2025 Year in Review: Volcanoes, Sharks, and Saying “I Do” in the Alps

Last Updated on January 6, 2026 by Charlotte

If I had to choose one word to describe 2025, it would be extremes.

This was a year of exhilarating, larger-than-life happiness in equally large landscapes like volcanoes, glaciers, and mountains that reminded me how small (and lucky) I am. It was also a year threaded with uncertainty, recalibration, and moments where the ground felt less solid under my feet than I would have liked.

In many ways, 2025 gave me everything I had been working toward. On paper, it was my most accomplished year yet, but at the same time, I felt like I experienced the evaporation of my identity like an ego death. A significant chunk of my professional identity got reshuffled in ways I didn’t choose. Work that had felt stable suddenly wasn’t, and I spent more time than I’d like recalibrating what ‘enough’ looks like when the ground shifts beneath your feet.

Looking back now, I see 2025 less as a year where everything fell apart, and more as a year that asked me to learn to balance inside the chaos. I learned that choosing your dream life isn’t a single decision—it’s something you keep choosing, again and again, even when external forces try to knock it loose. This post is a look back at the wild, tender, hilarious, and occasionally unhinged moments that shaped it, and what I’m looking forward to in 2026.

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Our Favorite Landscapes: Fire and Ice

In a year defined by contrast, some of our most unforgettable moments were shaped by the rawest elements on earth: fire and ice. In 2025, we were lucky enough to catch the Kilauea Volcano eruption more than once, with 1,200 ft (365 m) tall lava fountains! In the past, I’d seen lava in all shapes and forms: lava rivers, lava lakes, lava pouring into the ocean, but this was perhaps the coolest form yet! It is actually insane to see new earth being created in real time.

Abroad on our travels, we enjoyed multiple hikes up to glaciers in the Chamonix Valley. One of my particular favorites was the hike to the Albert 1er Refuge Glacier. We did this hike on my birthday, and it was an epic way to usher in another journey around the sun.

There was something oddly comforting about both experiences: glaciers that reshape the land through patience and pressure, and lava that creates new earth outright. They felt like symbols of recreation.

Our Favorite Tour: Truffle Hunting in Turin

I will be dreaming of the Andar per Tartufi Turin Truffle Tour for the rest of my days. On this tour, we explored the woods of Alba with a professional truffle hunter and his loveable truffle dog Teo in search of the Summer black truffle. I was skeptical that we would find any truffles, but Teo was incredible, and he found four!

After the hunt, we retired to the family’s Agriturismo for a six-course truffle lunch. You can check out my full recap of everything we ate in our blog post, Truffle Hunting Near Turin.

Our Favorite Specialty Coffee: Moody’s

If there is one cup of specialty coffee that I am still dreaming about, it is my cappuccino from Moody’s coffee, and that ooey gooey warm cinnamon bun.

You can read more about our favorite specialty coffee in Chamonix in our full guide.

Our Favorite Group Trips: Kona and Malvern

Some of our most meaningful moments came from slowing down to celebrate with the people who have shaped our lives across oceans and eras. After our elopement in Chamonix, we hosted two post-elopement parties for our geographically distant families. The first was on an Alpaca Farm in Malvern, and it was a weekend of swims in the pool, karaoke, bonfires at night, and bass fishing in a pond.

This event was very special because all of my mainland family and my grade school friends were able to come and celebrate in the same place.

It’s rare to have so many chapters of your life overlap in one place, and that weekend felt like a quiet miracle because of it.

A few months later, we hosted our second celebration in Kona on the Big Island with Travel Buddy’s family, our university friends, and all of our local friends from home in Hawaii.

For this celebration, we stayed at a charming property in Holualoa, a high-elevation area of Kona that is home to an artsy community surrounded by coffee and fruit farms.

It felt so great to have one last hurrah with our friends, to go snorkel touring together, and to share morning coffees and evening dinners on the lanai.

