Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

May God bless you and your loved ones over the holidays and throughout the new year.

We hope your family enjoyed 2016 as much as our family.

Julie and I traveled closer to home this year, but that's not to say we lacked wonderful voyages.

Our Southern Caribbean and Canada/New England cruises could not have been more different, but both proved to be outstanding in their own ways.

We visited Montana four separate times, beginning the year there at the tail end of a full-family holiday trip during which our granddaughter Emma learned to ski.

A summer road trip took us through Colorado with Jay and Amy. Julie's brother John and his family came for a Montana visit during that first summer sojourn. Then, Julie and I took another road trip back to Redondo Beach, where Gina's family came for a summer visit.  We returned to Montana for a late summer trip that also brought us to South Dakota.  Jay, Julie and I will be returning to Big Sky to ski over Christmas with the Giffords, which is always a major highlight of the year.

We also spent time with my sister's family in San Diego, including a summer visit while Gina, Laszlo and Emma were vacationing in California and over Thanksgiving, when they treated us to a gourmet turkey dinner at the San Diego Country Club.

We're fortunate that Jay lives in Brentwood, close enough to enjoy dinner together a couple of times each month, usually in Santa Monica right by Universal Music, where he still works as Director of Music for Film and Television.  As Jay said over dinner the other night, he doesn't know any career that he could possibly enjoy more.

Jay's job brings him into contact with stars like Elton John at a reception recently, and Pete Townsend, backstage at a Who concert.  Jay is frequently pleased by how nice these celebrity muisicians turn out to be, as was the case with Elton and Pete. His job brought him to many great music shows, including a private performance by Sting for a small room at Sundance Film Festival in Utah.  For fun, he went with friends to the "Desert Trip" in Coachella, where as a lifelong Beatles-fan who'd never seen any perform, Jay said Paul McCartney was his favorite, and with his cousin Jered he attended a multi-day festival in San Francisco.

Jay returned to China in the spring, where he was groomsman at the wedding for his friend Jimmy, who had showed him around his home country last year.  At Thanksgiving, Jay headed east, meeting up with Amy and her boyfriend Lukas at Gina's new home in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania.

Gina recently moved to a suburb of Philadelphia when she was lured from Columbia University, where she'd been happily doing research for a decade, to accept a tenured position at Drexel University, where a "transformative" philanthropical grant has created exciting possibilities to build their human-rights focused public health program, which is exactly Gina's field.

This unexpected relocation unfortunately meant they had to sell their house on a huge lot in the New York suburb of New City, but they seem happy to have downsized to a brand new condo that's an easy train commute from her job.

Gina's husband Laszlo has been able to continue working for a different branch of the same SAT preparation company on evenings and weekends, but he had to leave his computer networking job in New York.  This was probably for the best at least temporarily, because his mother Ria, who had served as their full-time nanny for years, did not make the move with them.

Laszlo has been home in the afternoon when Emma returns from school, helping Emma to smoothly transition to Pennsylvania.  Her first grade teacher says that when Emma is at a project table with other children, she can count on Emma to keep the others on task to finish on schedule.  Emma loves to learn, and she turns flowers for math word problems into art masterpieces.

As mentioned previously, they came to California for a long summer vacation, during which Emma spent a few days with Granddaddy and Nana while her parents had a romantic escape coupled with some rigorous hiking.  We always love these visits.  They also had several family trips to places like Chicago and Washington, DC, sometimes vacationing extra days in conjunction with Gina's speaking engagements.  Gina also ventured further afield to the Netherlands to be a featured speaker at a public health symposium and returned to Rio de Janeiro to coninue ongoing research projects.

Amy still lives in New York City, but right at the time we visited, she accepted a new position as Online Director for Popular Science Magazine.  When we visited before our cruise, we had the opportunity to visit the beautiful Travel+Leisure offices in the Time Inc. building and meet some of her co-workers while we were visiting before boarding our cruise.  It seemed like a dream situation that must have been painful to leave, but when opportunity knocks, she answers, which seems to be a common trait among our children.

She returned to Germany in the spring with her boyfriend Lukas to attend a birthday party for his grandmother.  Amy made many shorter trips closer to New York.  Just after she started her new job, she flew to Las Vegas, along with her college buddy Brian and her roommate Rachel. A Britney Spears concert anchored this mini-vacation. Earlier in the year, Amy spent a long weekend in Jamaica with some of her friends in media.

We were pleased when Amy was able to arrange to work remotely from California during the week before Christmas.  She came primarily to attend a cookie decorating party with some high school friends, but we're always happy to reap the benefits of whatever time we get with family.

Between Skype and intermittent visits, we have been happy to remain very connected to our East Coast contingent.

While I stress travel in this blog, it is time with family that makes life most worthwhile.

And, by the way, we still enjoy living in sunny Redondo Beach and visiting nearby attractions.

It's very much like being on vacation year-round.

Merry Christmas,

Wes, Julie and Family