On the road again...

After graduation I got to take a little solo roadtrip from Chicago to Cupertino. I figured that it wouldn't be too bad and could easily cover the 2,168 miles in about 4 days. That means averaging about 7 to 7 and 1/2 hours a day of driving. Although that kind of sounds like a long time to drive a day, it really wasn't too bad.

What helped to pass the time was that I got to listen to a bunch of audio books that kept me quite entertained. My reading list:

Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris (very funny collection of short stories)
City of Thieves - Daniel Benioff (coming-of-age type of story set in WWII Russia)
Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer (riveting true story about a disaster on Mount Everest)
Life of Pi - Yann Martel (pretty interesting story, but I never got to finish it)

I even got to listen to the short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Overall, quite an eclectic mix of reading (listening).

As for my journey, I pretty much drove due west through 8 different states, and stopped in Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Reno before making it to California.

Here's a sample of some of the pictures (in chronological order) I was able to take while on my drive. As you can tell, the weather and scenery changed quite a bit!

Finally escaping the storm

Impending storm clouds...

Videos from the storm (notice that it was raining so hard some cars pulled over):





Clear skies again... ahhh...

Pulling into Omaha where the College World Series of Baseball was taking place and I stayed in the same hotel that as the ASU team:

Getting into Colorado

Seeing a Rockies game at Coors Field. Rockies won on a Helton walk-off HR!




The view from the hotel:
The a big salt lake:

My first traffic jam in California :-)
Home sweet home...

Graduation Time

Guess what? I graduated from business school. Yes, I know you're probably thinking what stupid school would give Terah a business degree??? Well, hard to believe, but true!

It's quite incredible to me that two years have already gone by, pretty much at the same time we started this blog. It's been a great run and I'll look back on my time at school with a lot of fondness and great memories. At the same time, Michelle and I are excited about moving to California and starting the next chapter of our lives.

Anyways, here are some more photo highlights from the last few days I spent at school celebrating the end of a great journey.

To start off, Michelle and I attended a party for my friend, Phil, where his wife surprised him by getting an amazing cake (think: Ace of Cakes) that resembled all of those late night memories... Starbucks, Corporate Finance, Entrepreneurship... ahh, business school life:

As a bonus, I saw this mural and had to take a picture:

And then the big day came on June 13, 2009. Michelle flew back from California for the weekend and I actually was given my diploma. Luckily they give you the real thing on the day of the graduation so they can't take it away when they figured out I never belonged in business school. Enjoy the photos.



Lastly, at the end of the day, we to dinner at Table52, which is run my Oprah Winfrey's former personal chef. The restaurant serves basically upscale Southern comfort food. Very greasy, but very good.

Time For Some Updates!!! (last days in Chicago)

Hello ChanFam fans. Michelle and I have been quite busy over the past few months and we neglected to keep this blog up-to-date. For that, we apologize. However, we do not apologize for all the fun/adventures/moves/life changes/etc. that we have made that caused us not to blog. :-)

Anyways, since there has been so much going on, I'll split up all the updates into several smaller posts to avoid one huge one.

Michelle finished with her 2nd year of law school towards the end of May, while I still had about another month before my school year ended and graduation. In that in-between time that Michelle took off for her summer internship at a law firm, I still had some time to squeeze in some fun with my b-school friends before it was all over. OK, you got me. I admit, it was ALL fun time. Studying? What was that?

One of the highlights was that me and a couple of friends were able to do a kayak trip along the Chicago river that runs between the city of Chicago. It was really amazing to see the city from this perspective and it truly made me appreciate Chicago even more. If you are ever in Chicago and get a chance to kayak down the river on a nice day, I would highly recommend it! Here are some photo highlights from the journey:

The two other guys who went with me: Ravi and Dan (can you guess who's who?)

Finally on the river

Chicago Tribune building -- this door was built for boats to load paper off the river, but it wasn't built correctly so it was never used!

One of the many bridges in Chicago:

Some more shots from the trip:

I also got a chance to visit the Indiana Dunes region where we did a hike and then ended the day at the Three Floyd's brewery (mmmm). Notice the interesting juxtaposition of the smoke stack and nature: