Chasing Summer

craft craft Leroux

2011-08-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess now I am "craft craft Martin" but somehow it doesn't yet sound the same to me...

I have been very excited to knit and crochet lately. I can only work on small cool projects because of the heat, but I've got many going now. I'm actually feeling stressed about it. There's too many projects going at once. And, because I have to keep all of the proper sized needles and hooks with the unfinished projects because I would never remember which goes where whenever I might finally get back to the project, I'm finding that the number of projects I can start is seriously limited. (maybe that's a good thing)

craftiness in progress...

I've started a new craft blog, hoping that by writing about my projects and posting some photos of them, I'll be more motivated to get some of them complete before starting in on new ones.

My yarn basket runneth over, and I must get this stuff done!

Honeymoon Part II - Prague

2011-08-07T08:39:00.000-07:00

We've been back about 10 days, but I didn't want to leave our blog readers hanging about our honeymoon, so here's a quick report about the second half of our honeymoon in Prague, Czech Republic. As we mentioned last time, we took the train from Budapest to Prague where we spent three nights. We liked Prague a lot, although it was noticeably more touristy and crowded. It's a beautiful city, with lots of little alleys and old buildings to explore. This picture gives a good idea of the architecture and the crowds:

We spent one day just wondering around on our own, and on another day we took a "free" walking tour. There was no charge for the tour but the guides work for tips. The tour lasted three hours and was actually very informative so we didn't mind tipping our guide. As you can see from the above picture, the weather was cloudy and cool, but pleasant enough. We also appreciated that most of the US, including Boston, was caught in a major heat wave while we were there, so we didn't mind the cooler weather. You can see the rest of our pictures, but we pretty much walked, drank beer and people watched. Overall, we had a very relaxing time on our honeymoon, both in Budapest and Prague.

We've been married a little over three weeks now, and as I suspected, not a whole lot has changed, which isn't surprising considering we've already been living together for over five years. We got the rest of the pictures back from the photographer, but we haven't sorted through them all yet. (We did post a few preview shots of the wedding and reception but there are lots more to post.) We're also creating a photo book of our favorite pictures.

Honeymoon Part I - Budapest

2011-07-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

So we're on our honeymoon, and the following is a report of our time in Budapest, the first stop of our two city mini-tour of Eastern Europe. We arrived after an overnight flight from Boston through Munich and took a "minibus" to our hotel, the Best Western Hungaria. The hotel was what I would call nouveau Soviet chic, which means the building had an industrial feel to it, but you could tell the management was trying to overcome the communist influence. The staff was mostly young and good looking, and there seemed to be a young lady in a maid outfit perpetually cleaning the doors and wiping down various surfaces every time we walked through the lobby. I only noticed her because she seemed out of place, and she was always chatting with the elderly concierge hosts who didn't seem to have anything to do.

We took a short nap, but in an effort to overcome jet lag we forced ourselves to stay up and went out for a walk, landing at a "build your own falafel" place for dinner. We didn't quite know how to order, but we ended up with healthy and filling sandwiches. We got soft serve ice creams on the walk back and called it an early night.

The next day we had the included breakfast at our hotel, a sort of combination between Turkish style (tomatoes, cucumbers and feta) and German style (soft boiled eggs, brown bread and salami) breakfasts. It was an odd spread, including super-runny scrambled eggs, watery juice and a coffee machine that dispensed coffee about three ounces at a time. We took a swing by the train station so we would know where to catch our train when it was time to leave, and after a bit of searching found the Metro and took it across the river so we could explore the castles of the "Buda" side of Budapest. The weather was threatening rain and it did rain a bit now and again. We had coffee while overlooking the Parliament building, then walked up and down the walled area, searching at first for the Labyrinth (a glorified wine cellar where we declined to pay the $10 entrance fee), and then for something cheap to eat. We ended up getting sandwiches, where Jaimee had the tuna and I the salami. We both remarked that for a landlocked country they seemed to eat quite a bit of fish here.

Parliament Building from "Fisherman's Bastion"

We walked down the hill and over the picturesque "Chain Bridge", into the city and back toward our hotel. We found a cute little wine bar and had a couple glasses of wine before getting an early dinner of vegetarian tapas and more wine at a little cafe recommended in our guide book. We went back to our hotel, but again in order to not fall asleep too early we went out for ice creams at McDonalds and enjoyed the free wifi. McDonalds in Europe are the equivalent of coffee houses in the US. It seems people socialize and use them as meeting places. In the US, I'd be mortified to be caught hanging out at McDonalds, but it seemed acceptable in Hungary, especially when the Internet was faster than what I have at my own house.

Day three was more walking around, this time to the beautiful "Hero's Square" where we caught a brief military presentation of some kind. We walked all around the park nearby, stopped for a quick coffee at a square-side cafe and then walked back into the City Center. We were on a mission for a nice piece of orange chocolate cake (something Jaimee got in her head that she wanted), but most of the cafes we found in the city center were overpriced. We eventually ended up back at the same wine bar as the day before where they in fact had a delightful orange chocolate cake, which we had with some wine. We remarked that our glasses of wine were at least twice as big as the previous day, which we chalked up to the fact that they must have remembered us and were happy to see us again.

But we got the bill and realized we actually paid for "double" pours of wine, even though we didn't explicitly order such. They were still only $5 glasses of wine, which is a good deal, but not as good as the $2.50 we thought we were paying. In any event we left with a bit of a buzz and had greasy gyros from a takeout place, which contained a spicy sauce and definitely hit the spot. We got lunch supplies for our train trip the next day and retired back to our hotel where we uploaded pictures and planned our visit to Prague.

The hotel breakfast was packed the morning of our train ride to Prague, many of the people evidently on some sort of organized bike tour. I can't say I envy them given the rainy and cold weather. We had leftover Hungarian currency so at the train station we bought a bottle of wine and converted some of the money into Czech money, although we're still left with a 500 forint note which the change person was only going to give me one Euro for it. The current exchange is about 285 forint to the Euro, so I kept the bill as a souvenir. Which is stupid because I never would have paid one Euro to have a 500 forint bill souvenir, but out of principle I couldn't let the exchange person rip me off. Alas, this brought back memories of our around-the-world trip. We have a box full of currency from around the world, that I don't believe we've looked at once since we've gotten back. I'll be sure to reminisce when I put this 500 forint bill into the box when we get back.

The train ride to Prague was fairly pleasant and uneventful; we shared a six person berth with a family traveling with a little well-behaved boy. At first we just took the compartment next door which only had a German couple in it, but a few stops in we were kicked out by another German family. Our reserved tickets were window seats, although the country-side through Hungary and Slovakia was fairly dreary with the sky being mostly gray with on-and-off showers.

So far our impressions of Prague are positive, but we noticed a huge difference in the number of tourists. Prague is packed with tourists, including what seem to be large groups of men, seemingly on bachelor parties. Maybe it's all the cheap beer. We're enjoying the cooler weather compared to what's back in Boston right now. We actually both wore pants today and I used my sweatshirt this evening as we sat at a street-side cafe for dinner of pizza and beer.

Married!

2011-07-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

After five and a half years together, and countless trips and excursions we finally got married! July 16, 2011 Jaimee and I said our vows in front of close family and friends in Guilford, Vermont. My Aunt and Uncle, Betsy and Neil graciously allowed us to use their house and garden for the event, and it went off exactly as planned! The weather couldn't have been better, and all the hard work by everyone paid off in that the grounds looked beautiful, the food was amazing, and we had our perfect Vermont wedding.

We leave later today for our honeymoon in Budapest and Prague, but I wanted to post a link to a few pictures from the wedding. When we get back we'll hopefully have more pictures, as well as pictures from the reception which took place the next day.

But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy these pictures. We certainly enjoyed being there when they were taken. Thank you to everyone who helped create a truly memorable weekend.

Vermont Wedding

Summer Plans...

2011-05-31T20:33:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial kick-off to summer, so we decided to celebrate it with a trip to the beach! We went to Kennebunkport, Maine for the weekend. We decided to go there after getting an email offer from a "resort" that got our information from the Boston Travel show that we went to a few months back. See, mass marketing works! The hotel was adequate but nothing special, but we had a nice, relaxing weekend. Here are some pictures from the weekend:

Kennebunkport Memorial Day

The weather wasn't great, including one very overcast day, but since we were so close to the outlet stores of Freeport, we took a ride to do some shopping. I even managed to find my wedding outfit at a most unlikely place. It will be a nice, summery outfit, perfect for our garden wedding. Speaking of, we've been slowly finalizing the plans, and have almost finished the invitations. Because we're having the wedding and reception on separate days, we actually have two invitations. We sent out the ceremony invitations already, and the reception ones should get mailed soon.

In addition to our Maine adventure, at the beginning of the month, Jaimee and I participated in the New York Five Boro bike ride. It's a 40 mile ride through all five boroughs of New York City. We had fun visiting New York and it was definitely fun to ride through the city, but the ride was overcrowded, and there were actually bike traffic jams. At one point, because of construction on a bridge we were stuck on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (without cars) for about an hour. It was pretty crazy. We tried to get some pictures, including a few to show how many people were on the ride:

Tour de Boro 2011

We got back from Maine to super warm weather in Boston, which is gratifying after such a long, cool Spring. We're definitely looking forward to the summer.

Family Filled Weekends

2011-04-24T19:42:00.000-07:00

Our weekends have been very full of family activities lately. Its been great fun to see so many family members this month and I must admit that I've loved the chance to get dressed up for a change!

We started the month with my bridal shower...my favorite day so far this year. I got to get dressed up, wear ridiculous shoes, and see almost my entire female family in one day! Here I am in the library at Cyprian Keyes.

We also managed to celebrate the birthdays of Asa and my mom and step-mother on that same day (enter the male side of the family!) While my family often celebrates multiple birthdays in one celebration and with one cake, its not often...or ever...that we've celebrated my mom's birthday and Sandi's at the same party, even though they share the same birthday.

The following weekend Asa, my sisters and I all conspired to throw a surprise anniversary party for my dad and Sandi. While we weren't able to surprise Dad, we did shock Sandi!

We had so much fun planning the party and were very pleased by the big family turn out. We served Mexican food as well as margaritas and sangria. One of Janelle's friends made and delivered a delicious cake and I made an apple crisp for dessert. While it isn't apple season...it was the dessert served 25 years ago at Dad and Sandi's wedding. Here's Asa, Jonah and I having a quick cuddle before Jonah got wisked home to bed.

The next day we raced back to our apartment to spend the afternoon with my mom, Nate, Abby, and Shaun. Mom was still in town after her surprise appearance at my shower. Asa and I were excited to be able to host her again at our apartment! It was the first time Shaun made it to our place and it was a great day for a walk in the Arboretum. Here we are on Peter's Hill, a short walk from our apartment.

We don't only spend time with my family, you know. We love spending time with Asa's family and while they aren't in as close proximity to us as my family, we really look forward to our weekends away visiting them. Asa's Aunt Betsy and Uncle Neil, who live in Vermont, invited us up for a weekend and we were thrilled to be able to go to Goose Landing (their home) after a great morning of cake tasting for our wedding reception. We are going to have our wedding ceremony at Goose Landing this summer and we have offered to help them with the yard work as much as we can before the wedding...so we did some raking while we were there this time.

This weekend we were able to go to a nice Easter Brunch with my dad, Sandi, Janelle, Michelle, Russ, Meme, Auntie Linda and my cousin Matt. We went to the Grafton Inn for a nice brunch and then traveled back to Dad's house for a fun game of bocce.

The next couple of weekends we'll be heading to New York to see Asa's cousins Lexy and Vahop in Brooklyn and Asa's Aunt Lisa and Uncle Dick in Catskill. Really looking forward to those adventures as well!

It's Nice to Be Loved

2011-04-09T08:17:00.000-07:00

Living in New England we are lucky to be surrounded by loving and supportive family and friends. Last weekend we experienced that love first-hand when Jaimee's step-mom Sandi organized a beautiful and well-attended bridal shower, in anticipation of our wedding this July. Jaimee's sisters enjoyed planning the party, which was originally supposed to be a surprise, but because of Jaimee's sleuthing skills, she found out about it well before hand. Here's Jaimee with her sisters and step-mom:

From Wedding Shower

Jaimee's mom did do a surprise visit all the way from Idaho, so at least we were able to get one surprise:

From Wedding Shower

Jaimee received many awesome gifts, that we've put to use right away, including a few sets of nice glasses, an amazing coffee maker and various other kitchen items. Some of items will take some getting used to, such the set of "rolo" shot glasses, which I found out pretty quickly you need to hold on to when pouring:

After the shower, Jaimee's dad hosted a joint birthday party for me and Jaimee's step-mom (she's April 3, I'm April 5). It warms my heart to be part of such a loving family:

From Wedding Shower

Readers of my last blog post took note of the fact that I said I didn't get the memo regarding a yellow biking jacket, so one of my gifts was a bright yellow jacket along with a memo:

Now when I do my group bike rides (or even when riding solo), I'll be highly visible and safe!

We survived the winter

2011-03-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

With April just around the corner and a full week into Spring, I'm happy to report that we made it through a New England winter. And as far as winters go, it was a good one. If by good, I mean lots of snow, and very cold. I'll admit I'm glad to see that Spring is here, some flowers are sprouting, and last Friday it actually hit 70 degrees for a minute. Of course, Monday saw snow flurries and it turned cold, but warmer weather is definitely coming soon.

I also survived a winter of bike commuting. When winter began I wasn't sure when I'd stop riding, but turns out I never did. I just bundled up, put on studded tires and kept at it. It was actually kind of fun. Since most of my commute is on a bike trail, I had the trail mostly to myself. Now that the weather has gotten nicer there are a lot more riders out there. Which is fine too. In fact, I'm become friends with some of the other riders. On a commute earlier in the winter I started chatting with another biker and it turns out he runs a Roslindale Bike Club called RozzieBikes. They do various events in and around Roslindale including group commutes into Boston on the last Friday of the month. I joined them yesterday. There were only three of us, and they went painfully slow, and we took the longest route possible, but it was a beautiful morning so I didn't mind too much. We even stopped for a picture near the Charles River. I guess I missed the memo to wear my yellow jacket:

Jaimee has also been riding with me sometimes. She bought a bike last fall and we've been doing little rides around the neighborhood, or over to my sister's house in Jamaica Plain. But otherwise, not a whole lot to report. We were interviewed for a fellow travel blog a few weeks ago. Some other around-the-world travelers, whose blog I follow asked us to write up a short description of our experiences WWOOFing, as they are doing a series of posts about planning an around-the-world trip. The post is about working while on the road. I love reading about how they travel. It's definitely not the way we traveled, and they had two to three times our budget. I like how they state on their on their budget page, "we don't need all that much: WiFi, air conditioning, and a clean room are more than sufficient for us." I thought when I read that, that's like three more requirements than what we had. But, they were working while on the road, and Jaimee and I have both admitted (well, Jaimee more than me) that if we were to do it again, we'd probably spend a little bit more per night. A few extra dollars can make a huge difference in many countries.

Anyway, as I've said before, although I love reading about other travelers, I sometimes have to take a break because I get too nostalgic for the road. I miss our trip so much; it's crazy to think it's been almost 10 months since we've been back. We've settled in quite nicely here in Boston, and we love it here, but I still don't know if it feels like home. I recently finished reading a great travel book, called The Lunatic Express. It's about a journalist who travels around the world, purposely seeking out the most dangerous pubic transit he can find. Not only does he go to some crazy places, but he talks about the meaning of home, and what it means to him to travel. I could definitely relate, and I think some of our travels would rival the situations he found himself in.

More Adventures in the White Mountains

2011-02-28T05:48:00.000-08:00

This weekend, Jaimee and I spent another wonderful weekend in the winter wonderland of the White Mountains. We stayed for two nights at Carter Notch Hut near Mt. Washington. We drove up on Friday and when we left Boston it was a hard rain that turned to snow as we progressed north. It took over six hours to drive there, more than double what it should take. This meant we got a late start hiking, leaving the trailhead at 4:15PM for the four mile hike to the hut.

From More Winter Adventures

We made good time on the slog up the Nineteen Mile Brook trail, but when we got to the top of the ridge, it was pitch black with a hollowing wind. Even with our headlamps on full blast we could barely see in front of us, and when we got to a trail sign that said the hut was 0.3 miles we were super excited. The problem was, with the blowing wind, there was no trail. Having never been to the hut before we didn't know that it sat just above two small lakes. All we found were the lakes, and as we wondered across the frozen surface we noticed that our tracks were blown away so it was impossible to backtrack. I'll skip to the ending in that we eventually noticed the lights from the hut, but I will say, I was very, very scared. The White Mountains are a dangerous place, especially in the winter, at night, in a blizzard. It was the first time I'd ever seriously contemplated activating the 911 feature on our Spot device, but luckily, we stayed calm, found the last bit of trail that we recognized by walking the perimeter of the lakes and were able to find the path people take in the summer. There was another sign at 0.1 miles from the hut and at that point we could see the warm glow of the hut.

Our two-night stay at the hut was fairly uneventful, except for a drunk person in our bunk room. We stayed in a six-person bunk house the first night and one of our bunk-mates threw up inside the room, multiple times. It's a pretty horrible sound to hear retching and then the sound of vomit hitting the floor. Luckily the room was about 10 degrees so the vomit froze and actually didn't smell. But the guy did cause some drama looking for the door, falling on ice, making all sorts of noise. The second night was less dramatic as we had the room to ourselves.

We climbed one 4,000 foot peak during out stay, Wildcat Mountain A, which was quite the hike. It's only one mile up to the summit but because we had to break trail through drifts of snow over four feet high it took us two and a half hours to get to the top and only 40 minutes to come down.

From More Winter Adventures

The hike out to the car was much easier than the way in, but we decided to just return the way we came on the Nineteen Mile Brook trail instead of out and over Carter Dome, another 4,000 foot peak in the area. We got back to our car, and although the car was fine, we'd left a Sigg water bottle full of water in the car and when it froze it broke the metal bottle! The weather and conditions of the White Mountains are not be taken lightly!

