If blogs were people, I'd be getting ready for kindergarden

Happy blogiversary to Shelby Apples!  Today is FIVE years from my very first post, as I readied to ship off to Australia.

I started this blog originally to about being a stranger in a strange land, but as Australia became less foreign and triathlon became a bigger part of my life, the focus has shifted.

As I've been preparing for this post, it's been fun to look back at the milestones from these last 5 years.

Duathlon in Port Douglas

1.  I competed in my first duathlon, just a month after arriving in Oz.  It was such an unusual pastime I just titled it "Duathlon"

2.  I battled roaches in Cairns.

3.  I hiked to the top of the Pyramid with good friends.

4.  I took cooking lessons in Bangkok.

5.  I had a very good first date.

6.  I got hit by a car and totalled my bike...

7.  ... but I still competed in my very first olympic-distance triathlon just three weeks later.

8.  I cycled the from Adelaide to Melbourne along the Great Ocean Road.

8.  I had a very good second date, which resulted in a boyfriend.

Loz and me atop the pyramid

9.  I ran my first half marathon.

10.  I raced in my first half ironman.

11.  I moved back to the US for love with the aforementioned boyfriend.

12.  From there my adventures became less jetset.  No longer traveling to exotic climbs on a regular basis (Vermont doesn't count), I looked for speed at races and inventive healthy food options at home.

13.  I won my age group for the first and, so far, only time.

14.  I qualified for and raced at the Triathlon National Championship.

Cooking with Andrea in Bangkok

15.    I got engaged!

Looking back, I am humbled by how incredibly fortunate I have been, getting to experience all these new places, meet new people, and take on new challenges.

Blogging itself has been a wonderful experience:  it's the most dedicated to a journal that I've ever been.  It serves as a history of race strategies and recipes.  Where we go from here, only time will tell.  Here's to five more years of adventures!

1st place at the Duxbury Sprint

Paul and me at the Sydney Opera House on our second date.

The US through Austrlian eyes

Well, it's been a while. Life's been busy. A very large report I worked on is being published on broadband.gov today for public comment. It's very exciting, but it's been taking up almost all of my spare cycles. In addition to that, my friend Lauren from Australia was visiting and I took some time off to hang out with her. And other than that, my life just doesn't seem that exciting: work, the occasional training session, football on the weekends, repeat.

It was fantastic to see Loz again. We did some shopping, visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History (which had a giant whale skeleton from Queensland), sampled some authentic (or as close as you can come) Mexican food, watched a football game (well, ok, she took a nap through the third quarter), enjoyed some Karaoke (thank you, Boston, for verifying that the appropriate response to the lyric "Sweet, Caroline" is "Bah, Bah, Baaaaaaaaaah"), checked out the Topsfield Fair (the US's oldest fair - not all that different to Australian Shows - sans show bangs), and took a walking tour of Back Bay.

I still wish we had fit in jackolantern making, but somehow it just didn't happen. Overall though we tried to do more "authentic" American experiences than tourist ones. Still my favorite moments were ones where something American would surprise her. For example, at lunch one day burst out, "Oh, look, there's a squirrel out the window!"