Together, these two celebrations felt like coming full circle. Honoring where we came from, and where we’ve chosen to build our lives now.

Our Most Chaotic Travel Stories: France

We spent three weeks in France this Summer, and it did not disappoint… in travel mishaps! However, I did get trapped inside a self-cleaning toilet, which was terrifying, and then, one of our splurge accomodations in a fairytale village had a wasp infestation!

And finally, we got inside the wrong Uber at the Nice airport at 3 am in the morning and then got extorted out of 60 Euros for a 4-minute ride, or the driver would not let us leave the vehicle! He’d child locked all the doors! Not one of our finest moments!

I should mention that we did have a wonderful time, despite all of this excitement.

Our Scariest Adventure: Getting Hunted By Sharks

You might be surprised to hear that our scariest adventure was actually at home in Hawaii. Travel Buddy and I were out on our regular spear dive when we just got this “weird” feeling. I honestly can’t explain it, or how it works, but it’s this feeling like you’re being watched. Or followed. We were far out from shore when two sharks swam out of a cave, and they were in a frenzy. Living in Hawaii, we see sharks all the time, and usually, they are pretty chill, lounging around like sea puppies.

These sharks were NOT chill. They were erratically circling each other, tails snapping, banking and twisting, and we rightly decided to get out of there. So we’re swimming as fast as we can, trying to kick our flippers without splashing, and the sharks follow us, staying maybe 20 feet behind.

Travel Buddy gets his knife out, and we’re checking behind us, watching, until we come upon an Uncle who has an OCTOPUS stuck on his back!! And this Uncle is like “Hey, can you help me to get it off” because the octopus is suctioned on really tightly, so I am trying to peel off the octopus, and in the meanwhile, Travel Buddy is fiddling with his fogged up mask, and then a THIRD SHARK swims directly underneath us, and begins to circle us and this Uncle. At that point, I am like NOPE, I am out of here. So we high-tail it to shore and get out of the water. I do not know what was up, but the sharks were not behaving normally that day.

Our Top Experience: Eloping in the Alps

Much of 2025 was centered around planning and prepping for our biggest event of the year: eloping in the French Alps!

This day ended up being more than Travel Buddy and I could have ever dreamed of, and it felt authentic to us to be married in the same mountain range that is so close to our hearts.

What’s Coming Up in 2026

After the whirlwind of 2025, I feel like I am still trying to catch my breath. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t have our next six months of travel planned out in advance. But in a way, I think this will be fun. In 2026, we are going to try out some more spontaneous trips. We hope to travel to random destinations when the plane tickets are cheap, and the stars align with work and other life obligations.

At home, both Travel Buddy and I have signed up for a 10k, a half-marathon, and the Honolulu Marathon. Personally, I see this as a stepping stone toward reaching my goal of running the Marathon du Mont Blanc in 2030, and I am pretty excited! I want to try to run a sub 5, but we’ll see if I can do that.

We also finally want to take a mountaineering course sometime this year. I’ve had my eye on a course in Canada, and another option in Alaska. After visiting Chamonix in 2025 and seeing all the alpinists doing cool stuff, we felt very inspired to learn mountaineering skills before we get too old.

Lastly, I’ll share my blogging goals for 2026. In the personal chaos of 2025, blogging was the single predictable and comforting thing in my professional life. In sharing all of our experiences with you, I got to relive the fun times, the hilarious times, and the memories we made. So, thank you, dear reader, for sticking with me through all of this. You have helped to turn this hobby project into something bigger, and each and every post is made better by you!

I appreciate all of your thoughtful comments, questions, and trip reports from when you go on your own adventures. I still have a massive backlog of things to write about, but I am slowly chipping away at it, one blog post at a time.

If there is something that you’d like to see that does not exist yet, just pop me a comment! I am always happy to bump a destination of interest to the top of my to-do list, if it is helpful to you.

Wishing you and yours a restful new year and a world full of new adventures.

–Charlotte