Other than our little weekend adventure, we've had more quality family time. We celebrated Jaimee's birthday with her cousin and meme, who all have birthdays within a few days of each other. I love this picture of the three of them blowing out the candles on the cake. Take away the smart phone on the table and it could be a Norman Rockwell painting:

From More Winter Adventures

We also got in a trip to Vermont to visit my Aunt and Uncle, where Jaimee and I pinch-hit for my Aunt (she hurt her knee and has trouble snow-shoeing) and led the wine and cheese snow-shoe tour at Grafton Ponds where she works. Much easier than hiking up Wildcat Mountain, this was a 45 minute hike through the woods to a waiting bonfire where they'd already brought up bottles of wine and blocks of cheese via snowmobile. We drank four bottle of wine between 10 of us, which made for an interesting walk back down through the woods. We've had an amazing snowy winter here in New England and we feel lucky that we've been able to enjoy it as much as we have.

40 years ago...

2011-02-07T17:18:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not turning 40. I may be old, but I'm not that old (not yet anyway). Forty years ago today my parents got married. They were married for 19 years when my father passed away, and I have no doubt that if he hadn't died, they'd still be married and celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary this week. Their anniversary was a big deal in our family because, as some of you may know, we didn't celebrate Christmas growing up. (We also didn't celebrate Hanukkah, which is always the next question when you tell someone you don't celebrate Christmas.) Instead, my parents arranged what we called, in retrospect somewhat unimaginatively, "Present Day" which coincided with their anniversary. We took the Christ out of Christmas and moved it to early February. We also took out the lights, decorations, stockings and trees. In reality it was nothing like Christmas except that we exchanged presents. This tradition fell by the wayside as my sisters and I got older, and I honestly couldn't tell you when the last official "Present Day" was.

I mention my parent's anniversary today, not so much because of the memories of "Present Day", but because my dad has now been gone longer than my parents were married. I got to thinking about this recently because I have a strong tendency to dwell on the past, and while I never ever want to forgot the people from my past, sometimes the past has a way of covering over the present. Life moves forward, and it sounds like a cliche, but you can't live life looking backwards.

Take for example our around the world trip. Before we know it, we will have been back in the States longer than we were away. It's not that the memories of the trip are fading, but the relevancy is fading, or at least that's how it feels. It might seem obvious, but the trip we took will never change, which means we'll always be answering questions such as, "Did you go to Cambodia?" with "No." Or "Did you go to South America?" and we'll have to say "No." We'll answer "What parts of Africa did you go to?" and it will always be "Just Egypt". And we'll always be explaining that we only visited southern India, and didn't see the Taj Mahal.

This isn't to say we won't travel again, and indeed I intend to continue traveling and visiting new places. I recently found myself on-line playing around with around-the-world tickets, which even though we didn't end up using one for our trip, I still find intriguing. Not to alarm anyone in our family lest they think we're planning another big trip, but I read a lot of travel blogs and I happened to click on an ad for a "South American around-the-world" ticket that stopped in Columbia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Costa Rica. All those stops (and there were multiple stops in some of the countries) cost less than $1,500 per person. That's an amazing deal, and part of me wants to head to Miami (where the ticket originated) and leave on that trip tomorrow. And not just because Boston has three feet of snow on the ground, although that certainly is big motivation.

Then again, as I've mentioned repeatedly, I am enjoying myself in Boston. Yesterday we had a lovely Superbowl party at Jaimee's dad's house and on Saturday, Jaimee and I had a long visit with my sister and nephew. I cherish those moments, and am truly happy that we are close to family. But, the travel bug is hard to kick and I sometimes wish we didn't fall into jobs and a routine in Boston so easily.

When we came back from our trip, I had a grand vision of finding some way to finance more travel, finding a way to break free from the "9 to 5", three weeks of vacation a year syndrome. Alas, Jaimee and I found jobs, good jobs that we both like, and an apartment that we love. So what's the problem? Nothing really, except that I still have unfulfilled dreams. I guess the take-away from this somewhat long rambling post is that I plan on spending more time in the present (and future), and less time reminiscing about the past. In reading other around-the-world bloggers, I noticed a similar struggle that sets in a few months after returning. Often it seems the blogs morph into something else. The most explicit example of this is AwayTogether, a blog about a family of four who traveled around the world, which turned into A Runner's Trip, a blog about long-distance running. Another example is our friends Jason and Gillian from Victoria who have continued their blog, but with a focus on motivation behind travel, living in the moment, and challenges to move out of your comfort zone. I know that Gillian sometimes reads this blog, so I don't mean to misrepresent her blog if my description isn't her intent, and I really encourage people to check it out for themselves, as it's quite motivating.

Maybe this blog will change into a place to motivate others to fulfill their dreams and live in the present. I suppose we can do that by setting an example ourselves. So, maybe you'll see more posts about dreams, goals and living a more fulfilling life.

Lonesome Lake

2011-02-01T04:33:00.000-08:00

As promised, here's an update of our latest winter adventure at Lonesome Lake hut in the White Mountains (with pictures). It started, like many trips to New Hampshire do, with a stop at the Liquor Store right off the highway. We had to stock up on "nips" to keep us warm in the hut, and we also wanted to pick up some Sortilege, that super-yummy Maple Canadian Whiskey that our Canadian couchsurfers brought us a couple months ago. We couldn't find Sortilege in Massachusetts, but we'd heard it was available in New Hampshire. Sure enough, they had a huge display of it, although they were the small 375mL bottles which was disappointing, but it just meant that we got two!

The hike into Lonesome Lake hut is fairly short, a little over a mile, but like many trails in the White Mountains it is very steep - it gains about 900 feet in that one mile so it was a good workout. The lake was completely frozen over so we could take a shortcut across it to get to the hut:

From Lonesome Lake

The setup of the hut is a large main building where the caretaker keeps a wood fire in the evenings surrounded by two unheated bunk houses separated into rooms with four or six beds each. The entire compound sleeps about 45 or so, but when we got the hut, the very nice caretaker told us it was only us and one other couple that night. So we had privacy on our anniversary after all. We soaked it up that first night because on Saturday night the hut was filled to capacity, half of them a "Women of Newburyport" group. They certainly took advantage of the short hike in as they carried in at least a dozen bottles of wine.

Our friends Michael and Liza met us at the hut on Saturday morning and we did a day hike of two 4,000 foot peaks in the area. The conditions were amazing. The trail was already packed out by other snowshoers and although there wasn't much sun, there also wasn't any wind so it wasn't all that cold (as long as you kept moving). It truly was a winter wonderland. We summited both North and South Kinsman, making it peaks 17 and 18 in my quest to hike all 67 4,000 foot peaks in New England.

Even though supposedly the hut was packed the second night, no one shared our bunk room with us so we had the room to ourselves again. Of course, the temperature in the room was in the single digits so we didn't spend too much time in the room itself; mostly we were bundled up in our sleeping bags. I'm a pretty warm sleeper so I was comfortable in my 25 degree down bag, while Jaimee had borrowed her dad's 0 degree bag. It took up most of her backpack on the hike in and out but she claims it was totally worth packing in.

We had a great weekend at the hut, and I'd totally recommend Lonesome Lake as a place to try out "winter camping" as it's a short hike in, the hut is very comfortable (even with 40 or so people), and the setting is beautiful. We're already planning our next outing, probably to Carter Notch Hut at the end of February.

60 Months

2011-01-28T07:14:00.000-08:00

As of today Jaimee and I have been together for 60 months! January 28 is our recognized "anniversary" date of when we officially started dating. Sixty months is five years to those that celebrate in terms of years; we've gotten in the habit of celebrating Monthaversaries on the 28th of every month. We're celebrating the occasion by going up to New Hampshire and staying at Lonesome Lake hut for two nights. Yes, we're celebrating our anniversary by staying at a wood-stove heated shelter in the middle of the mountains that we have to snowshoe into, bring our own food and sleep in bunk beds! Yes, I realize our idea of romantic is quite different from other people.

We've been having quite the winter in New England. It seems every couple days we get another snow storm, so we're expecting great snowshoeing up in New Hampshire. We'll provide a trip report (with pictures) when we get back.

New Year's Report and Kicking it in Boston

2011-01-11T05:36:00.000-08:00

Happy Belated New Year! And Happy 1/11/11 day. (Is that even a Holiday? If it isn't it should be!) We were in Vermont for New Year's Eve and Day, staying with Neil and Betsy. We had a wonderful time and we went to a New Year's Eve party at their friend's house, a party this particular host holds every year. We'd actually been to his New Year's party three years ago so it was fun to see the beginnings of a tradition of sorts. The party also doubled as a 60th Birthday so there were poetry readings, toasts and tearful speeches by the woman's son. Plus the food was catered and it was outstanding, including an amazing chocolate mousse cake!

New Year's Day we took a snowshoe up at Grafton Ponds where my Aunt Betsy does cross-country skiing and snow shoe instruction. She was leading a wine and cheese snowshoe tour where you snow shoe up the little mountain to a cabin where there is wine, cheese and a little camp fire waiting for you. It was amazing! A great way to spend the first day of the year!

Back in Boston, after that large Christmas snow storm, we've only gotten a few more dustings of snow, but apart from a warm spell on New Year's weekend, it has stayed cold, causing snowy/icy conditions on the roads. I've decided to try and commute by bike all winter so I picked up some studded tires for my bike. They're small studs that are placed on the outside edge of the tire to primarily help with lateral sliding. You also run the tire pressure a little low so that you get more surface area under the tire. For the most part, Boston treats the roads (including the bike paths!) exceedingly well so I wasn't needing the studded tires too much, although yesterday morning I took my normal route through the Arboretum and came across packed ice and snow:

See what I mean about treating the roads. This is inside the Arboretum, where no cars are allowed, so they plowed this for pedestrians and bicyclists. I was a little hesitant at first but then I realized the tires were gripping just fine so I made my way through. Here's another shot of the tires, all packed with snow:

As I've said before the commute is actually the best part of my day; despite the cold I love riding every day, and I hope to keep it up the rest of the winter. Plus, the studded tires are harder to pedal so I will be very strong when Spring rolls around. When I switch back to my "slicks" it will feel so fast.

This past weekend, we received a last minute couchsurfing request from an Australian guy doing a two month bus trip around the US. He had only one reference from a fellow traveler and not a host, but we took a chance on him and it worked out great. He's a super nice guy, very knowledgeable about the US, including sports. We went down to the local pizza place to watch one of the NFL football games (since we don't have TV at our apartment), and I was surprised how much he knew about football. But apparently basketball is his favorite sport and he went on ebay and bought two tickets to last night's Celtics game. He wouldn't let me pay but he took me along, and it was super fun, even though as it turns out, the Celtics lost. As luck would have it, we watched the first Celtics home loss since mid-November. But, I'd never been to a Celtics game before so I enjoyed it. I'd never seen so much green before; next time I go I should definitely get a team jersey:

He's moving on today to Montreal, then Ottawa, Buffalo, Detroit, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Austin, and who knows where else, eventually making his way to Los Angeles where he flies back to Melbourne, Australia.

We might have more couchsurfers this coming weekend. A couple, he's from Philadelphia, she's from Taiwan and they're trying to couchsurf in all 48 of the lower 48 states (while writing a book about it). Meeting all these travelers makes us miss our travels a lot, and it feels odd to now be in the position of living vicariously through other people's travels. Part of me wants to just jump on a bus like our Australian friend, but then again, Buffalo and Detroit in January? Detroit at all? I think he needs some help planning his itinerary.

A Winter Adventure

2010-12-31T10:18:00.000-08:00

With this posting I may have to really rethink the whole "Chasing Summer" title for this blog. I just spent three days enjoying the aftermath of the "Blizzard of 2010" up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. (Jaimee could not go with me as she had to work.) Last Sunday night New England, especially coastal areas like Boston got hammered with snow. Boston alone received 18 inches of snow. Before the storm, we spent Christmas Eve to Christmas morning at Jaimee's dad's house in Shrewsbury. We had a lovely, festive time, and pardon the inside joke (but let's be honest, only "insiders" are really reading this anyway) no churches were burned down on Christmas Eve. We left Shrewsbury Saturday evening and drove down to Cape Cod where we visited with Jaimee's visiting Mom and her brother and sister. The storm began rolling in late Sunday morning, and although we had plans to return to Boston on Sunday night, we spent another night and braved the roads back to Boston on Monday. Although by Monday most of the snow had fallen, the roads were still somewhat treacherous and parking in the city was a nightmare. Our downstairs neighbors were out of town so they said we could park in their driveway, but that meant I had to shovel it. It took over two hours to shovel out the driveway wide enough to park the car. Dealing with this much snow is certainly never something we had to deal with in Seattle.

However, the timing of the storm couldn't have been better with respect to my planned trip up to the White Mountains. I spent two nights with our friends Liza and Michael at the AMC Zealand Falls Hut. The hut is rustic, only heated with a wood stove that they stoke between 4PM and 9PM each day. The hut has bunks for about 35 people and it was filled to capacity each night. This meant for cozy accommodations especially in the main room with the stove. We had a great time though, playing games and meeting new people. Not only did I meet someone who knew one of the Appalachian Trail through-hikers I met last summer while hiking the Long Trail, but I also met people who knew my Aunt and Uncle, Neil and Betsy. One guy said he'd house sat for them, and another said he used to work at the West Hill Bike Shop when my uncle owned it. It truly is a small world.

We also got in lots of snowshoeing during the day. The first day was a relatively easy snowshoe into the hut because the trail was already broken out. The second day we took the trail up to Zealand Mountain which was not already broken out. It took the three of us five hours to break through snow that was often up to our waist deep. We eventually got to the summit, which sadly had no view. Although it is a 4,000 foot peak so it helped my friend Michael who is attempting to climb all 48 of New Hampshire's 4,000 foot peaks in the winter:

The third day we returned to the car via the summit of Mount Hale, another 4,000 foot peak. Again, waist high snow where we took turns breaking trail to reach the summit. Hale actually had somewhat of a view and the day was beautifully sunny, so we enjoyed basking in the warm and calm summit:

It was a lot of work snowshoeing through the mountains, but it was a ton of fun and I hope to get up to the mountains more this winter. I'm not necessarily trying to climb all 48 New Hampshire 4,000 footers in the winter, but I am keeping track of which ones I've climbed; I'm up to 16 peaks climbed (and now two in the winter). You can see the rest of the pictures from my hut adventure here.

Now we're finishing packing up and are headed to Neil and Betsy's for the weekend. We might get in some cross-country skiing, but overall hope to have a relaxing New Year's. 2010 was a tremendous, life-changing year for me and Jaimee and I'm hoping 2011 brings more adventures and fun!

Home for the Holidays

2010-12-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

Although Jaimee and I have enjoyed our Holiday travels in the past, this year we're taking advantage of being in the area to do many of the family things we were too far away to do in recent years. As we mentioned in the last post, a couple of weekends ago we went down to Cape Cod to visit Jaimee's brother. While there we helped him install Christmas lights on his house. They were the "icicle" style:

From December 2010

Although the Chatham stroll was kind of a bust (we thought it was happening both Friday and Saturday nights, but when we went on Saturday night many stores were closed), we still had fun visiting family and friends.

This past weekend, we attended the Annual Leroux Christmas Party at Jaimee's dad's cousin's (aka Jaimee's first-cousin once-removed) house. He lives in a beautiful, recently remodeled house in central Massachusetts. The house was like a Bed and Breakfast, and good thing because there were probably 50 people there. The main event of the party was an "As seen on TV"-themed Yankee swap. If you think a Yankee swap with 42 gifts sounds like a nightmare, well, you'd be right...Actually it wasn't that bad, although the gifts were about what you'd expect given the theme: there were three snuggies (one plain, one with the Patriots and one with the Boston Red Sox, the Patriots), three Perfect Brownie pans and several other gifts that were good for a laugh, but not much else. Surprisingly (or maybe not so surprising for those that know us) the gift we bought for the party, we also got to keep (I traded for it). It's the Twin Draft Guard, a contraption for blocking cold air on drafty doors or windows. The door that leads down to the basement in our apartment is super drafty, but after putting the Twin Draft Guard on the side of the door - the draft is gone! It may not be the most stylish thing in the world, but it certainly works!

From December 2010

Speaking of drafts and cold weather, today was the first big snow storm of the year! It started snowing around Noon, and by the afternoon there was a good couple of inches on the ground. I was a little nervous to ride my bike home in it, but it wasn't all that slippery. It's still snowing and we have to go to the airport in about an hour to pick up Jaimee's mom. Her mom is visiting for the next two weeks from Idaho. She's spending the night with us tonight and then going to the Cape tomorrow. We're spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Jaimee's dad in Shrewsbury, than heading down to the Cape to visit with Jaimee's mom and her side of the family. Here's the Leroux family tree (they seemingly buy gifts for everyone and his brother):

From December 2010

It's shaping up to be a busy Holidays, but my office is closed between Dec 23 and January 3, so it should also be relaxing. For me, anyway as Jaimee still has to look after the babies that she nannies for. While Jaimee is doing that I might be spending a few of my vacation days hiking up the White Mountains. My tentative plan right now is to snow shoe into Zealand Falls Hut for a couple nights and hike a few of the 4,000 foot peaks in the area. Given the recent snow storm, it should be beautiful up there.

Getting into the Christmas Spirit

2010-12-09T18:23:00.000-08:00

After such a New England Thanksgiving we are continuing the Holiday season with what's shaping up to be a very New England Christmas too! In fact, my company already had its Holiday Party. It was a pretty low-key affair (on a Monday night!) but Jaimee made the trek into downtown Boston after work. It was actually pretty fun, because at one point Jaimee and I got on the subject of our trip with a few people. Most people are amazed when we talk about spending two and a half months in South East Asia or two months in New Zealand. It was fun to reminisce and it made me really miss our trip. I'm glad we don't forget about it and find new opportunities to discuss and remember it.

Last weekend we visited Vermont for two reasons. First, we spent Saturday doing some trail work on the Catamount Trail. The Catamount Trail is to cross-country skiing what the Long Trail is to hiking. It's a cross-country ski trail that goes the length of Vermont. They were having one of the final work parties of the year so Jaimee and I made the trek up to Killington to help clear a section of the trail. They were rerouting part of the trail off of a snow mobile trail. Here's Jaimee ready to go with the brush cutter:

From December 2010

And as is typical in Vermont, one of the people working that day knew my Aunt Betsy and Uncle Neil. We discovered he knew them because this guy started talking about how he's attempting to ride his bike along every paved road in Vermont, and he was wondering out loud if anyone had ever done that before. I said, well my uncle was telling me about someone who was attempting to do that, and as soon as I said it, I thought, wait maybe he's the same person. And sure enough he was. It's a small state.

