Bride - Berniece Bruinius
Berniece is an English professor at California Baptist University (CBU) and a Ph.D. candidate at Claremont Graduate University. She is the fourth child of Harry and Judy Bruinius. She has two older brothers, Harry, Joshua, and one younger brother, Ron and her older sister is Vera, her matron of honor. She grew up in Lansing, IL, a south suburb of Chicago, IL. After graduating from high school in 1992, her family moved to Florida to escape the snow for the comfort of the beach. She attended Florida State University in Tallahassee. After college, she taught middle school for only one year and gave up a promising career filled in adolescent drama for the big life in New York City. However, in NYC, she discovered she missed the great outdoors. As her older bro Harry once said, “you don’t move to the city for Central Park.” Hence, she returned to Florida to teach high school and train for triathlons. She competed in her first triathlon in May of 2002. Teaching high school provided several valuable opportunities to shape and inspire development as a literature teacher and motivation to attend graduate school. After some research, she discovered the graduate program at CBU and packed up her small car, strapped her bike to the back, and drove across country with her bridesmaid Kimberly Beasey to Riverside, California. She began teaching part time at CBU in the fall of 2004 and full time in 2007. She began working on her Ph.D. in the fall of 2009 and is now at the early stages of the dissertation process. After much prayer, she met Brent last April and fell madly in love with his passion for serving Christ, hiking national parks, running trails, discussing James Joyce, talking politics, following Braves baseball, and maintaining his scuffy beard!
Groom - Brent Alspach
Brent is an environmental engineer with the international behemoth known as ARCADIS, a company whose names resembles the acronym of an evil international spy outfit and which operates like the Borg from Star Trek. For a person whose initial 5-year post college mission was to get some experience in potable water treatment before moving on to other to-be-determined pursuits, his largely stable16-year run with company has been surprisingly fulfilling. Prior to becoming assimilated into the corporate juggernaut, Brent grew up in the fantastic ‘burb of Dunwoody, GA (near Atlanta) and subsequently earned his BS and MS in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Cornell University in gorges Ithaca, NY. He began his career in 1997 in the awesomely named town of Newport News, VA before migrating to San Diego in 1999 at the behest of the company. In planning this x-country trek and seeing new territory in America’s heartland, Brent observed that there were only a handful of states that he hadn’t yet the occasion to visit over the course of his admittedly very blessed life, thus initiating a short-lived quest to complete the US civil circuit, which he did upon meeting up with his Best Man, Tim Patronski, in Alaska in 2001. Much of Brent’s so-called spare time over the next decade was spent in fervent devotion to the youth group and senior high Sunday School at his church, collecting treasured experiences that to this day make him smile wide at the remembrance. After a bittersweet parting from this passion, Brent was subsequently blessed with a new focus for loving devotion in his soon-to-be wife. In the interstitial spaces in time when he’s not working or either spending time with, talking to, or thinking about Berniece, Brent indulges in a healthy combination of non-profit work with The Escondido Creek Conservancy and Sierra Service Project, serving on the Boards of both organizations. He’s also an avid reader… of comic books… and enjoys a masochist’s love of hard core trail running. And with the 50 states under his belt, Brent is looking forward to completing his tour of the Major League ballparks (only four to go) and, in the long term, the National Parks (many more than four to go). The happy couple will shortly collaborate on the latter pursuit, kicking off their marriage on an Alaska honeymoon junket that will take them to several of America’s most remote and stunning such places.