in Colorado with her friend Sara, where they visited Rocky Mountain NP, Garden of the Gods, and saw the famous Greeley Stampede rodeo.  Yee haw!

The most fun we had this year was going to the Eastern U.S. to attend Amber’s sister Samantha’s wedding in North Carolina in October.  Along the way, we visited Chicago for a live taping of Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me and got to meet the cast, then headed to Gettysburg NMP, Washington D.C., Shenandoah NP, Blue Ridge Parkway, Appomattox Court House NHS, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania NMP, Moores Creek NB, Great Smoky Mountains NP, and Mammoth Cave NP.  We hiked to the top of the two tallest mountains in Shenandoah, down into the longest cave in the world, and walked the hallowed grounds of Civil War battlefields.  Our favorite hike was to Ramsey Cascades in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

In July, Nathan’s mom passed away from complications of multiple myeloma.  She was 53.  Nathan misses her every day and thinks of her often.  We are grateful for the continuing love and support of our friends and families.

Next year, we will be moving to Kansas for at least half of the year.  Nathan was hired for a permanent status job at Fort Larned National Historic Site, a well-preserved fort along the Santa Fe Trail.  We plan to sell our house in Minnesota in 2010.

We wish everyone a happy holiday season and a great 2010.

Amber and Nathan at Ramsey Cascades