After our day of trail work, we headed across the state to East Thetford where my cousins Jenny and Campbell live. We spent the evening babysitting their two kids while they had a dinner out with some neighbors. Their kids, Kate and Mack, are the kind of kids, as Jaimee likes to say, who could trick you into having kids. They are the cutest, smartest, most well-behaved kids. The next morning, we went with the family to pick out their Christmas tree. In true Vermont fashion you drive on a dirt road to a big field with a bunch of trees. You pick out the one you want, cut it down yourself and then mail the owners $16. (Subaru station wagon is optional, but strongly encouraged, as four of the five cars parked along the road were Subarus.) It was fun picking out the perfect tree, and my cousin's family did some nice posing for pictures. Here's Mack and Kate in front of the tree:

From December 2010

Then the whole family posed for a nice picture:

From December 2010

Continuing the Christmas theme, Jaimee and I are headed to Cape Cod this weekend for the Chatham Christmas Stroll. I'm actually in the strange situation of having to use up some vacation time. I accrue a certain amount per month at my job and I'm not allowed to carry over any vacation time to the next year. So, I'm taking a paid day off tomorrow, which is a strange feeling since my last few jobs have not had any paid vacation. Anyway, one last picture that Jaimee took of Jonah and Grace this week. It's been quite cold out recently, but Jaimee has been quite the trooper in wrapping up the babies for at least one trip outside each day. Here they are ready for the cold:

Aren't they lucky kids to have such a nice nanny?

A Most New England Thanksgiving

2010-11-28T20:42:00.000-08:00

We spent the weekend as if we were on a mission to fulfill every cliche of a New England Thanksgiving. We began at Jaimee's dad and step-mom's house on Thursday where we helped prepare a traditional turkey dinner while watching the New England Patriots beat the Detroit Lions 45-25. Then we welcomed a houseful of guests, a mixture of both friends and family, including five visiting Australians. There was a little pressure presenting a "typical" American Thanksgiving for the visitors, but as usual, Jaimee's dad and step-mom were wonderful hosts and could definitely qualify as model hospitable Americans. The Leroux house was like a revolving door all afternoon and evening as people came and went. There were probably a total of about 40 people that stopped by at one point or another.

Jaimee and I headed back to Boston on Friday where we met up with a couple of her friends from Cape Cod. We toured them around Roslindale and drank hot chocolate in our little apartment. Then on Saturday, we drove to Plymouth to meet some friends of Jaimee's from Chicago who were in the area visiting family. We met up for breakfast at a cafe right next to Plymouth Rock! How could we not snap a couple of photos next to the iconic 1620 rock?

From Thanksgiving 2010

After a brief pop-in at Jaimee's Aunt and Uncle's house in Plymouth following breakfast, we went back to Boston for a late lunch of turkey dinner leftovers with my sister and her wife's family. Isn't Thanksgiving about going from one meal to the next, all the while visiting family? After the brief lunch we came back to Roslindale and wandered into the village for the Christmas Tree lighting. We even got to see Santa Claus arrive on a fire truck! We didn't stay long but we appreciated living in such a cute neighborhood with lots of families and fun activities for them.

We then went home and waited for our couchsurfing guests to arrive. Those who'd been following our travels know that we used couchsurfing quite a bit during our travels. We begun using the website back when we lived in Seattle and hosted several people before we left. We then "surfed" many times while traveling and we vowed that when we settled down again we'd return to being hosts. Well, Dominic and Audrey from Saguenay, Quebec became our first guests in Boston. Saguenay is way up in Quebec; it took them almost 10 hours to drive to our house! They are incredibly nice. As is typical when couchsurfers meet, we enjoyed talking about our travels. We also helped them plan their time in Boston.

They were kind enough to bring us a little house-warming gift of a bottle of Sortilege: Canadian Whisky mixed with maple syrup! We cracked it open and shared some on a little ice. It was so delicious! The gift reminded us of when we hosted other Canadians last year in Seattle. Canadians are always so nice!

Today, while Dominic and Audrey went off to explore Boston, Jaimee and I met my cousin Bevan up in New Hampshire for a hike up Mt. Monadnoc. It was a typical New England winter day with crisp cold air and cloudless blue skies. We took the supposedly less-traveled Dublin Trail up the mountain, although there were quite a few people out climbing today. The trail was somewhat treacherous, especially at the top where there was lots of ice; Jaimee even got to use her Yaktrax to keep her from falling on the ice. It was a beautiful but cold at the top.

From Thanksgiving 2010

The hike was a wonderful finish to a wonderful weekend. What a great Thanksgiving, and as we mentioned briefly on Thursday we really do have lots to be thankful for. It might not seem like it with all our running around this weekend, but we did reflect on how lucky we are to have so many loving friends and family.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

A brief post today wishing everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving. Today we are spending the day at Jaimee's dad's house where we're busy preparing for a houseful of about 20 friends and family who will all be arriving shortly. Meanwhile, the Patriots and Lions are playing football, so it's shaping up to be a very New England Thanksgiving.

This is the fifth Thanksgiving Jaimee and I have spent together, but it's only the second one we've spent with family. We spent Thanksgiving of 2006 together in Portland, Oregon, 2007 in Idaho with Jaimee's Aunt and Uncle, 2008 in Whistler, British Columbia and last year we were in New Zealand with our first WWOOFing hosts, Jeanette and Doug. I think on actual Thanksgiving day last year we had home-made chili after a day of working on their farm.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, which is sort of ironic, considering I didn't celebrate Thanksgiving growing up and then I was vegan for several years while in Seattle and I spent Thanksgivings with my vegan friends, consuming more Tofurkys than I care to remember. So in some sense, this might actually be my first traditional Thanksgiving.

We have many. many things to be thankful for this year, including our loving families. On Saturday we'll be in Boston, spending part of they day with my sister and her wife's family, then on Saturday night we host our first couchsurfers in Boston. We recently reactivated our profile on couchsurfing.org and we're scheduled to host a couple from Montreal as our first guests since our return from our world-trip. Look for an update later!

20 years ago...

2010-11-16T05:13:00.000-08:00

On November 16, 1990 my father, Ludlow Fox Martin died after a short bout with cancer. It was two days before his 45th birthday. I've been thinking a lot about him this past week, especially in light of the fact that, as my Aunt Lisa (my dad's sister) pointed out to me via e-mail recently, in two days he would have been 65.

The year 1990 was not a pleasant time for me and my family. My grandmother (on my mom's side), with whom we lived, died in April of 1990, then in June my dad was diagnosed with sinus cancer. He went to the doctor complaining of sinus pressure and after a couple of exams and biopsies we found out he had cancer. After trying surgery and radiation, he tried alternative forms of treatment, including a special clinic in Mexico and a place in Wisconsin that specialized in ozone treatments to attack fast-growing cancer like his. Ultimately, however, he succumbed to the disease, dying at home (in the same house where he was married to my mom) on November 16.

It's amazing that it's now 20 years later. I think about my dad often and have many good memories: watching football on Sunday afternoons (including hot pastrami sandwiches), playing tennis, his love of games, including chess, checkers and backgammon, and his great sense of humor. We spent a lot of time laughing as a family, a tradition that I carry on to this day. I also remember numerous family vacations, including trips all around New England and Northeast Canada, as well as at least one trip to Florida where I got to ride "Space Mountain" at Disney World with him. I believe my younger sister was too short to ride it and my older sister had a broken leg and was in a wheel chair (a fact she doesn't let me forget to this day!), so it was just me and my dad for the mostly pitch-black ride.

Part of what is strange about talking about someone who died in 1990 is that there are very few pictures of him. Now a days, everyone has pictures of themselves readily available. I haven't taken the time to scan in any of the few print photos I have. There are a few framed ones in our apartment, but sadly nothing to post for the blog. Also, many of my current friends never met my dad, and many might not even be aware that he died (it doesn't always come up right away).

And since ostensibly this is a travel blog (although I acknowledge it's morphing into something slightly different since we've gotten back from our trip), I'll also mention that in late November of 1990 after we'd finished the funeral and burial, my sisters, mom and I took a short "vacation" to the Bahamas. We went to Harbor Island, a small secluded island recommended by one of our travel agent friends (remember travel agents?) We stayed at a resort that came with golf carts to travel around in, and my 13-year-old sister loved driving us all around. And I loved playing backgammon with the bartender while sipping my daiquiris and other yummy rum drinks (we joked that the drinking age was based on height; if you were tall enough to stand at the bar, they'd serve you a drink.) It was also during that trip that I read The Catcher in the Rye. Given my circumstances I could definitely relate to the protagonist Holden Caulfield, and I've often thought about re-reading it to see if my impressions would change. On the other hand, sometimes I feel like the memory of that trip is just perfect (given the circumstances) so I'm not sure if I want altered memories of it.

As readers of this blog know, visiting Vietnam was very special for me, because when my dad served in Vietnam he was exposed to Agent Orange, which more than likely contributed to his developing sinus cancer all those years later. It was closure on some level for me to visit the places he stayed while in Vietnam. Again, I wonder how different my life would be if he'd never served in Vietnam (or if he'd received a state-side assignment instead). Also, I mentioned my grandmother at the top of the post, and I explicitly remember being in Invercargill with our lovely WWOOFing hosts Colin and Ellen on January 17, on the day when my grandmother would have turned 100. I will never forget either my dad or my grandmother.

[Update: I received a correction from my mom that apparently my dad started having sinus issues in the Fall of 1989 and knew by early 1990 that he had cancer. In June he had his final surgery and learned the news that they weren't able to remove it all. Because of the form of cancer (schwanomma) he would have needed a craniotomy, which although the doctors were prepared to do they didn't follow through on for various reasons, partly because the tumors were too big and too close to his eye. I do remember discussions of whether they should remove one of his eyes in another surgery or if he should explore other options. Can you imagine facing this choice? Ultimately he looked at other treatments. My mom also reminded me of the generosity and kindness that many people showed us during that time. My mom, who has a memory even better than mine, knew exactly who did what when during that time. The list of people is too long to list here, but I thank everyone who helped our family during that difficult time. That immense outpouring of kindness will not be forgotten either.]

Nannyhood in the Neighborhood

2010-11-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

I've been working as a nanny for about a month now for Asa's nephew Jonah and another little girl, Grace. The kids are now five and six months old respectively, so you can imagine how hectic the days can be.

From Nanny Shots

This job has been working out quite well for me for a variety of reasons. It's a great deal different from my last job as an intensive special needs teacher in a public middle school. I don't attend staff meetings that don't apply to my students anymore (always a huge waste of my time). I don't have to work with assistants who aren't very cooperative. I don't have mountains of paperwork or deadlines (except for feedings). And now we can go on walks throughout the day, including walks to the neighborhood shops, banks, and libraries, making it fairly easy for me to keep up with errands and chores. This includes my eight minute walk to work. It's so nice to be a walking commuter! And let's not forget that I only work four days per week (10.5 hours/day). I love my Fridays off!

From Nanny Shots

There are some similarities, however. I still change diapers though its much different when the diaper isn't worn by a 14-year old. I still structure my day ahead of time, to allow for walks outside and certain amounts of playtime between naps. I still have a super rushed meal time, though now it's me chowing down while the kids are napping (you never know how long you'll have), instead of racing through my lunch after my long walk to the staff room and then my wait at the microwave for the other 10 teachers, and then a sprint to the bathroom, all in the 30 minutes allowed by the bells.

The job is very fun for me, and I hope also for the babies. We've gone to the park a couple of times now, though Jonah has been asleep both times by the time we roll up in the double stroller. We get to walk the dog, Story at the Arboretum. We spend time outside visiting with the very friendly neighbors at Grace's house. And we sing and play throughout the day. All of our time walking around in the stroller has helped me learn our neighborhood and West Roxbury too. We can go to the grocery, the libraries in both villages, parks, and coffee shops and restaurants. And, look at these babies, they are a hit everywhere we walk! People are always asking after them and wondering if they are twins.

From Nanny Shots

Being a nanny is not without its challenges, though. Grace has been going through what her parents call a sleep strike, not wanting to sleep in her crib. She will sleep in the carrier or in my arms, but this will not be a long term solution (I hope). When one baby is hungry, both are starving once the bottle comes into view. This makes for some intense seconds until I get everyone positioned for a group feeding. And when one baby is tired, that doesn't mean both are. But crying and clinginess are contagious, so if one is tired and clingy, I've usually got both kiddos attached to me. Sometimes its a bit wild, like while I'm wearing a sleeping Grace in the carrier and trying to get Jonah off to sleep, by bouncing him in my arms. Luckily they both tend to nod off in the stroller; if only we could walk for two hours at a time twice a day, everyday!

From Nanny Shots

Because the babies are so young, they are changing a lot all of the time. I've noticed big differences in Jonah and Grace in the four weeks since I've started watching them full time. I'm very excited to keep watching them grow, develop, and learn in the months ahead.

In other neighborhood news, Asa and I had the opportunity to walk to the polls last week for election day. We hadn't been able to do that in a few years, as Seattle moved to all-mail-in ballots. Our polling place was the local church in our village, three blocks from our apartment. We were impressed with how organized they were and how quickly our line was processed. It was a pretty low tech situation, with small counters and felt tip pens to fill out our paper ballots, but the turn out was impressive and it seemed like voting was a family affair for many of our neighbors. Here's a photo taken outside our polling place, the Greek Church.

Fifteen years ago...

2010-11-07T07:12:00.000-08:00

November 7th, 1995 I visited Seattle for the first time. I arrived in a 1988 Subaru Justy with my good friend Brian from New Hampshire after a 10-day road trip across the country (we took the "Northern route" through New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, etc.). I didn't intend to move to Seattle, but stay I did, and the rest, as they say, "is history."

Now Seattle seems really far away as we're settling into a new routine in the Boston area (maybe we've already mentioned this?). Last weekend, we went to Vermont for a couple days and had a wonderful time doing "Vermonty" things, like a trip to the farmer's market, walks in the woods, and leisurely breakfasts. (Not to imply that Vermonters live the life of leisure; only visitors to Vermont live this leisurely life. Living in Vermont involves many chores, which luckily we were able to avoid this time.)

We stayed at a converted "Bed & Breakfast" that used to be a two-room school house. The owners rent it out per night and stock the refrigerator with breakfast foods that you cook up yourself. The adorable little house reminded us a bit of our apartment as it had lots of windows and skylights. Notice the tall windows that are original from the school house days; if you sit down inside you can't look out the windows, which I guess is the point if you're trying to keep the attention of school children:

We visited the Brattleboro Farmer's Market on the last Saturday of the year before it moves indoors for the winter. I was surprised by the number of prepared food vendors at the farmer's market, including exotic food, like this Malian food vendor (there also were two Thai places and a Vietnamese vendor):

But mostly, as we keep mentioning, we're living a pretty relaxed life in Boston, enjoying semi-city-life in Roslindale. I say semi-city because although Roslindale is technically part of Boston, it feels more like its own small town than the city of Boston, actually a lot like our old Seattle neighborhood of Ballard. The Fall weather has been very nice, it's definitely getting colder, but it's been dry for the most part, which is a welcome difference from autumn in Seattle. The November I arrived in Seattle, it literally rained every single day for my first month; I suppose that indicates I was destined to stay there. If I could tolerate a solid month of rain, the weather wasn't really going to bother me that much. On the other hand, the following summer it was sunny for, again literally, every day in July, August and September (with no humidity!) which became the cycle of living in Seattle - recharge during the sunny summer for the gray, rainy winter. In any event, we've already had a bit of frost in Boston, which I noticed the other day on my bike commute to work (it might be faint, but it was definitely there):

Again, pretty cool that this is right in Boston (and that it's part of my daily commute). I feel lucky to live in such a nice place.

Lantern Festival

2010-10-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

Now that Jaimee and I are both working full-time, it's amazing how quickly the week flies by. I suppose it's a good sign that the week goes by quickly - it must mean work isn't too terrible - but it does mean that we don't have a whole lot of time mid-week to do "fun" things. But, this weekend we took advantage of being in Boston and went to the Jamaica Pond Lantern Festival. Every year the weekend before Halloween, thousands gather around the Pond right after sunset and walk the one-mile path with homemade lanterns. It was mostly full of families, but Jaimee donned her grand-mother's square-dancing cape and we enjoyed the full moon and relatively mild night:

Otherwise, not a whole lot else to report. Our apartment is taking shape and is really starting to feel like home. In fact, I will go so far as to say I really like it there! It's super bright, and we've adjusted to climbing three flights of stairs everyday. Although to remind us of Seattle, we framed a poster of a map of Seattle and put it next to the Boston version:

We're also planning a weekend trip to Vermont next weekend with my sister, her wife and my lovely little nephew. We'll be sure to bring our camera and get some pictures of our weekend away.

90 years

2010-10-17T15:21:00.000-07:00

So, our weekend plans of visiting with my aunt and uncle from Vermont didn't pan out. Because we're sad to report, Jaimee's 90-year-old grandfather George E. Leroux, (whom she called Pepe), passed away last Wednesday. You can read his obituary in the Worcester newspaper. (Which incidentally marks the second time in the last two months that Jaimee and I have appeared in the Worcester Telegram. I never blogged about it, but Jaimee and I were interviewed at the Shrewsbury Public Library one Tuesday when we attended the bi-monthly Scrabble club. You can read about it, and see a terrible picture of me along with some ridiculous quotes.)

Jaimee's pepe struggled the last few months with a bout of shingles which had him bouncing between his apartment, the hospital, including a couple of stays in intensive care, and a few different rehabilitation centers. We were happy to be local and see him on several occasions during this time. I've only know pepe for about five or six years, but I've always know him to be smart, funny and a joy to be around. He took a great interest in our trip around the world and followed along by reading our blog. He was quite computer savvy for a 90 year old; he even had a facebook account and knew how to skype. A few times on our trip when there were family gatherings at his apartment, we'd skype with him and Jaimee's meme.

