After moving to Oregon a year ago, we are taking our first full trip back to visit friends and vacation.

It was great to see the mountains, lakes and especially all of our friends we missed. Thank you Venters and Shizukus for giving us places to stay. We love staying with you.

We got to float the swan river with the Venters and the Loves. We’d never even been to that river in the 13-15 years we lived there.

Anna and I have finally returned from England! We went with Anna’s mom, Carol, and Ashton’s Grandpa Joe. It was a fantastic trip. We’ll try to recap:

Anna’s entire English family lives in southern England, so we were able to stay with her family while we were there. Ashton hadn’t met any of his new England relatives, and he got to meet almost 20 of them on this trip.

This post is going to be a picture blog with descriptions. Enjoy!

We left America at around 4:00 in the evening, and 10 hours later, we arrived in London at 10:00 am the next day. This was our first glimpse of England. It took a couple days for me to figure out why the landscape definitely looked like England: None of the roads (or tree-lines) go in a straight line for very long… England is devoid of any semblance of straight driving areas.
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This year, I (Ashton) got to coach a U-12 (Under 12-years-old) boys team named “Venom” for Polson FC (Polson Football Club). The head coach was Link, and we had 14 boys on the team. My neighbor’s son, Michael, was on the team, and was one of the best kickers on the team.

This was the first time I had done any sort of real coaching, so I wasn’t quite sure how advanced of soccer techniques I should teach. By the end of the year, I was teaching everything I knew, and they were just soaking it up. The kids on our team were all very talented, and we played some amazing games.

The last tournament of the season was this weekend, and we won! I wasn’t able to make it to this final tournament, but here’s a great picture from the season:

(We’re extremely behind on posts, so I’m going to start posting some picture for old posts.)

Anna and I spent a couple months in California and Florida early this year. While in Florida, I got to play volleyball with some great, friendly people at Clearwater Beach.  Here’s some pics Anna took of me today:

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If you haven’t yet met Grandpa Joe, we’ll just introduce him with a: “He’s freaking amazing.” He turned 90 this year and he’s still spry, capable and funny.

For his birthday, since Anna and I were still in Florida, we all went to Myrtle Beach for the weekend. Here’s some pictures of his party and some family pictures we took:

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