Thank you…and welcome aboard

Its 757 EST as I type this message and we are cruising above the clouds on the way to LAX, and our great adventure. To catch you up, we got in line to board this flight four years ago when we took a chance and went to Vietnam, Laos and Thailand for our honeymoon. That chance paid off in 30 cent beers (beer Lao if you’re buying), $5 hour long massages, new friendships, priceless memories and other assorted awesomeness. From there I grew up and became a nurse and my beautiful baby went to work planning and saving and planning and saving. A month in Colombia & Ecuador after nursing school confirmed in our minds that we need a longer opportunity to eat strange and delicious foods, meet great people, rack up sunburns and bug bites, get lost and find stuff, go beautiful places and otherwise explore this amazing pile of dirt we live on. From there it became logistics and if youre reading this blog at this point you know which member of team Deiter orchestrated the million details, large and small that go into ensuring that this thing won’t blow up on the launch pad. Needless to say were aiming for 10 months at this point and if I was in charge the over under would be 10 days. (vegas likes the under). So fast forward to June and the move to Raleigh and the first in a wave of emotional gut punches saying “see you later” to dear friends and family. To our Philly friends and family, we love and miss you. We promise to be safe and to hurry home with great stories and memories. Then there was “The Summer of Sean and Tash.” 13 unreal weeks of true southern hospitality, of laughs, love and misty eyes as I type now thinking of how you welcomed us into your lives (we’re looking at you Deiters and Maradei’s). My time at Duke Cancer Institute left us with deep respect for all of the people who give so much of themselves to support those with Cancer and love for those patients and family’s currently in the Fight (give em’ hell guys). It also reaffirmed that life is fleeting and that while you cant yell YOLO and go rob banks, you should chase your dreams whenever and however you can (especially if you can do it with the one you love). Then the clock sped up and 13 weeks melted into days and then hours. Then its last night and all of the craziness of this summer (We’ll spare you the gory details but it involved benign brain tumors and torn ACL’s on dogs among other nonsense) all that madness melts away into a Malbec and some IPA’s on the patio deck at the beautiful Umstead hotel in Raleigh, N.C. (get the filet medium rare over the Yukon gold garlic potato whip and thank me later) and then we crashed a wedding…cut to more tearful goodbye’s, one hour of sleep, the “wait I’m coming too right” stare from our dog as we hit the door and a trip to the airport with mom. Then we became bloggers….with a goal of cataloging our adventure and sharing it with the people we love (and being bigger than Facebook so click away). We promise to update as frequently as we can and attempt to be moderately interesting if you promise to stay connected with us and reel us in if we start posting things that could be detrimental to future employment. Seriously though, we understand it’s a “rich mans’ problem” but we know there will be times when this trip will try and destroy us and at those times we will need an open line or a kind word from you guys to push us over the top. We thank you in advance for your support. Lastly, before I settle into an inflight bloody mary that our good friend young nicky pumpkin would call “a spicy meatball,” I will close by reminding you all that we love you, that we will be safe, and we’ll be home soon. And so it begins.