All of Saturday was taken up with funeral and visiting hours. There was a lovely service at the funeral home in Shrewsbury, then a touching mausoleum-side service in Worcester, including a flag-folding ceremony and the playing of taps to commemorate his service in the Army Air Corps (now Air Force) during World War II. He served in North Africa, where he told me when I asked him about it one time, "I played a lot of cards." He was extremely well-loved by his family and friends, and he will be missed dearly.

Interestingly, many of Jaimee's relatives are entombed at the mausoleum where Pepe rests now, including her grandmother and grandfather on her mother's side. After the service we took a short stroll to look at the gravesides of some of Jaimee's other relatives. It's a beautiful spot on top of a hill, and walking amongst the different sites, we remarked at how many people were well into their 80s and 90s when they died. It's a hearty bunch, those in and around Worcester!

Ninety years is a long time, and for 62 of those years he was married to Jaimee's grandmother. That is an incredible accomplishment and I am proud to have know him. Jaimee and I will miss him very much.

A weekend at home

2010-10-12T15:56:00.000-07:00

We spent this past weekend without ever leaving the city of Boston (well, we drove through Brookline at one point, which technically isn't Boston, but I won't nitpick here). This marks the first weekend in a long, long time where we haven't traveled anywhere. Even last weekend, when we had out of town visitors, we traveled out to Northboro in central Mass to go apple picking. This weekend, however, was an all Boston weekend, and more or less all in our neighborhood too. We even saw two Boston themed movies on Saturday. First we saw, The Town, which one reviewer called "aggressively regional" with all its myriad outdoor shots of Boston (she was one of the few reviewers who didn't like the movie). Second, we saw The Social Network, where part of the story takes place at Harvard so there were numerous scenes in and around Cambridge. (Both movies are highly recommended by the way, and they make a nice double-feature, albeit with each one clocking in at over two hours, that's a lot of movie watching in one go.)

Instead of us traveling this weekend, people came to visit us in our new, bright apartment. First, we hung out with my sister and nephew on Saturday, going to the Farmer's Market in Roslindale. Then on Sunday, Jaimee's dad and step-mom came over for lunch and a walk. We strolled through Arnold Arboretum, and admired the view of the Boston skyline from Peters Hill, which at 240 feet is the highpoint of the park. (But not the highest in Boston; that belongs to Bellevue Hill, which is actually quite close to us so expect to see a report of our adventures there soon).

From Our Apartment

Later on Sunday my sister and her wife brought little Jonah over again for another visit, and we all hung out in our apartment. We took a family picture where we all had to huddle around Suzanne who was holding Jonah because once he falls asleep you don't want to stir him. Apparently he sometimes doesn't like to take a nap, worrying he'll miss out on something. It's good to see he's got the adventure spirit in him already!

From Our Apartment

Overall, it was a wonderful weekend, and next weekend we expect even more local fun as my Aunt and Uncle are coming to visit. Don't know if the weather will be as nice as it was last weekend, but stay tuned for details.

Our first guests, and a perfect Fall weekend

2010-10-04T17:11:00.000-07:00

We'd been in our new apartment for less than a week before we entertained our first visitors. Our friends Kate and Kyle from Seattle came to visit us last weekend. They are the same Kate and Kyle whose wedding we went to over Labor Day in Seattle. It was great to see them, and the weather in Boston turned out to be just perfect, especially Saturday. It was one of those perfect Fall days; crisp and sunny, warm in the sun, yet cool in the shade. If only we had more days like that, Boston weather would be great. As it was, the previous week was rainy, muggy and steamy warm (temperatures reaching into the 80s) with Friday being a real "soaker" as they say around here.

However, Saturday was perfect. We visited the very cute Roslindale Farmer's Market (is anyone not on Facebook?) in the morning and then embarked on a major walking tour of Boston. We didn't calculate it, but we must have walked over 10 miles, covering just about all parts of the city. Boston is a very pretty city, with great architecture and between the Charles River and the Bay, you're never very far from the water or boats.

Sunday, the weather wasn't quite as nice, but we ventured out of town to go apple picking at Tougas Farm in Northboro, Mass. It was pretty much peak apple season, with over 20 varieties to choose from. We especially enjoyed the "under appreciated" Empire variety, a cross between McIntosh and Red Delicious. I don't usually like Red Delicious, but Empires were quite tasty. In addition to over 20 pounds of apples, we also got apple cider donuts, and together with the apple cider we'd picked up at the farmer's market at Saturday, we had our fill of apples!

As an aside, we paid $25 for 20 pounds of apples (1/2 a bushel), which seemed like a good deal until we stopped at the grocery store on the way back to get ingredients to make an apple crisp, and discovered that Empire apples were on sale for $0.99 a pound! So, in other words, we paid extra money for the privilege of picking our own apples. Although, the apples we got looked better and we got a bunch of different varieties. And we had fun, so there is that.

Our apartment, thanks to lots of diligent work by Jaimee in searching out cheap furniture, is coming together quite nicely. We've uploaded more pictures to Our Apartment album. Despite not being there for long, it's starting to feel like home. I'm also getting into a groove at work (starting week three!), although I can't say I've contributed too much to the team just yet. But, so far I like the work and my co-workers, and I've already been paid, which of course is the real reason I got the job in the first place.

Our New Home

2010-09-26T17:03:00.000-07:00

We just spent most of the weekend moving into our new apartment! We mentioned in our last post that we'd rented a really cute attic apartment in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston. Well, this weekend we moved in. The stuff we'd moved from Seattle we'd been storing at Jaimee's dad's house, so on Saturday we borrowed two pick-up trucks and we were able to transport it all from his garage into our little attic house in two trips. We also got some help from Jaimee's dad and step-mom. (Thanks!) Today we began the process of unpacking and organizing. It's a long and narrow space, with five skylights and lots of angled spaces. We'll post more pictures when it's all nice and organized, but here are a few shots of the inside:

We're super excited to have a place of our own again. I think we'll also enjoy getting to know Roslindale. It's a very quaint neighborhood with lots of large old homes, most of which are split into multi-family units like ours. And so far our neighbors are very friendly. While moving in a few of our neighbors walked by on their way to the farmer's market (another great plus!) and stopped to welcome us and say hello.

Also this week, I completed the first week at my new job. It went pretty well; we stayed at my sister's condo in Jamaica Plain while they were away on vacation and I was able to ride my bike to work three of the days and I loved the commute. From Roslindale, the bike ride will be a little longer but I think I will still be able to ride my bike often, at least while the weather holds out. I met some people at my office who bike commute all year around, so I'll probably be talking to them for pointers about cold-weather riding. As for the job itself, I think I'll like it. I'm part of a software team of about 10 other developers and in my first week I already got a few assignments so I'm helping out right away (or at least will be - I need to complete the tasks this week).

In addition to moving and starting a new job, we're still working on our wedding plans for next year. And for the purpose of scouting out a cake (or as I like to say, cakes, plural) we went to the New England Dessert Expo at Copley Place in downtown Boston. We bought our tickets through Groupon (an on-line deal-a-day website), and based on how many people were at the show, it appears that we weren't the only ones to take advantage of Groupon's half-price deal. The place was packed! In fact, way, way overpacked. (For a blog post that shows that writers can spin any experience into something positive, take a look at this post, but you'll notice from the comments that we weren't the only ones to complain about the crowds.) Here's a picture I took while trying to navigate through the exhibits.

Jaimee e-mailed Groupon complaining about our experience, and they quickly refunded our money AND gave us a $5 credit toward our next "deal of the day". And since we actually did get to see the exhibits and sample some yummy desserts (although I'm not sure if we found our cake baker yet) I'd say it worked out in the end.

An Adirondack Adventure

2010-09-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

Things really came together for us since our last post. For starters, I was offered a job at one of the places where I'd interviewed. Prior to our trip to Seattle, I'd given the company my list of references but because of the holiday (and because I knew some of my references were on vacation) I wasn't sure how quickly they'd be able to contact them and then make me offer. However, when we landed in Boston from Seattle I had a message from the recruiter with my verbal offer. We made it official via e-mail the next day. My start date is this coming Monday, September 20. I'm excited for the job. I'll be working for an Internet Marketing company doing some programming and data manipulation. I'm excited because their primary programming language is Python, a language I've never used before. I'm really glad they trusted that I'd be able to learn it quickly enough.

Second, we found an apartment! As we might have alluded to in this blog, apartment hunting in Boston was a real challenge. We looked at dozens of places, but apart from one place where someone else rented it between us seeing it and telling the landlord we wanted it, none of the other places grabbed us. Until we saw a really cute third-story attic apartment, advertised on craigslist as the "tree-house apartment". It's the top story of a three-unit building in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston. It's essentially a big studio apartment with five large sky-lights and plenty of closets. It's within our budget (although more than we were paying in Seattle, for less space too) and it's within walking distance of both Roslindale village, with numerous shops and restaurants, and the commuter rail station where I'll be just a 12 minute train ride to my new office (the office is on the 7th floor above the train station at Copley Place in Boston). We'll show some pictures after we move in on September 25.

So, with the job and apartment all squared away, we decided to take a mini-vacation during our last week of "freedom". We drove up to the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York for what we thought might be a few nights of camping. Our main purpose in going up there was to climb Mount Marcy, the highest point in New York state. Unfortunately, we did very little planning with regard to the trip so it didn't work out quite how we would have liked.

For starters, it took a long time to get there, and we got kind of a late start so we didn't get to the area until after dark. Then, the campground we'd planned on going to was closed for the season. Since Mount Marcy is really close to Lake Placid, there were plenty of hotels, but none were very cheap. We found a little "cabin" in nearby Saranac Lake, which was habitable but full of mouse poop and if we turned on the gas heater we felt like we were going to get asphyxiated. We ended up sleeping on the bed in our sleeping bags, although we did use the little gas stove to cook our camping food.

From Mt Marcy

The next day we climbed Mount Marcy, which was a 15 mile round trip hike with about 4,000 feet of elevation gain. As mentioned, it's the highest point in New York (and therefore all the Adirondacks) at 5,344 feet. Despite the length, the hike was pretty easy, except for the summit push which was quite steep and the top was very windy and cold. We took a few quick pictures and headed back down.

From Mt Marcy

In addition to being a state highpoint, Mount Marcy has historical significance as well. In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was camping in the area when President McKinley was assassinated. He was summoned to take over and he then became the youngest President ever at 42 years old. (President Kennedy would later become the youngest elected President at 43 years old).

There was a campground at the base of the mountain, but they charged $40 per site to camp! Plus, "room tax" of 10% and $10 a day to park! That would add up to $54 to camp for the night. Seriously? Even though that was cheaper than a hotel room (or cabin) nearby, we felt that was a ridiculous amount to pay for camping. So we left and got a hotel room in nearby Lake Placid. We probably violated all sort of regulations but we cooked up our camp food on our camping stove inside the hotel room.

We then came back to Massachusetts, stopping for one night to visit my lovely Aunt Lisa and Uncle Dick in Catskill, New York on the way. We had a quick visit, but we enjoyed catching up with them and having a nice dinner. We came back to some sad news regarding Jaimee's family though. Her grandfather spent the day after his 90th birthday in the intensive care unit of the hospital. He'd been having various health problems over the past few months, but he got a bladder infection that sent him to the hospital. We visited him at the ICU and he was not doing that well, barely aware of his surroundings. As of this writing he's still there and hanging on, and we're all hoping that he can pull out and survive the infection.

Back to Seattle

2010-09-09T07:23:00.000-07:00

We just got back from a wonderful, albeit short trip to Seattle. It completed a full circle for us, returning to where we left last August. We stayed with our friends Greg and Laura, the same people who we stayed with our final two weeks in Seattle. It was a whirlwind tour, similar to the type of visit we used to do when visiting the East Coast; we visited many, but not all, of our friends spending a few hours with each group. We also went to two weddings, one of which was south of Portland, Oregon (about a four hour drive each way). In between the weddings and visiting we found time to go to many of our favorite Seattle places, including several yummy meals.

The trip started out on a good note leaving Boston when, on account of hurricane Earl, flights were rearranged. We originally had a flight to Seattle connecting through Houston, but instead they "bumped" us to a direct flight! This got us into Seattle two hours earlier than planned. However, because we'd prepaid for our rental car we couldn't pick it up early unless we paid for an extra day (which, according the helpful rental agent would be three times our online daily rate, plus taxes of course). We decided to wait. Then they "upgraded" us from a compact car to a Ford Flex! It's a nice car, but it seats seven and doesn't get the greatest gas mileage. We complained and tried to get a compact car like we'd requested, but in the end were saddled with the Flex. (It was actually very comfortable but ended up getting 20 mpg; it cost over $50 to fill up the tank!)

Then more travel-related snafus occurred with the first wedding we went to. We had to drive to Hillsboro, Oregon for the wedding on Saturday, but when we showed up at the wedding location it was empty with no cars or anybody around. We didn't have the invitation with us, nor did we have Irene's phone number so we had no idea what was going on. Eventually as we were walking around someone came up to us and asked if we were there for Irene and Chandler's wedding. We said we were, and he said the wedding had moved to a new location about 45 minutes away! Apparently she'd e-mailed/messaged me somehow but I never got the message. Anyway, we found the new place, but missed the wedding. We did enjoy the reception (along with the open bar) and excellent cake.

From Back to Seattle

Then the next day it was back to Seattle to meet some friends for breakfast. This began the baby tour part of our visit, where we got to meet all the new babies from our many friends who had babies while we were gone on our trip. We met up with Lynn and her son Theo and Sadie and her son Angus (who was born February of 2009 so we'd met him before). Here's everyone in front of the big Lenin statue in Fremont:

From Back to Seattle

We then had a nice barbeque dinner at Greg and Laura's house where we met more babies: Jeff and Rae's daughter Addy and Brendan and Sara Ann's son Jasper (who we'd met before in Boston). On Monday we went to our second wedding down in Gig Harbor, followed by the reception in Tacoma. It was a beautiful morning ceremony and yummy brunch reception. Here are Kate and Kyle walking off into wedding bliss after brunch:

From Back to Seattle

The rest of our visit consisted of seeing more friends - Lane via a quick visit to his house, Chris and Cass and their daughter Caroline at lunch at a Thai restaurant, Greg and Erin and Betty at Elliot Bay Brewery in Burien, Corey at Bauhaus Coffee and Andy, Kendrah and their son Charlie along with Goldin and Kiyoshi at Agua Verde for dinner. But despite all this running around, in honor of our trip we found time to play a game of Scrabble over mochas as the glorious Caffe Fiore in Ballard, and in honor of many a past Seattle Sunday, we had Bloody Mary's at King's Hardware in Ballard.

From Back to Seattle

I'll close this post with a few thoughts about what it was like returning to Seattle. I thought returning might make me miss Seattle, but although I love Seattle and always will, I don't really miss living there. It's a wonderful place, but now a place I can enjoy as a tourist and visitor instead of a resident. I'm not quite to the point where Massachusetts is my "home" but it's getting closer. (Does this mean I'm "homeless"? Maybe...) As I've said before, I think moving to a new location after our big trip has helped psychologically in that many things in our life are new and different, which eases the inevitable letdown of returning from our trip. Jaimee and I are both starting new jobs (more on that to come), we'll be moving into a new apartment (at some point when we find a nice place) and meeting new friends. The Seattle phase of our lives is over, and we're on to new things. I'll always cherish my time there, and plan on visiting as often as I can. Our next visit will be November of 2011 when the North American Bridge Championships will be held in Seattle. I guess I better start practicing now so that I can put on a good showing with all my old bridge friends next year.

One final note on the pictures. This trip was an experiment to only use the camera on my new phone. I love the phone, but the camera takes some getting used to. It's not very good in low light and because you have to press so hard to the take the picture, too many photos are blurry. I think I'll continue to bring a point and shoot for our travels as it's easier to use and takes better pictures. In any event, you can look at all the pictures online.

A state highpoint, a walkabout and apartment hunting

2010-08-31T12:30:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday we took a ride out to Rhode Island to hike the state highpoint. As readers of the blog know, hiking state highpoints is a hobby/goal of mine, and I'd been meaning to climb Jerimoth Hill ever since we got to New England. Of course, at 812 ft. I use the words hike and climb liberally. You park on the road, and walk about 1/4 mile to a small sign designating that you're at the peak. I don't think there's actually any elevation gain on the stroll. It's more strenuous than Ebright Azimuth (scroll down on the link), but it is one more highpoint off my list. (I'm up to 15 now.)

From August 2010

We did manage to find some legitimate hiking nearby though, on a group of trails built by visiting Australians in 1965. A group of Aussie navy seamen were stationed in Rhode Island waiting for delivery of a Destroyer so they "volunteered" to build a bunch of trails around some lakes. Called, appropriately, the Walkabout Trail, it was a very pleasant stroll through forest and lakes. Not sure if I'd make it a destination in and of itself, but if you're in the area where Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island meet you might check it out (how's that for a glowing review?).

From August 2010

We also checked out Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, MA, just outside the Boston city limits. It's a great park, that includes a ski area and over 125 miles of hiking and biking trails. We chose to hike it on a day where the temperatures got up into the high 90s and we were sweating within minutes of starting the hike. The views, however, made it worth it.

From August 2010

We have also been spending a lot of time looking for apartments around Boston, which has been somewhat frustrating, as the prices are high and the quality is low. We found one that we actually really loved, but by the time we called back someone else had taken it. I guess we'll have to be more aggressive next time, although the people who took it did look at it before us, so it's not clear that we could have gotten it even if we'd asked right away. It is a shame though because of the dozen or so places we've looked at, it's the only one I could see myself living in. The rest seemed merely tolerable (and most actually not even that) which isn't exactly what I was looking for in a place to live. Especially one where we'd be paying 50% more than what we were paying Seattle. I know we'll find a place eventually, and probably in the next week or so more listing will open up. The beginning of September is a tough time to look for apartments around Boston as open units get snatched up quickly by the myriads of college students in the area. But, if any readers of this blog know of any good apartments in the Boston area, definitely contact us!

