Surprise! Its a.....

Ok, so this is a little off from our usual travel talk, but we have some pretty important news that we're so excited about we just have to share!

What a disappointment

Some of you may enjoy the Panama City Beach of the mountains that is Gatlinburg, Tennessee, but we had a very different experience.  We visited Gatlinburg in the late spring of 2007 for our first anniversary.  Our most memorable part of spending time there was our day trip to Cades Cove in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park.  We stayed for two nights in a hotel a block off the main drag of downtown Gatlinburg.  It was a free stay for the obligation of touring a to-be built timeshare unit.  Before we had gone for our town we agreed to do a second one at another location for $100.  If we had already done the first there is no way we would have agreed to the second.  After wasting what seemed like most the day in this endeavor we walked the strip.  All we saw was cheap tourist trap paraphernalia.  We did go to the aquarium, which seemed to be the most elaborate thing in the town.  My advice is this, if you have the option between visiting Gatlinburg and anywhere else, steer clear of Gatlinburg.

The Days Following Marriage

Upon returning from their honeymoon, Mike and Dayna moved into a small two bedroom apartment in Florence.  Here they stayed until October, even though only weeks after his return from his honeymoon he had been transferred to a work site in Decatur, Alabama, which was about an hour drive each way.  During this time Dayna took a job waiting tables at the Mexican restaurant, Rosie's.  In October, they made another move.  Mike was transferred again, this time to a location in Cullman, Alabama, which was too far to commute.  However, Mike's grandparents lived in an old house outside Cullman and had an extra room and they welcomed Mike and Dayna into their home.  While Mike worked to find a new job, Dayna took a position working at a coffeehouse in town, which she thoroughly enjoyed.  Their stint in Cullman lasted five months until finally Mike took a job with a small consulting firm in Atlanta, Georgia.  Dayna made the trip to Atlanta without Mike to find a place to live and found a great little apartment in between Sandy Springs and Buckhead where they would spend the next nine months.

A Little Background

Let me bring you up to speed on where we are in our lives.  Mike was born and raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, until his senior year in high school when his dad's work transfer took them to Huntsville, Alabama.  After completing high school in Huntsville, he went to Florence to the University of North Alabama.  There he pledged and joined Alpha Tau Omega fraternity and walked on and became a four year letterman on the cross country team.  After four and a half years in college, he graduated and moved to take a job back in Huntsville.  This began where he began his courtship with Dayna.
Dayna had also been raised in Georgia, though through her early childhood her fathers military career had them living for an extended time in Europe.  In fact, Dayna was born in Italy and her younger brother in Germany.  Dayna went through grade school in Watkinsville, Georgia, where he father choose to return after his military career, seeing as he had gone to school at the University of Georgia, just up the road.  After graduating from Oconee HS in 2001, Dayna left the university town for a small school in Rome, Georgia, Berry College.  After four years she graduated with a degree in math, having loved Berry to much to follow through with her plan to transfer to Georgia Tech after two years.  Just before her graduation in May of 2005 is when her relationship with Mike began to develop into more than friends.
She and Mike met on Summer Beach Project in 2002, a summer mission trip organized by a campus ministry on both their campuses called Campus Outreach.  They had a mutual interest but the distance fostered nothing more than a friendship.  It was a special friendship however, and they remained in touch through their years in college.  When they did start dating romantically in early 2005, their feelings quickly grew into a love for one another.  In fact, after Dayna graduated and spent some time touring America and Brazil with UWAM she moved to Florence and took a job to be closer to Mike.  Mike proposed on a rainy Martin Luther King Jr - Monday holiday evening, having the day off from his current job at a bank in Huntsville.  Mike soon found a job in Florence and for the first time they were living in the same city.   After a short engagement of four and a half months, they were wed on Memorial Day weekend in May 2006 at the college chapel at Berry College, thus beginning their lives together as husband and wife.  From there the adventure begins...

Hello and Welcome

As you get to know us, you will find that we love to travel.  We are always on the go and love to make a trip out of any opportunity.  We look forward to sharing some of these with you.  But this blog is about more than just our travels, it is about our journey through life.  Especially our experiences in marriage and raising a family.  We are an ordinary family and hope to share what we learn as we travel along the highway of life.