Settling into a routine, sort of

2010-08-24T12:17:00.000-07:00

Since we've been back, we haven't really settled in one place. Although we've physically spent the most time at Jaimee's dad and step-mom's house in Shrewsbury, we've actually been moving around quite a bit, as recent readers of the blog know. Our routine seems to be, do some hiking, go to a family function, visit some relatives, do a little more hiking, visit some more family, etc. Although it's been chaotic and somewhat random, it's actually started to feel like a routine of sorts. It's been a blast staying with Marty and Sandi. They are super generous and we enjoy spending time with them. Plus, there's a swimming pool, HBO (with video on demand!) and a wonderful garden bursting with fresh produce this time of year. However, it's also starting to feel someone uncharted and like we're drifting. Jaimee and I both realize it's time to "settle down" and get our own place. There are also jobs to get, as we don't have unlimited funds.

So, we've been on both the job and apartment hunt. Jaimee had one interview, where she was promptly offered the job (I'll let her post about it), while I've had several interviews but no job offers just yet. We've also looked at a few apartments, but the rents in the Boston area are a lot higher than Seattle so we're having a hard time figuring out what's a good value.

All of this has been somewhat stressful (especially the job interviews for me, which have been much more intense than what I was expecting). Which is why we keep interspersing little hiking adventures along the way. We did a short hike up Mt. Wachusset, the "highest mountain in southern New England east of the Connecticut River." Despite all those qualifications, the hike was a good workout, albeit very buggy. The view at the top was beautiful. It's pretty clear this is the tallest mountain for quite a ways:

From August 2010

I also hiked some more of the Long Trail. I completed a 25 mile section over two days between Route 140 near Wallingford and Route 4 at Killington. I would have liked to hike more but because of my scheduled job interviews I wasn't able to get out there for more continuous days. Killington, the highest peak in southern Vermont is one of Vermont's five 4,000 footers, so it was neat to climb it. I'd skied the mountain many times when I lived in Vermont, but this was my first time hiking up it:

From Long Trail 2010

We also scheduled a return trip to Seattle. We'd been planning on returning for a visit on account of two weddings we wanted to go to, so we finally bought our tickets for September 3 to September 8. Somewhat of a short trip, but I guess I'm being optimistic about having a job by then, and Jaimee should have already started hers. The cool thing about our tickets though is that they were free! We cashed in on our Capital One miles, most of them earned from the spending on our trip. I'm always skeptical about being able to redeem miles, but it turns out the hassle-free part of Capital One miles is really true.

One year ago today...

2010-08-15T21:02:00.000-07:00

We left Seattle exactly one year ago today. It feels like such a long time ago when we headed out of Seattle with only a rough itinerary of where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see. Without a real end date to our trip, it's hard to know when it's over. Did it end when we arrived back in the US? Or will it end when we finally get another apartment? Or when we get jobs?

For the past two months since we've been back in the US, we've continued to travel around and do the things that we love, including this weekend going to Cape Cod for the weekend and catching up with our friends Karisa and Norman who we'd visited in Austin, Texas last Fall. Karisa grew up on the Cape and together with Norman are back visiting so we came down to hang out. Today Jaimee and I rode our bikes on the Cape Cod Rails to Trails for 25 miles and had a relaxing dinner, not a whole lot unlike a day we would have spent on our trip.

Eventually, we'll both be getting jobs again and settling into an apartment somewhere around Boston, but for now we're still enjoying our adventures. And I hope to get back on the Long Trail again later this week to continue my quest to hike all of it.

No new photos for the blog from this weekend. I suppose that's one indication that our "trip" is winding down. We're certainly not taking as many pictures in our day to day activities as we did previously. But we uploaded thousands already so feel free to peruse the albums.

Long Trail Report - Week 1

2010-08-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to report that I made it through Week 1 of my Long Trail hike. I came off the trail after five and a half days and 85 miles in order to come back to Boston to do some job interviews. Yes, reality is starting to slowly settle in. After the interviews tomorrow and early next week, I hope to get back on the trail.

The first week was awesome. My cousin Bevan joined me for the first three days and we had a great time walking through the woods. Here we are getting dropped off at the Appalachian Trail in Williamstown, Massachusetts. (The Vermont border and official start of the Long Trail is 4.1 miles away):

From Long Trail 2010

There are three-sided shelters every five to 10 miles along the trail, so I based how far I'd go each day on which shelter I wanted to stay in that night. Bevan carried a three (!) person tent for the sections with me, which we used one night. The second night together we stayed in one the shelters. The scenery we walked through was amazing, particularly Glastenbury Mountain. There's an old Fire Tower on top and the views over all the Green Mountains were very nice.

From Long Trail 2010

Bevan even found his 700th geocache up near the Fire Tower. Good work Bevan! After his wife Tammi picked him up on the third day, I resupplied from a stash in Tammi's car and continued on. I packed a one-person tent and got to use it twice; once I pitched it inside a shelter to double as a mosquito net, and a second time I pitched it outside in the pouring rain. Both times the tent worked like a charm. I camped by a few lakes, including beautiful Stratton Pond, the biggest body of water along the Long Trail. Combined with a climb of Stratton Mountain, it would make a lovely day hike, or short backpacking trip.

From Long Trail 2010

Since this beginning part of the Long Trail overlaps with the Appalachian Trail (AT), I got to meet many, many AT thru-hikers. They are a varied and interesting bunch, to say the least. They're also very social for the most part and I enjoyed chatting with them and hearing about their journeys. All the hikers use "trail names" to refer to each other, in many cases they don't even know each other's real names. Since I was only out on the trail for a few days I didn't get a trail name, but when I continue on the Long Trail later, maybe I'll get one. Apparently, you can't name yourself; someone else has to give you the name.

I created a Picasa album of my pictures so far, including a map of where most of the pictures were taken. I'll keep adding to it when I pick up my hike, hopefully next week.

Off on the Long Trail

2010-08-05T17:58:00.000-07:00

I'm headed to Vermont as soon as I finish packing. Tomorrow morning I start my Long Trail hike. My cousin Bevan is joining me for the first three days and then I'll be on my own for the rest. (Unless anyone cares to join me. Anyone? The invitation is out there.) I'm leaving the schedule somewhat open although I created a quick map of my projected route with each day's shelter stop marked on the map. The schedule is subject to change, depending on how I feel each day, but the plan is to stay at a shelter each night. (There are shelters approximately every five to 10 miles so I can adjust the schedule as need be.)

View Long Trail 2010 in a larger map

If all goes according to plan I will spend 18 days hiking with rest days after the first and second weeks (in Killington and Stowe, respectively). Jaimee is planning on meeting me for each of these rest days when I will resupply for the upcoming week. Be sure to check my Spot page as I intend to check-in every night, and if I get Internet access during my off-days I'll update the blog with some pictures of the hike. I'm super excited!

Hiking and a trip to Nantucket

2010-07-30T18:20:00.000-07:00

We've been back from our trip about 50 days now, and it seems with each day our trip seems further and further distant. We haven't quite developed a routine in our life back in the states just yet, but sometimes I reflect on our trip and am amazed that it's been almost two months since we were moving from place to place around the world.

We spent the last week on Nantucket, an island off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Jaimee's dad and step-mom rent a house there for a week every July and we joined them this year. Well, I came over a few days late, as I went on a three day backpacking trip in New Hampshire before taking the ferry out to meet them. I did about a 35 mile loop in the Pemigewasset Wilderness. Even though I ostensibly did the hike "by myself", there were many other hikers on the trails, and one night I spent it in at Guyot Shelter and met many other very friendly hikers. I climbed six of New Hampshire's 4,000 foot peaks during the trip, and am now up to 11 of New Hampshire's 48 4,000 foot peaks. I had decent weather for most of my trip, but as is typical of the mountains in New Hampshire I had some windy weather as well as a little rain. Here I am on top of Mt. Bond in somewhat of a gale. It was mild by New Hampshire standards, but still quite rough.

From July 2010

We had a wonderful, relaxing week on Nantucket. On the way out on the ferry, I was treated to a wonderful sunset which set the stage for a beautiful week weather wise.

From July 2010

We had three gorgeous beach days and one partly cloudly, semi-rainy day where we lounged around the house playing games. Overall, Nantucket was a perfect way to spend a week. For now, we're back in Shrewsbury staying with Jaimee's dad and step-mom, but we'll be bopping around New England visiting various people. I still plan on doing my Long Trail hike I talked about in the last post, but I may delay the start a bit as I'm following up on some job leads and it would be most inconvenient to try and conduct a job interview from the trail (although I'd certainly love it if that were possible).

More hiking adventures, and a wedding

2010-07-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in the previous post about hiking in New Hampshire, we've been very impressed by the quality of the trails in the White Mountains. This past week we went up there again for some more hiking and were not disappointed. This time, we camped at a campground so as to get in two good days of hiking. We hiked with our friend Michael the first day and climbed Mt. Lafayette and Mt. Lincoln, both over 5,000 feet. It was a great hike which went by one of the many Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) huts that are all through the mountains. We stopped in and refilled our water bottles at the beautiful Greenleaf Hut.

From July 2010

We lost the trail on the way down, but were able to follow a brook down through the woods and eventually meet back up with the trail. It was a dramatic finish to a strenuous hike. After camping for the night, Jaimee and I hiked up Cannon Mountain the next day, passing by another hut at Lonesome Lake. Cannon was a good hike, but since there's a tramway that takes people to the top, we were the only two people who'd hiked up there. It's always a little disappointing to sweat and struggle up a mountain to then be surrounded by people in flip-flops staring at you wondering why you're so sweaty. This time on the way down we made sure that we didn't lose the trail.

From July 2010

After our NH hiking we went back to Shrewsbury for the wedding of Jaimee's cousin Frank. It was a traditional Catholic ceremony followed by a wonderful reception. Here we are all dressed up for the wedding (click through for some pictures of the reception too):

From July 2010

Now we're back in Boston, but only for the week, as Friday we're heading to Nantucket for the week. I might try and squeeze in another hike in NH, especially since my plan is to hike the entire Long Trail in August. Don't mean to hide this announcement in the bottom of a blog post, but yes, I'm planning on walking the length of Vermont from Massachusetts to Canada. It's 275 miles and I plan to complete it in about three weeks. This has been a dream of mine for a long time, so given that I'm unemployed, we'll be moving out of our sublet apartment in August anyway, now seems like the time. I'll do a separate post about my plans, but for now you can look at my spreadsheet of stops and read about the trail on the above link. Currently the plan is to hit the trail at the Massachusetts border on August 4th and finish up around August 25.

Let the hiking begin

2010-07-12T06:13:00.000-07:00

Moving away from Seattle, one of the things I knew I'd miss was the incredible hiking available in Washington. Hiking Mt. Si or Tiger Mountain, for example, were yearly rituals for us, to say nothing about the amazing hiking and backpacking opportunities available a little further away. Some of my fondest memories of my years in Seattle are out on the trail, whether it was day-hikes in the Cascades or around Mt. Rainier, or multi-day adventures through the woods.

Of course, having grown up in Vermont, I knew there was plenty of hiking in New England, but I think my years of West Coast outings (including forays to all the beautiful National Parks in the West) biased me into thinking that New England hiking was inferior in some way. So it was to my surprise that Jaimee and I went on two hikes this past week and had an absolute blast. The hiking was certainly different than out West, but I wouldn't say that it was inferior.

First, last Thursday we took a ride out to Walden Pond and went for a walk around it. It was less than three miles, so maybe it doesn't qualify as a hike, but it was really fun to read about Thoreau, see the replica of his little cabin and go for a swim in the pond. Apparently there are about 17 miles of trails in the little park just 30 minutes from Boston. Certainly not an epic adventure, but a nice respite from the urban heat.

From July 2010

Then yesterday, we did a more intense hike up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was actually quite an impressive hike. We hiked with this guy Michael that we sat next to on our flight from Iceland to Boston. He's super into hiking, attempting to climb all 4,000 ft (or higher) peaks in New Hampshire. I was vaguely familiar with the attempt that some people make to climb all 48 peaks (or all 67 peaks over 4,000 ft that are in New England), but until chatting with him I didn't really how serious some people are.

Well, we went out with him for the day yesterday and bagged our first two 4,000 footers! We hiked part of the Crawford Path, the oldest continuously used mountain trail in America. We climbed up to Mt Pierce and then continued along the Crawford Path (also the Appalachian Trail at this point) to Mt Eisenhower. All in all it was about 9 miles round-trip with about 3,000 feet of elevation gain. We had beautiful weather and the views were outstanding. By any standards, West Coast or East Coast this was a fine day hike. Here's a great view of the Mountain Washington Hotel, a huge castle-like hotel right in the mountains.

From July 2010

And of course, we took summit pictures:

From July 2010

Our hiking partner Michael wants to climb them all in three years. He's also attempting to climb them all in the winter, which according to the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) goes from winter solstice to spring equinox. The AMC web page goes into great detail on what this means. It seems a bit obsessive, but also somewhat intriguing. I think it would be awesome to hike them all, and I've even started my own list of them (click the NH 4000 tab on the spreadsheet). I won't set a deadline for completion, but if anyone is visiting New England and wants to do some hiking, let me know. We'll be out there as much as possible.

Multiple Fourth of July Celebrations

2010-07-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

One of the advantages of being in New England for the 4th of July is the number of different celebrations. Each town it seems has its own party, often on different dates in order to not collide with each other. We already mentioned last week's 4th of July parade in Guilford, but this past weekend we followed that up with celebrations in Somerville, Massachusetts and Catskill, New York.

Somerville, the town right next to Boston where we're staying for the month of July had their Annual 4th of July Fireworks on July 1st. There was music by several bands, including a performance by the US Navy Band. The fireworks were quite impressive, lasting for over 30 minutes and we were very close so we could see them launch from the ground before exploding up in the air. Our apartment is really close to Jaimee's sister Janelle's apartment so we just walked over to her place and watched the fireworks together.

From July 2010

From Boston we drove over to Catskill, New York to visit my Aunt and Uncle Lisa and Dick. They were hosting their own celebration, the 7th annual summer party to benefit the Thomas Cole Historic Site. This was held at my Aunt's house right on the Hudson River. The party was amazing. There were 350 guests, two huge tents, a live band and an amazing fireworks display, launched from the edge of my Aunt's property by the river. We felt honored to help my Aunt and Uncle put on this fundraiser and had a blast (no pun intended) mingling with art lovers and others from the Catskill (and New York City) community. We also were blessed with incredible weather (hot, but since the party was in the evening, the weather was cool enough that the temperature was just perfect). Here's a picture of the festive tent, set up for the 350 guests:

From July 2010

Then we topped off our 4th of July celebrations last night by having a wonderful dinner with Jaimee's dad and step-mom in Shrewsbury. We love being close to them and being able to just drop by for dinner and a visit. I even picked up golf clubs for the first time in several years and went to the driving range with Jaimee's dad. (I hit a few good balls, although I definitely need more practice before I'm anywhere close to his level of play).

All in all, we're certainly getting right into the swing of things (again, no pun intended) living in New England, albeit we're still in travel mode as we're in a new location almost every night and aren't working (although I do have a few job leads). It's funny how easily we've adapted to not being on our trip any more. I think moving to a "new" city has helped our transition. I've been reading with interest the blog posts of our friends Gillian and Jason who we met in Thailand (and then met up with later in Laos) who recently returned home from their trip around the world, as it shows the many different emotions that surround the completion of a big trip. (Their friends, also returning from an around-the-world trip a few months ago wrote a very touching blog post illustrating the emotional roller coaster that is returning from a big trip). Everyone reacts differently and I think us not returning to the same city and the same jobs has helped us acclimate to living in the USA again. I don't mean to over-dramatize coming home, but for us, being with family and friends has really helped us not miss the road too much (although I think I could very easily just jump back on a bus or train and go visit new places tomorrow).

More reasons we've moved to East Coast

2010-06-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

It's not on account of the humidity (which has been tolerable, but still fairly bad) or the bugs (including the lovely greenheads) but on account of our families that we moved back to the East Coast. We touched on this briefly in posts about the birth of my nephew Jonah and our engagement, but we're really getting into the swing of things now with family. I think our family might be beginning to realize that we're not leaving, but I mean that in a good way.

We spent this past weekend in Vermont, ostensibly to house sit for my Aunt and Uncle, but there wasn't really anything or us to do while house sitting. We arrived to the perfect house sitting instructions: eat whatever we want from the garden, so Jaimee made lovely cream of broccoli soup and fresh salad:

We went to the Guilford 4th of July parade on Saturday, which they held a week early so as to not conflict with the parades and activities of neighboring towns. I took some pictures, which you can view on Facebook. (You should be able to view them even without a facebook account, but if you're reading this blog you really should be my facebook friend anyway.)

When my Aunt and Uncle returned from their trip to Cape Cod, we went to a neighborhood potluck which doubled as a surprise 70th Birthday Party for my Uncle Neil. Happy Birthday Neil! It's hard to believe you're 70. My Aunt Betsy got him a special cake with a tractor on it (the lady at the bakery was surprised to know that the special birthday boy was turning 70):

We had a lovely time in Vermont. My cousin and I put together my bike (thanks Bevan!) that I'd shipped from Seattle and we went for a nice ride on country back roads. And then with my other cousin we went on a driving tour of beautiful houses and gardens where he does landscaping and care taking. All in all, it was a very relaxing, enjoyable time, and it's weekends like this that are the reason we moved back.

From Vermont we cruised to Cape Cod for a day and a night to visit with Jaimee's mother and aunt (visiting from Idaho) and brother Nate who lives in Hyannis. We went to an awesome drive-on beach then hung out at the outdoor fire pit at Nate's house.

Tomorrow we move into our Sommerville sublet apartment. We'll be there for a month, so if anyone is in Boston, let us know and you can swing by for a visit. Although, not this weekend, as we'll be up in Catskill visiting my Aunt for July 4th.

What we might have done differently

2010-06-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

Faithful reader Lane commented on our Places we loved post:

I hope you'll also post on what you would do differently if you had it to do again. Given the same time and budget you had, is there anywhere you wish you'd spent less time in order to spend more time somewhere else or go somewhere you didn't have time to go? Anything you'd do smarter? If you had an extra month or an extra 10K, what would you have added?

This is a great question, and a more positive spin than a post titled "Places we hated." I'll try and answer that question with a summary of where we went:

USA - We spent the first two months road tripping through the United States, staying in the following states: Washington (2 nights), Idaho (5), Oregon (4), California (16), Arizona (5), New Mexico (6), Texas (8), Louisiana (2), Alabama (1), North Carolina (4), Virginia (1), Maryland (1), New York (3), Vermont (3) and Massachusetts (9).

Even though road trips in the US are one of our favorite activities, in retrospect we probably could have condensed this into a shorter trip in order to spend more time internationally, especially since several of the places would have been accessible as shorter trips once back home. However, it's hard to think what we would have cut, as we enjoyed each place we stayed.

Australia - 28 days. This was a decent amount of time to spend in Australia, and renting a van for 21 of those days was a great, albeit expensive idea. The only thing we would have done differently is to only travel in one direction. We started in Brisbane, traveled north to the Whitsunday Islands then back south to Brisbane again before driving to Melbourne. Instead it would have been better to pick two starting points and travel between them, moving in one direction only so as to avoid backtracking.

New Zealand - 65 days. This was our longest stay outside of the US, and it was a great choice. WWOOFing worked great, having only one bad stay out of the five farms we worked at. We wouldn't really change anything about our NZ visit, as we feel like we saw a lot of the country and WWOOFing was a great way to save money.

Southeast Asia - We toured around Southeast Asia for roughly two months, staying in Singapore (3), Malaysia (14), Thailand (14), Laos (12) and Vietnam (14). Since SE Asia was very cheap, we could have easily spent more time here. Given more time, I'd spend an additional two weeks in Thailand and probably add Cambodia to the trip. I also wish we'd gone to Indonesia. Everything we've heard about Indonesia has been great, and we wish we'd made it there. Also, we covered the Northern half of Vietnam twice, and if we'd planned better we should have only moved in one direction, instead of entering in the middle, traveling north and then returning south again like we did.

India - 33 days. Trying to decide what we would have done differently in India is tough, as we had a great time and wouldn't really want to change what we did. We traveled from late March to late April which is during their hot season so the only thing I might have changed is to go earlier in the season. Planning differently, I would have spent more time in India to see more of the country and gone either in the Fall or Winter instead of the Spring. We loved Southern India though, especially Kerala and Goa and would happily revisit those areas again.

Egypt - 13 days. As we keep telling people, and is evident from our blog posts on Egypt, we didn't love it there. Doing it over again, I would not bother going to Luxor or Aswan. I'm glad I saw the Nile, but Luxor was not that great and Aswan was even worse. Sinai wasn't too bad and done differently, traveling overland through Jordan and Syria to Turkey from Sinai would be my preferred route, taking the time we spent in Luxor and spending it in Jordan and Syria instead.

Turkey - 12 days. Turkey is another place we would have loved to squeeze in more time. As noted, traveling overland from Egypt so as to visit Eastern Turkey and Cappadocia would have been preferred. As for what we saw in Turkey, I'm happy with our tour of the western coast, although we could have easily spent more time in Istanbul.

Greece - 13 days. We liked Greece, especially Crete, but in retrospect I think I would have traded a week in Greece for a week in Italy. The problem with Greece is getting around. If we could have gone straight from Turkey to Crete to Italy, that would have been ideal, but traveling by ferry you have to island-hop, which is fun to a certain extent, but also time consuming and expensive. We also didn't love Athens, and as far as larger cities go it wasn't our favorite.

Italy and Switzerland - two days each. This was the biggest shame of our trip, in that we didn't do justice to either country by only visiting Venice and Zurich. Time was more of a constraint than money; if we'd planned it out a little better by buying a rail pass and arranging couchsurfing in advance, I'm pretty sure both these countries can be done on the semi-cheap. We hit it right with the strong dollar versus the Euro, but we didn't have enough time to really dig into either country.

Iceland - four days. As noted in our Iceland posts, I'm very happy with our time in Iceland. We could have easily spent more time there, and driving the Ring Road would have been awesome if we had more time, but I don't have any regrets as to our visit there. In fact, to some extent, I'm glad we left something for another time as I can't wait to revisit.

What would we have changed about our route overall? I think adding Central and South America would have been really awesome, although it's a large enough region to stand alone as an awesome trip in its own right. Also, visiting more of Africa would have been nice, but again, a tour of Africa would also be a wonderful stand alone trip.

Knowing that our trip overall would be as cheap as it was, I would have left Seattle a few months earlier and pushed everything forward by a couple months so as to spend more time in Southeast Asia, India and Europe. We also planned on visiting Australia first so as to meet up with Jaimee's sister Michelle who was studying abroad in Brisbane, but without that constraint, I might even contemplate going around the world in the opposite direction, i.e., Europe first, then Turkey, Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and finally Australia and New Zealand. Then we could have done WWOOFing in Ireland, Spain, France or Italy during late Spring/Summer and been in India by Fall/early Winter and then Southeast Asia in Winter and Spring. This would have put us in Australia and New Zealand during their Spring/Winter which might not be great, so maybe we would exchange Australia and New Zealand for a few countries in South America.

So many possibilities, I could write all day about potential trip itineraries and ideas. But again, I can't emphasize enough how much we loved what we did do and have very few regrets. It turned out great, although I'm sure I'll spend the rest of my life playing "what-ifs" with our trip.

An island vacation, an announcement and a wedding

2010-06-20T21:22:00.000-07:00

Let's start with the announcement part first, as this is what I'm most excited about: Jaimee and I are now engaged! Yes, after spending 298 days on our trip, essentially together 24 hours a day, we have now decided to spend the rest of our lives together as well. Probably not constantly together like we have been the past year, but together nonetheless.

I proposed (and she said yes, by the way) while riding on the ferry from Vineyard Haven, Martha's Vineyard to Woods Hole, Cape Cod. It might seem anti-climactic to have traveled all the way around the world and come back to Massachusetts to propose, but that's how it worked out. We both love ferries - one of our first official dates was a ferry trip to Whidbey Island in Washington - so it seemed appropriate, even if it wasn't what you would call exotic. Here we are right after proposal:

From Martha's Vineyard

We were coming off a wonderful three days on Martha's Vineyard visiting with my Aunt and Uncle, Betsy and Neil. They rented a house on Chappaquiddick, a small island off the eastern side of Martha's Vineyard. Neither Jaimee nor I had been to Chappaquiddick (also called Chappy) before (although she'd been to Martha's Vineyard several times) so it was a great continuation of our trip, visiting places we'd never seen.

Chappy is, unfortunately, most famous for the "Chappaquiddick incident" involving Ted Kennedy in 1969 when he drove off a bridge and crashed his car in a river, killing the passenger riding with him. For some reason I pictured a huge tall bridge, but in fact the bridge was a tiny little overpass. My uncle Neil and I rode our bikes out to see Dyke bridge:

From Martha's Vineyard

Back in 1969 it apparently did not have any guard rails, but still, pretty interesting that such a little bridge could cause such a big accident. History lesson included, we had a wonderful time on Martha's Vineyard. We toured around the main island on our bikes as well, and actually had pretty decent weather for mid-June.

Next on our agenda was a wedding. We went up to Gloucester, Massachusetts for Jaimee's cousin's wedding. It was interesting to go to a wedding so soon after getting engaged as I looked at the wedding in a slightly different light, somewhat with an eye of what I might want to do or not do. This wedding was a blast (providing many more "dos" than "don'ts"), although it was possibly a bit fancier than I think Jaimee and I would plan. It was a lot of fun to meet many of Jaimee's relatives on her mom's side of the family, and with gorgeous sunny days we had fun exploring Gloucester and Rockport during the day before the actual ceremony and reception. The wedding was at the beautiful Ocean View Inn (where we also stayed for the nights before and after the wedding), situated, as you might guess, right on the water, which enabled us to go out and snap some family photos right along the water:

From Martha's Vineyard

The end of our week-long getaway was a stop back in Shrewsbury to have lunch with Jaimee's grandparents and then later dinner with Jaimee's father and step-mother in celebration of father's day. This was a great cap to the week, celebrating Father's Day with my new family-to-be. I'd actually never celebrated Father's Day before (a semi-long story which I don't need to get into on this blog) but I enjoyed starting what I hope to be a long tradition of many more to come. I'm happy to be marrying into Jaimee's wonderful family and I'm sure the two of us will continue to have more adventures in the years ahead.

The Best Welcome Home Ever

2010-06-14T18:16:00.000-07:00

Way back in April (April 15th to be exact, because we'd just filed our tax return extensions), sitting in an Internet cafe in Hampi, India we wrote that we bought our tickets home to the United States. (Interestingly, we bought those Iceland stop-over tickets one day before the volcano Eyjafjallajokull started spewing ash all over Europe.) One of the reasons we wanted to come back when we did was because my sister and her wife were expecting a baby boy. It was my first nephew, and the first grand-child on my family's side. Although we knew Keturah was pregnant before we left, we were essentially gone for her entire pregnancy. We skyped with her and Suzanne when we could, but we knew that we wanted to return in time to welcome my nephew into the world in person.

The timing of our return could not have been better. We visited with Keturah and Suzanne on Friday, our first full day back, and got to see Keturah in her full pregnant state. Here we are in the baby room of their condo (notice us too in clothes that you might not have seen in a while):

From Homecoming

Then, Keturah gave gave birth to 9 lb. 1 oz. Jonah Gray Martin yesterday afternoon. We drove into Boston and were there in time to hold little Jonah a mere three hours after birth. I can't imagine how emotional it must have felt to Keturah and Suzanne, but it was definitely a special moment for me.

From Homecoming

I can already tell Jonah is a kid after my own heart because he had enough sense to be born on a day with free parking! Despite there being both a Red Sox game and a Celtics game (welcome to Boston!), we found free parking outside the hospital and visited for a while with Suzanne, Keturah, Suzanne's mother and little Jonah. Both Keturah and the baby are doing well, and should be going home tomorrow.

Other than the baby, our re-entry to the US has been pretty uneventful. We'd left our car here during our travels so today we dealt with car issues, which were fairly minor (the car actually started right up and was running fine, it just needed a fluid flush or two). But it was enough of a pain to make me wish for our carefree (and carfree) travel days. Note to potential around-the-world travelers: one of the best ways to save money would be to get rid of your car. Between the insurance we had to reinstate and the repairs we could have lived in India for two and a half weeks. Living in the US is not cheap, that's for sure.

But, we'll be using the car during our next few weeks as we travel around. Tomorrow we head to Martha's Vineyard for a couple nights to visit with my Aunt and Uncle who are vacationing down there. Jaimee and I pumped up the tires on a couple borrowed bikes and are excited to peddle around on the island.

Places we loved

2010-06-13T04:11:00.000-07:00

One of the most common questions we receive when talking about our trip is "What was your favorite country?" That's a really tough question because each country was so different that it's hard to generalize and say one was best. However, there were definitely places we'd love to revisit. Here are the countries we'd revisit and why:

India

We loved India. The food was outstanding, the people interesting and friendly and sights and activities were varied enough that there was always something fun to do. Even though we were there for five weeks, we only saw a fraction of the country, essentially the southern third. India would probably rank at the top of the places I'd easily revisit again. I'd probably concentrate on the North, combining it with a visit to Nepal (which we sadly didn't make on this trip).

Thailand

We spent 15 days in Thailand but that wasn't nearly enough time. Thailand is a wonderful place to visit - the people are so nice, the food is amazing and the variety of geography makes it place with something for everyone. We spent most of our time in the mountainous north and I think on a future visit, I'd like to concentrate on the beaches and islands and the interior in the east, visiting Cambodia along the way as well.

Australia

Australia is another very large country with huge diversity of geography. Although it's not as exotic as say Thailand or India (and certainly not as cheap), it was a very fun country with wonderful people. Again, even with a month on the road there, we only saw a fraction of the country. On a future visit, I'd love to see the west coast, visit Adelaide and Sydney and do some trekking in Tasmania.

New Zealand

Being the country we spent the most time in (two months), I feel like we saw most of the country. It helps of course that it's a fairly tiny country with only four million people. We loved the South Island and on a revisit would probably concentrate further there. We missed the iconic Milford Sound, and were not set up to do any backcountry hiking which would be a definite on a future visit. I'd love to do some kayaking too, maybe a multi-day mixed hiking/kayaking trip would be awesome. Or, given more time, I would love to hike Te Ararao.

Turkey

Turkey was a great surprise. We fell in love with the country and would highly recommend it as a place to visit. We concentrated on the western side of Turkey but on a future visit I'd love to see the center and east. We loved the food, the people and the all the amazing things to do and see.

Europe (including Iceland)

We spent about two weeks in Greece, two days in Italy, two days in Switzerland and four days in Iceland. Obviously that was not nearly enough time, and we would love to revisit Europe. I'd love to do some hiking in Switzerland, spend more time in Italy, and visit new places we didn't make it to this time (i.e., Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, various places in Eastern Europe, etc.) We also really loved Iceland and could revisit there. It would be fun to drive the entire Ring Road. We also enjoyed Greece, but would probably revisit Turkey before we went back to Greece.

In a future post, I'll talk a little about the places we didn't love so much, and I will end this post by saying that we're excited to be back in the USA because we love touring around our own country as well. There are still places in the US that we haven't been (Hello, Alaska) that also rank high on the list of places we'd love to visit.

Back in the USA

2010-06-11T06:33:00.000-07:00

We're back! It seems natural to write home after that phrase but I capped it at "We're back" because it doesn't feel like home yet. Mostly of course this is because we left Seattle and have now arrived in Boston. One of the purposes of our trip was to incorporate our around-the-world adventures into our move from Seattle to Boston. But given that we don't know exactly where we're going to live and don't have jobs yet, it certainly doesn't feel like home. Even though the customs agent at Logan International Airport said, "Welcome Home" to us, I still feel like a visitor.

From Iceland

While waiting for Jaimee's family to come pick us up at the airport, I even joked with Jaimee that maybe we should have tried to get to Shrewsbury (where Jaimee's dad and step-mother live) by public transport. We could have added Boston to the list of cities we visited around the world. But, I'm glad her family picked us up. We went straight to a Mexican restaurant for burritos and margaritas, two food items that we continually craved while on our trip. It was a wonderful welcome back into the US.

I have a feeling it will be quite an adjustment period before I think of this area as home. Yes, I was born in Maine, grew up in Vermont, and therefore have a strong emotional connection to New England, but I lived in Seattle for the last 14 years and Boston is very different from Maine and Vermont (and Seattle), to say the least. But this will be good. It's a way of extending our trip in a way, and although it won't be as exotic as our previous locations, I plan on continuing this blog, using it to talk about some of the places we visit while we transition to a more "normal" life. For example, we already have plans for trips to visit Martha's Vineyard next week, Catskill (where we visited last fall) over July 4th weekend and Nantucket at the end of July. Additionally, we are subletting our friend's apartment in Somerville (a neighborhood of Boston) for the month of July, so we'll get a chance to see if Boston living is for us. In general, my plan is to live in the moment, enjoy the memories of our trip and not jump right back into a typical hectic American's life right away.

A few notes about Iceland to finish off where we left it the last time: We found the hot river area of Hveragerdi at it was amazing. It was about an hour hike through incredible terrain to an area where a glacial river runs into steaming water creating a perfect temperature for sitting and soaking. Even though the weather turned cold and rainy we soaked in the river and even enjoyed a natural waterfall massage.

From Iceland

Also, the Blue Lagoon is amazing! We spent the morning there between dropping off our rental car and catching our flight to Boston. It's an eerie area where the hot springs mix with minerals and silica creating a blue-milky colored water that felt so nice to relax in. It was a perfect ending to a perfect ending destination.

Iceland: a beautiful cherry on the top of our trip

2010-06-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

Iceland is amazing! I can't imagine a better place for the last stop of our trip. Although we only have four days here, and are just barely scratching the surface of what Iceland has to offer, the scratch that we've done has been pretty nice.

Our visit started out on a slightly stressful note though. We took a 10:30 PM flight from Frankfurt, which was scheduled to arrive around midnight local time (it's about a 3 1/2 hour flight and Iceland is two hours behind Western Europe), but the flight was delayed by about an hour and we didn't arrive until after 1 AM, and after taking the bus into Reykjavik it was almost 2 AM. We had scheduled to stay with a Polish couple through couchsurfing and we had their address and phone number, but it turns out we were dialing the wrong country code. We were using the SIM in our phone that we got in Greece so we didn't know that we had the wrong code, only that the phone number didn't work. After walking around for a while (even at 2 in the morning it wasn't even close to dark) we eventually found the apartment, but after ringing the bell and knocking on the door, nobody would answer! We didn't know what to do, but in the end decided to just "camp" in their yard. We unfurled our beach mat and sleeping bags and slept for a few hours in the back yard. Around 8 AM we tried ringing the doorbell again and this time they answered. They're not sure why they didn't hear us the night before, but they welcomed us in the morning before heading off to work.

We spent the day exploring Reykjavik, which is a very cosmopolitan town, full of little cafes, restaurants, book stores and other little shops. We were lucky to have a beautiful blue sky day, with temperatures in the high 50s, low 60s. Here's the famous concrete church, called Hallgrimskirkja. We didn't get to climb it because it was busy with funerals, but it's quite a sight and because it's on a hill, it can be seen from all over town:

From Iceland

We also visited one of the many outdoor geothermal public pools. For a 360 kroner ($1.75 US) fee we soaked in a gigantic outdoor hot tub. These pools are everywhere and are centers of social life. Instead of going to a coffee shop (although they do that too) groups congregate and hang out soaking in hot water. It was quite fun.

Iceland has a reputation for being extremely expensive, but Iceland was hit especially hard by the recent financial crisis and their currency took a huge hit (thanks Financial Crisis!), so in dollar terms prices are half or less what they were two or three years ago. So, while Iceland is still not cheap (restaurants in particular are still quite costly), it is not at all prohibitively expensive. For example, we ended up renting a car for two days to do some touring and it cost 19,000 kroner (about ~~$90~~ $145 US) for two days. This includes taxes and insurance! Update: I realized later I must have miscalculated the exchange, and it's actually $145 for the two days, which is on the high side, but still better than we could find on-line when doing research.

We also scored a free tent for out little excursion by just asking. We went into an outdoor store and inquired about renting a tent to do some camping and although they didn't rent tents they told us to check the hostel across the street. We went in there and asked and they said we could just have a tent! Some German tourists had bought it and didn't want to bring it home so left it at the hostel. We were surprised, but they just let us have it. It's not the best tent in the world, but it was more than sufficient. (See a picture of it in action.)

For our road-trip we toured around what's called the Golden Circle area, a loop of about 200 miles or so that visits some waterfalls, National Parks, hot springs and geysers. Here's a short video of a geyser called Strokkur. It erupts every five minutes or so. You can watch the water recede into it and then bubble up and explode. There were gangs of kids (heard screaming in the background) who would stand downwind from the geyser and get soaked by the water.

From Iceland

We tried to get some pictures of Eyjafjallajokull (no, I didn't fall on my keyboard, that's really how you spell it), the volcano that caused all the flight cancellations last month, but it was covered in clouds so we couldn't see any steam. We also saw plenty of huge waterfalls, including Gullfoss, which had a beautiful rainbow across it:

From Iceland

We've had a blast (no pun intended) touring around in our rental car. The scenery is just amazing. Iceland is very beautiful, and there is a lot to explore. It's a great time of year to visit Iceland since the sun doesn't set until almost 11 PM and then rises again at 3 AM which means it's never completely dark.

We now have about 24 hours left in Iceland (and on our trip). Tonight we hope to camp in a hot spring area and take a dip in some open-air geothermal swimming pools near Hveragerdi. Then tomorrow before our flight to Boston we're stopping at the Blue Lagoon, a famous spa/outdoor hot pool to do some last minute relaxation before getting back to the US.

We can't wait to see friends and family again, but it's sad that our trip is almost over. It's been 297 days since we left Seattle last August 15th. Iceland has been a great last stop, and I'd highly recommend it as a place to visit, especially now while the dollar is strong against the kroner. (And note to our Seattle friends, Iceland Air flies direct to Reykjavik from Seattle.)

Switzerland and Germany, briefly

2010-06-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

Because of the way we arranged the last couple weeks of our trip, after two nights in Venice we took the train to Zurich, Switzerland for two nights. Two days each in Italy and Switzerland is obviously an absurdly short amount of time. The train ride from Venice to Zurich made this all too clear. It was a gorgeous ride through tiny mountain towns and beautiful countryside. Every bend of the train had me wanting to get off and explore the surrounding villages and mountains. But, our schedule didn't allow us time to do that. I was sad about this, but similar to the cliche that it's better to have loved and lost, I suppose it's better to have two days as opposed to none.

From Zurich

We met up in Zurich with our friend Aaron from Seattle. He's lived in Zurich for about a year now, and definitely has mixed feelings about Zurich and Switzerland in general. It's a very orderly place, but almost too orderly, almost to the point of creepy orderliness (he's not allowed to do laundry on Sunday for example, and he's heard of apartment buildings where you're not allowed to take showers after 10PM because of the noise of the running water). Everything is very regimented; there are rules and regulations for everything and he finds the people to be very stiff and hard to get to know. However, the city itself is beautiful, sitting at the top of Lake Zurich, nestled between mountains and lots and lots of greenery. The city also has wonderful old architecture, including several churches, and the largest clock face in Europe.

We took a day trip with Aaron and his friend Eva to the German town of Constance, about an hour away by train. Contance is popular with vacationing Germans (redundant, I know, as pretty much all Germans are vacationing) and like Zurich, is set on a large lake amidst mountains. Constance is popular with Swiss visitors too as a place to do shopping as availability, selection and costs are better than in Switzerland. While in Constance we climbed to the top of a cathedral for amazing views of the town and surrounding countryside.

From Zurich

Having only spent less than 48 hours in Switzerland (with about eight of those in Germany) we know that we definitely want to come back. We saw loads of people riding bikes, and we would love to come back to do some biking and hiking. We didn't get up into the mountains this trip but it would be really fun to do some hiking and camping on a multi-day backpacking trip through either the Swiss or Italian Alps some other time.

Now we're off to Iceland, the last stop of our trip. Our flight leaves from Frankfurt, Germany so we booked a train from Zurich to Frankfurt where we take a plane to Reykjavik. It was difficult to find a couchsurfing host in Reykjavik, but at the last minute a Polish couple who lives there said they could host us. We have four days in Iceland, and we're not sure what we're going to do there. This Polish couple said they would host us for our first two nights, and after that maybe we'll rent a car (although the prices were ridiculously expensive, so we may nix that plan). Possibly we'll do an organized tour. We found a pretty awesome website that lists so many incredible activities to do in Iceland. I feel like a kid in a candy store looking at the possibilities. We'll post details on what we end up doing after we decide.

Our Ante Pentultimate Destination: Venice

2010-06-04T00:51:00.000-07:00

It seems fitting that after beginning our trip in expensive Australia, we're ending it in expensive Europe. We've come full circle budget-wise in our travels. Turkey and Greece were not too bad on our budget, especially since we couchsurfed six times between the two countries. In Venice, we tried to find a couchsurfing host, but with no luck. The pickings were slim (only seven available hosts, and we only contacted one that we thought looked promising); later we found out that there were more hosts in the larger neighboring city Padua. Oh well, next time...

The 31 hour ferry ride from Greece was surprisingly pleasant. We didn't have a cabin, but we staked out an area in one of the lounges where we could unfurl our beach mat and alternately sleep and sit up. We read and played plenty of games. The only complaint about the ride is the high price of coffee: between 2.20 and 3 Euros ($2.70 and $3.70) depending on which part of the ship we bought it from.

We got into Venice in the early afternoon, and I was immediately reminded by how beautiful a city Venice is. This is my second trip to Venice, and I think it's one of the world's prettiest cities. Of course, it's pretty in one particular way: old buildings, old bridges and canals, so if you're looking for variety, Venice isn't the place. We walked around the evening we got there and got some amazing sunset pictures:

From Venice

We found a place to stay by making our way from the ferry jetty to the train station and standing around looking lost. A man approached us asking if we needed a place to stay. Jaimee and I had determined earlier that our budget for a room was around 50 Euros ($62 at $1.23 to the Euro), and it was as if I'd learned nothing from all our visits to countries where bargaining is the norm, because when the man asked us what we were hoping to spend, I blurted out "50 Euros". Would it have hurt to start lower? Anyway, not surprisingly, he had a room for 50 Euros and he sent us with a map to his hotel where we were greeted by his wife. After a quick confirmation call to her husband on which she screamed at him, mostly in Italian but with the phase "Speedy Gonazalez" thrown in, we were shown to our room. It was a large bright room with a shared bathroom down the hall, but the neighborhood was great and since at this point it had started to rain, we took the room so we wouldn't have to wander around Venice in the rain with our backpacks.

Without our packs, wandering the streets of Venice was all we did. Well, alternating between stopping at cafes for wine or coffee and buying slices of pizza on the street. And gelato, at least twice a day (so many flavors to sample - I definitely recommend the pear!) It's cliche, but getting lost in Venice is part of the plan. There were several times when we'd walk around, somehow ending up repeatedly in the same wrong spot, but we didn't care. Every street in Venice is beautiful, and down each little alley is another small cafe with outside seating. After months of pinching pennies we somewhat spent with abandon (well, for us anyway), but it was totally worth it. Despite the hoards of tourists, including lots of young backpackers and many school groups, the city has plenty of very romantic and quaint spots.

From Venice

We didn't do any of the "touristy" things, apart from the aforementioned walking, as every sight was packed with tourists; there were long lines to get into the Musei di Piazza San Marco, Gallerie dell' Accademia, and the Peggy Guggenheim museum. Plus each museum was between 10 and 12 Euros ($13 and $15) each! That's a pizza dinner for two with beer and then two scoops of gelato! We also didn't take the vapporetti (water buses) because a one-way ticket costs 6.50 Euro ($8) each. That's the price of two glasses of wine. Plus, Venice is pretty compact and perfect for walking. We estimated that we walked an hour for the distance that we would have taken a vapporetto. Wouldn't you walk an hour for two free glasses of wine?

It might seem crazy to pass up such beautiful sights for what is in the long run, small amounts of money. But, museums will always be there, right? And, we needed to save our money for train tickets to our penultimate stop of Zurich, Switzerland. We almost fell over when we were told the price was 179 Euros ($220) for the two of us. Train travel in Europe is not cheap. We left the train station and investigated alternatives. We tried looking up buses (not convenient and not any cheaper) and flying (cheaper, but not to Zurich), so in the end we bought the train tickets. It's a six hour trip, covering a distance of about 550 km (330 miles). In Zurich, we'll stay with our Seattle friend Aaron who works for YouTube (Google) in Zurich. We won't have very long in Switzerland though as we fly out on Sunday to Iceland! We're really cramming a lot into our last week!

Athens and a strike!

2010-05-31T15:01:00.000-07:00

We're visiting Greece during an interesting time. They've been hit especially hard as a result of the global financial crisis. The government is essentially bankrupt and almost defaulted on its debt a couple of weeks ago. It got rescued by a loan from the international community (i.e., Germany) and as a condition of the loan the government had to impose a series of "austerity" measures to limit its expenditures. This has resulted in protests by people whose wages or services were cut.

Not that it's the Great Depression or anything even close, but we couchsurfed with a local named Panos in Athens so we got to hear first-hand about some of the cuts. He works for a local university and his salary was recently cut 7% and his father's government pension was also cut (including withholding a lump-sum payment he was owed). Panos is not out rioting in the streets (and his dad was actually on holiday when we visited), but Panos did have some interesting things to say about Greece and the crisis. I won't bore our readers with the details (feel free to ask me about it sometime) but the essence is he thinks the government wastes a lot of money and wishes they'd cut military spending (per capita they spend more than eight times what Germany spends on military spending, he pointed out). In that respect, it was a lot like a conversation I might have in the USA.

Panos was a great tour guide. He took us all around the city, including a nice night out with some of his friends. The Greeks are notorious for their late nights, and on Saturday night with Panos we stayed out until 4AM drinking Ouzo at a tiny street-side cafe. Earlier in the evening, we sat outside an outdoor concert by the band Thievery Corporation, then a Jazz Festival for more outdoor music, all the while surrounded by throngs of happy, partying Greeks. Let's just say if you measured the crisis in terms of coffees consumed or street-side cafe visits, Greece wouldn't be registering a crisis at all.

Although Panos claims it has nothing to do with the crisis (and says it was always this way), we continue to notice massive amounts of graffiti. It's everywhere, and it's definitely the worst we've seen on our trip. I guess every county has its one issue. Australia had flies, India had garbage, Egypt had street touts and Greece has graffiti.

From Athens

We had a whirlwind tour with Panos in Athens, including Sunday spent at a beach in Sounia, south of Athens. We met many of Panos friends, all cosmopolitan young people speaking very good English, including one guy, I kid not, named Adonis. Like I said, if this is a country in crisis, bring it on!

We left Athens this morning for Patra, northwest of Athens in order to catch a ferry to Venice, Italy, our next destination. We were supposed to catch a ferry at midnight, but there was a ferry workers strike so our boat is delayed six hours and won't leave until 6AM. Since we were already planning on hanging around until midnight we figured instead of getting a hotel room we'd just hang out in the train station or something, although now we're starting to maybe regret that decision. Patra is a little run-down and we're not sure what we're going to do for the next four hours before we can check into our boat. We're currently writing this blog post at a little cafe basically waiting until they kick us out.

If all goes well with the ferry, we'll arrive in Venice on Wednesday morning (it's a 31 hour ferry - yes I said 31 hours) where we'll probably spend one or two nights before heading off to Zurich, Switzerland to visit our friend Aaron. Crazy that we'll be back in the USA in a little over a week!

A Cretan Adventure

2010-05-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

When we decided to visit Greece, we didn't really know where we'd end up going. With 227 inhabited islands (thank you Wikipedia), plus numerous places to visit on the mainland it was a bit daunting to decide where to go. We chose Rhodes to start because it was close to Turkey, but from there we had many choices. We're definitely glad we added Crete to our itinerary.

Crete is the largest of the Greek islands by both population and area. Most of the people live along the northern coast, and we landed off the ferry in Iraklio, around the center of the north coast. Although a definite stop on the tourist trail, Iraklio had a sort of rundown feel to it. There was graffiti everywhere, and there were many beggars and street kids trying to sell us stuff as we walked around.

From Crete

Now is the part of the blog where we describe things that we didn't go to see; The Archaeological Museum is apparently quite nice, and the Palace of Knossos is the main tourist attraction of Iraklio. Unfortunately we didn't go to either. We did try to go the Battle of Crete Museum, but it was closed. (I read a little about the Battle of Crete, which took place from May 20 to June 1, 1941 when Germany invaded and "conquered" Crete during World War II, and I was hoping for pictures of the famed glider troopers that Germany used in the battle.) There's also the Cretaquarium (a great name for an aquarium, by the way), "the largest aquarium in the Eastern Mediterranean." Which begs the question, does this mean it's large or small? I assume they mean to imply it's large, but really, how many aquariums can there be in the Eastern Mediterranean?

Anyway, after enjoying a few of the numerous street-side cafes in Iraklio (and honing our backgammon skills) we moved on to our couchsurfing hosts of Irene and Arjan in the small village of Koutouloufari, about 15 miles east of Iraklio. Hoping to couchsurf on Crete we had sent a message to the general Crete couchsurfing group. This was a new method for us to find a host. Normally, the way couchsurfing works is that a surfer (one who wants to stay with someone else) does a search in a given area for hosts and then messages them each individually requesting to stay. However, all the people we requested to stay with were unable to host us for one reason or another. So we sent a message to the Crete Couchsurfing Group saying we were on Crete, didn't know where we wanted to go and wondered if anyone wanted to host us.

Luckily, Irene messaged us and said she'd love to host us. It couldn't have turned out better. Irene is from the Netherlands, having moved to Crete only five or six weeks ago. She moved in with her Dutch boyfriend who's summered here for the past 15 summers. They are relatively new to couchsurfing (we were only their second guests) but they were outstanding hosts. We had our own little apartment, on the second floor of an impossibly cute little Greek house. Additionally, Irene is a chef and she cooked us a delicious vegetarian meal the first night we were there. Here's Jaimee relaxing in our little room:

From Crete

Irene's boyfriend Arjan runs a tour business, called Routaki Routes where he provides customized driving routes all over Crete. There's an audio portion where you listen to information at each "stop" of the route. He drives the routes periodically to make sure they're up-to-date and he took us one of the off-road trips in his jeep and it was a blast. We went all over the mountains of Crete, saw many vineyards, orange groves, churches, a huge agave plant, and a giant cave! He wrote the trip up on his blog (even written in English for those of us who don't read Dutch). Here we are in front of one of the churches on the route:

From Crete

We ended up having dinner at this farm/hotel which we never would have found otherwise, and had a wonderful gourmet meze meal (Greek style tapas) of over 10 different dishes.

It was hard to leave Irene and Arjan, but we took a bus across the island to Chania in western Crete. It was there another couchsurfer (Juan, from Spain) agreed to host us. We had contacted him individually from an earlier couchsearch and his "maybe" turned in an "accepted" while we were staying with Irene and Arjan. We wanted to visit western Crete primarily to hike Samaria Gorge, and this turned out to be a highlight, not just of Crete, but of our entire trip. It's listed as being of varying lengths (from 13km to 18km [8 to 11 miles]), depending on where you measure the start and end but it is invariably listed as the "longest gorge walk in Europe". (Similar to the Cretaquarium discussion above, I wondered, how many gorge walks are there in Europe?) Regardless, it was both long and beautiful.

The standard route is to take a bus to the start at the northern end which begins at 1,250 meters (4,100 feet) and walk down through the gorge to the sea. Then catch a ferry to another town where you catch a different bus back to Chania. In all, it was a 13 hour day, but totally worth it. We took some photos during our hike, which you can see at the end of our Crete album but there are some good ones on the Samaria Gorge information page as well.

Now we're off to Athens. We weren't sure if we were going to go to Athens or not, but the only ferries from Chania go to Athens. We are couchsurfing in Athens as well, and we're supposed to meet up with our host for breakfast tomorrow morning. The ferry leaves at 11PM and gets into Athens (Piraeus) around 6AM. We bought "deck" class tickets (no inside cabin) but it's a full moon and we hope (well, I do at least) to pull out our sleeping bags and sleep outside on the deck.

From Rhodes to Crete

2010-05-24T01:18:00.000-07:00

Our first stop in Greece was the island of Rhodes, fourth largest of the Greek islands, and only about 11 miles off the coast of Turkey. As we mentioned before we couchsurfed with Savvas in the main town of Rhodes, called imaginatively, Rhodes Town.

Rhodes was quite nice, albeit very touristy. It gets a lot of cruise traffic and the Old Town was swarming with tourists off the cruise ships. It seemed the favorite activity of these cruise ship visitors was to sit in little street cafes drinking gigantic beers. We wondered why, considering isn't drinking what you do all day on a cruise?

Anyway, although we enjoyed walking around Rhodes Town our first full day, we rented a car the next day and did a tour of the island. It took us all day to drive the perimeter of the island, stopping in several towns along the way. Highlights were the town of Lindos, about 25 miles south of Rhodes Town, where a huge Acropolis dominates above a town full of classic white-washed Greek buildings:

From Rhodes

We also enjoyed the 15th century Castle of Monolithos on the other side of the island, perched on top of a large rock outcrop. It was incredibly beautiful.

From Rhodes

Here's a map of our road trip.

View larger map

From Rhodes we took a 13 hour ferry to Greece's largest island, Crete, where we are now. The ferry stopped at several islands along the way, and we did a Spot check-in at each port. Here's a map of the route:

View larger map

We plan on staying on Crete for about five days or so. We arranged to couchsurf tonight and tomorrow on the eastern side of the island, and we hope to visit the west side before leaving. So far, Crete seems nice and we've seen our first protests; we saw a group of men near the ferry picketing around an open fire. Not sure what their signs said as they were in Greek. We've also heard that there might be a ferry strike coming up. We hope we don't get stuck on the island, but apparently if there is a strike, they'll give two days warning. Here's hoping we don't get stuck in the islands...although I suppose I could think of worse places to be stuck.

Good-bye Turkey, Hello Greece

2010-05-20T23:16:00.000-07:00

We're sounding like a broken record, but we had a wonderful time in Turkey. It's highly recommended as a place to visit, and we only saw a small portion of the country. In a future visit (or visits) we'd love to visit central and eastern Turkey and explore more of the Mediterranean coast.

One of the downsides (or you could call it an upside too) of couchsurfing is you often don't do the "touristy" things while staying in a given place. This was the case in Izmir. We loved hanging out with George, but we didn't really do much in Izmir except visit a few brunch places, take a side trip to Cesme, and hang out with a bunch of his friends. It was great, but we were happy on our last day in Izmir that George took us up to see the beautiful views from the top of Kadifekale (kale means fortress). It's the ruins of the ancient city of Smyrna, one of the "Seven Churches" of the book of Revelation. According to Revelation, Smyrna was the only "church" that didn't get rebuked by John, the author of Revelation. "This makes the Izmir people special," George told us. Regardless of rebukes, the views were pretty special, and in typical Turkish fashion, after snapping a few pictures we sat and had some tea. Did we mention how much we love Turkey?

From Izmir and the Turkish Coast

We knew we were heading to Greece after Turkey and we'd decided to head to the island of Rhodes first. Partly we decided on Rhodes because it was close to Turkey and also because we found a couchsurfing host there. Rhodes has a population of about 50,000 people but there were about seven couchsurfers when we did a search, one of whom, named Savvas, agreed to host us. Coincidentally, when we were at George's couchsurfing party in Izmir we met a Brazilian woman who knew Savvas! She met him when he went to Brazil last winter. Small world.

Before going to Rhodes we spent a couple nights in Selcuk, near Efes (Ephesus), another one of the Seven Churches. Selcuk was a very cute town, and the ruins of Efes were amazing. Although it was mobbed with tour bus traffic, it was really cool seeing the old buildings. I hadn't really thought of it before, but a lot of Bible history is in Turkey.

From Izmir and the Turkish Coast

Our last stop in Turkey was the Mediterranean town of Marmaris. We were only stopping here to catch the ferry, and we're glad we didn't spend more time here, as it was our least favorite Turkish town. Our guest house owner bragged about how Bill Gates visited recently (not at our $30 a night guest house, but in a private yacht off the coast) which tells you something about the town's character. It's full of European tourists, mostly rich ones and the stores and restaurants cater to that crowd. We did find one cheap restaurant (which we went to twice) and we enjoyed walking around people watching.

We took a fast ferry to Rhodes, it only took about an hour and a half. We met up with Savvas and we all went out to dinner and drinks at a local pub. Savvas is very well educated (he's half Greek, half Swedish) and his dad (the Greek half) was a High School exchange student in Cape Elizabeth, Maine 40 years ago! Anyway, Rhodes seems to have quite a few sights to see, including castles, beaches and mountains (it's an old volcano so the middle of the island is quite mountainous). We'll post more of our adventures later. In the meantime, be sure and look at all our pictures of the Turkish coast. We updated the album since the last blog post.

Ancient Ruins and More Couchsurfing Adventures

2010-05-16T13:59:00.000-07:00

Western Turkey has a definite "tourist track," a series of stops that almost all tourists to Turkey visit. Istanbul, of course is one stop (usually the first) and then most tourists head south along the coast, stopping in Canakkale to visit the World War I battle field of Gallipoli and the ruins of Troy. We decided to take an organized tour of Gallipoli as the sights are quite spread out and there isn't really public transportation. The tour was pretty interesting, and we learned a lot about the battles that took place there in 1915.

Gallipoli is a famous place for Australians and New Zealanders to visit because it was the first major battle of Australian and New Zealand forces (ANZAC). There are numerous memorials to dead Australian and Kiwi soldiers. It was a beautiful day when we toured the area and it's hard to imagine fighting in such a beautiful place. Over 500,000 soldiers died in about eight months of fighting.

From Gallipoli, Troy and Pergamum

Next up was Troy. We decided to visit Troy on our own since a tour would cost $40 US each and there was a public bus out to the sight of the ruins. However, because we were catching a bus to the town of Bergama at 12:30 PM the day we visited, it only gave us about an hour to see the ruins. It turned out to actually be enough time, as there isn't a whole lot to see. We walked the circuit of the ruins and took some pictures at the somewhat ridiculous Trojan Horse recreation.

From Gallipoli, Troy and Pergamum

Troy was okay, but we enjoyed the Gallipoli tour much more. From Canakkale we took a bus to Bergama, which is right next to the ancient ruins of Pergamum, "site of the preeminent medical center of ancient Rome" (Lonely Planet). We stayed at the cutest little guest house, called Gobi Guest House where the owner, Gobi was probably the cutest Turkish man ever. He made sure we were comfortable at all times, giving us complimentary tea whenever we were coming and going as well as all sorts of information about visiting the sights of the area.

From a budget perspective, Bergama also gave us two good budget-conscious stories. First, we'd read in the guide book that there was a shuttle bus that transfered people from the bus station to the center of town about 7 km (4 miles) away. The guide said it costs 2 TL ($1.25 US) each. However, when we got off the bus, a taxi driver and another ticket seller told us that there wasn't a shuttle bus anymore, but that he'd drive us for the "very good price" of 15 TL ($10). We said no, we wanted to take a bus, and Jaimee even showed the guys the part in the guide book that said there was a shuttle (as if this proved there should be a shuttle). They insisted there was no shuttle. Thinking there was no bus, we relented and headed to the taxi. The taxi driver popped the trunk and we were putting the bags in when I spotted a bus on the other side of the parking lot. "Where does that go?" I asked. "Oh, another village," the driver said. Not trusting him, I ran over to the bus and it was a shuttle into town, for FREE. We jumped on the bus and told the driver and other passengers the story and they were all very mad, saying that that was not how Turkish people should operate and the driver even wanted to get the taxi driver's identification number in order to report him to the tourism board. It was a welcome reaction, quite different from Egypt where the attitude seemed to be that that kind of behavior was to be expected.

Our second budget story occurred when visiting the actual ruins of Pergamum. After paying 60 TL ($40) each for the tour of Gallipoli and 15 TL ($10) each to visit Troy, I was a little burned out on paying entry fees, so when we walked up the Pergamum entrance and saw it was also 15 TL each, we agreed that Jaimee would pay and go in and then come and get me to pay if the ruins were really great. Otherwise, I was happy to wait outside and see what I could from the entrance. So, Jaimee paid and walked through and I settled in to wait outside. When the ticket taker saw what I was doing she just let me go in for free. Now, it might seem stupid to balk about paying $10 for an entry fee when we'd paid so much to get to the actual sight in the first place, but after paying at sight after sight in Egypt we were kind of tired of paying. In any event, it probably won't work again, but it's worth a try if you ever want to get a two-for-one admission...

As it turned out, Pergamum was totally worth $10 (even $20 maybe). The ruins are in great shape, there's a huge amphitheater and several other building, including treatment rooms for psychiatric patients. The only downside was that we were touring the sight with a gaggle of school kids from several different schools and the place was swarming with kids running all over the place. They also were saying many things to us in Turkish that I can only imagine was not very nice because they kept laughing after yelling different phrases.

From Gallipoli, Troy and Pergamum

From Bergama we took a bus to Izmir, a city of about three million people on the coast. According to our Istanbul couchsurfer Ali, Izmir is the "Barcelona of Turkey". We'd arranged to couchsurf with this 60-ish year old guy, George, who was retired from working in the travel industry. As it turned out, George is an American from Barre, Massachusetts who's lived in Turkey for 45 years. He was an absolute hoot. He is gung-ho into couchsurfing, even hosting a couchsurfing party while we were there. About 20 people showed up, including a Brazilian, a Portuguese, and an American from Steilacoom, Washington. The American annoyed everyone by showing off his "new toy" (his words) to everyone. (Side note: I wasn't overly impressed, and do not plan on running out and buying one when we get back to the states.)

George took us all around Izmir, mostly out to breakfast (Turks put brunch-loving Americans to shame - they can surely lounge for hours with cup after cup of tea and a yummy medley of foods), but also to the seaside town of Cesme where we met up with some friends of his who own a big sailboat.

From Izmir and the Turkish Coast

Even though we've only know George for a few days we feel like we've known him for a lot longer. He's a great guy and we hope to catch up with him in the states this Fall when he heads to Boston for a family reunion.

Tomorrow we get back on the tourist trail and head south to Selcuk where we can visit more ruins and see the ancient city of Ephesus. Feel free to look at all our pictures of Gallipoli and Troy, as well as the few that we took in Izmir. George took more pictures at the couchsurfing party but we couldn't transfer them off his camera but if he ever posts them on-line we'll add them to the album.

One of the Great Cities

2010-05-12T00:18:00.000-07:00

Istanbul was a real delight. We'd heard entirely good things about the city from other travelers and our visit lived up to the expectations. It is an amazingly beautiful city with wonderful architecture, natural beauty in all the various bodies of water and green spaces and has a very cosmopolitan and European feel. It's a huge city both in population (16 million or so) and area - the second largest city we've visited (after Cairo) - but it was not intimidating at all. There is ample public transportation and once within a neighborhood, walking around is very pleasant.

We were lucky to couchsurf with Ali, a wonderful guy who lives on the Asian side of the city. Since we were there on the weekend he spent Sunday with us taking us all around the city, pointing out the various sights. We also took a little scenic cruise up the Bosphorus strait that connects into the Black Sea.

From Istanbul

Then, Jaimee and I spent another day touring all the other sights we didn't see on Sunday with Ali. Yet still we don't feel we saw everything there is to see in Istanbul. We did see the major landmarks, including the famed Blue Mosque. This picture doesn't begin to do the building justice. Built in 1609, it is an impressive building both inside and out. See this google search for even better pictures.

From Istanbul

The one drawback to Istanbul that we'd heard from others was that sometimes the shopkeepers could be aggressive in attracting customers, but after Cairo and Luxor in Egypt, the market bazaar experience in Istanbul was a dream. Only one person was even remotely rude or combative, but we didn't let it bother us in the least.

We enjoyed having tea and coffee at a few of the street side cafes that dot the city. We have also enjoyed trying a few new foods. We had read that the food in Turkey is the best, and we have to admit that it is very tasty! Also, Turkey is definitely more expensive than anywhere we've been in the last few months, but it's still quite manageable.

Although we could have stayed longer in Istanbul and really enjoyed ourselves we headed out on a bus yesterday down the Aegean Coast to the town of Canakkale, which is near the sight of the Battle of Gallipoli of World War I and also the location of Troy of Iliad fame. Today we're taking a tour of the Gallipoli battle fields and tomorrow we plan on touring around Troy on our own.

So happy to be in Turkey

2010-05-08T23:12:00.000-07:00

We said good-bye to Egypt by means of one horrible overnight train ride. Maybe we did it to ourselves, but our stubbornness refused to let Egypt beat us, but I think in the end Egypt did win after all.

After not really enjoying Aswan (feel free to ask us about it sometime), we took the train back to Luxor and hung out our last day in Luxor doing a falafel/tea tour of the city. As we've said multiple times, Egyptian food is outstanding, and the tea and sheesha culture is quite cool. Tea and backgammon for two hours in the middle of the day? What's not to like? So, overall, we had a great final day in Luxor. (We only got ripped off once - what a day!) We planned on taking the overnight train to Cairo, but did not want to take the "tourist" sleeper for $60 US each ticket. We also didn't want to take 1st Class for 156 LE ($27 US). Instead we wanted to buy a 2nd Class air-conditioned seat for 52 LE ($9). After being in Southeast Asia and India for three months we'd grown used to traveling in second class; we actually prefer it - we find it more "interesting" and it saves money to boot.

However, every time we went to the train station to buy a ticket they wouldn't sell us one. We tried multiple times but each time the ticket booth told us to just buy it on the train. It was a little risky, but we thought okay, why not? We got on the train at 9:30PM in Luxor and it was mostly empty, so we took two seats. The ticket seller sold us two tickets for 52 LE - so far so good - although he suggested we upgrade to 1st Class. His English wasn't that good; we didn't really understand what he was saying or how much the upgrade would cost so we declined. He also mentioned that we should keep our eyes on our bags which were in the luggage rack above our heads. So we shimmed our bags underneath our seats, reclined our seats and prepared to sleep for the ride to Cairo.

However, around 1AM someone woke on us saying we were in their seats. They had a ticket for our exact two seats. Somehow they were able to buy advanced tickets. We were confused, and in the confusion the guy sitting in the aisle next to us offered to start helping us. In India, we welcomed local help from people, but in Egypt we grew very wary of accepting "help" from strangers. In any event, we had to vacate our seats, but at this point the train was completely packed, I mean solidly packed, as in not a single seat anywhere. Additionally, there were people sleeping on the floor in between the cars, sleeping behind the last row of seats on the floor or sitting double to a seat. It was absolute chaos. I left Jaimee with our bags in between two cars and walked the train looking for seats. Nothing. When I got back to Jaimee our friend somehow convinced a few other guys to take turns standing so that Jaimee and I could rotate into a seat. In between we had to stand right next to the bathroom car where the door wouldn't stay shut, wafting very unpleasant smells into the cramped quarters where I was standing with three other smoking Egyptians. The mix of latrine smell and cigarette smoke was almost enough to give me dry heaves on several occasions.

When the train started to empty out, Jaimee got her own seat and slept, while I sat in a different seat with our bags piled on top of me. We actually got a couple hours of sleep. We got off at the Giza stop in Cairo, took the Metro to the central bus station, got some koshary (who knew pasta, rice, lentils, chick peas, dried onions and tomato sauce could taste so good?) and took the bus to the airport. Total cost from Luxor to Cairo International Airport: 52 + 1 + 4 LE (train, subway, bus) x 2 = $20 USD. Was it worth saving the $100 by not taking the tourist sleeper train? Or saving $32 by not going in 1st Class? Probably not. But as we don't plan on going back to Egypt anytime soon we'll never find out.

We flew into Istanbul, and it was like a breath of fresh air. Literally. Not only was the weather wonderfully cool, but when we took the bus from the airport to the Sea Bus ferry terminal (we're couchsurfing on the Asian side) they even put our bags down below in the luggage area of the bus. Now that's civilized! Granted the 20 minute ride cost 5 Turkish Lira (TL), about $3 apiece, but you know what, everyone was paying that price and it was clear from the very beginning what the price was. That in itself was refreshing.

Then we bought ferry tickets from an automated machine at the ferry terminal. Since I have to put one picture in the post, here's Jaimee waiting in line to get our tickets.

Our couchsurfing host is super nice. Even though we'd been traveling for about 24 hours straight, we stayed up well past midnight drinking Tuborg, chatting about culture, travel and Europe versus America. And we made plans to go out for brunch in the morning (i.e., soon). We are so happy to be in Turkey! More to come as we explore Istanbul and the areas of Southwest of Turkey.

Egypt hates tourists

2010-05-05T06:34:00.000-07:00

After three nights in Luxor, we've come to the conclusion that Egypt really hates tourists. Which is odd, given that they're a significant source of revenue for the country. Well, even if they don't hate them, they certainly don't treat them very well. We've had numerous trying times dealing with people in Egypt, and although the beauty of the country is amazing, having to deal with all the shenanigans of local people is quite tiring. Beware that below is a long rant, so if you're not interested feel free to skip it and just look at this picture of us enjoying a happy moment at the Temple of Karnak in Luxor. Also, be sure to check out all our pictures from Luxor and Aswan. We'll be adding to them over the next few days.

From Luxor and Aswan

I wrote up a longer essay on the issue, but I won't bore the readers here with the full analysis. Basically it boils down to the fact that people want to come to Egypt to see the Pyramids, the Great Sphinx, the numerous temples and monuments in Luxor and Aswan and various other amazing sights. There is a steady stream of new visitors that want to come here to see sights for which there is no substitute. There is only one place to see the Pyramids (Luxor in Las Vegas doesn't really count). Therefore, Egypt doesn't have to depend on repeat visitors for tourism. So, for the same reason the Space Needle restaurant in Seattle will invariably be overpriced and of poor quality, the Egypt tourist experience is poor and disappointing. Compare this with Thailand. The things that Thailand offers (good food, beautiful beaches and islands, forest hiking, religious temples) have substitutes in many places: Central and South America, Hawaii, parts of Europe and other countries within Southeast Asia, among other places. Therefore in order to lure tourists they must provide good service, which they certainly do. Think of how many people do repeat visits to Thailand; I know many. How many come repeatedly to Egypt? I don't have the exact figures, but I can't imagine it's very many.

Anyway, at least that's what basic economic theory will tell you about why the tourist experience is so bad here. The basic issues we're having here are:

We're continually getting ripped off. Dahab was an exception; there most restaurants posted prices and you could decide ahead of time whether you wanted to go there or not. However, Cairo and Luxor, unless you read Arabic, it's impossible to know the prices. Ditto for taxi drivers and buses. Unless you know ahead of time what the price should be and just pay that price, they'll charge you two or three or five times what it should cost. Even ordering tea at a coffee shops turns into a bargaining session. It shouldn't be that way. It should be clear what the prices are, allowing us to make a decision ahead of time.
People selling stuff will not leave us alone. From taxi drivers, horse carriage drivers, sellers of all sorts of things, street side cafe owners, hotel proprietors, kids selling stuff, beggars, everyone bothers us. We've had people approach us with cartons of cigarettes. When is a carton of cigarettes an impulse buy? Who is buying all this crap? In Luxor they were like flies. Even a short walk turned into a constant walk of saying No.
Men are constantly oogling and saying lude comments to Jaimee. It is incredibly bad. Many Egyptian men (and teenage boys) are just absolute pigs. From whistling and hissing to comments such as "You're such a lucky man" (yes, I know, but I don't need an Egyptian Don Juan to tell me) or "Just one kiss". It makes me really mad.

As we mentioned before, the food has been very good (assuming you can find it reasonably priced), and the sights are amazing, but after 10 days here, we're pretty much "done" with Egypt. Currently we're in Aswan, about three hours south of Luxor, which seems a little calmer. For us the Luxor tourist experience was really bad. Hopefully Aswan will be better. We're here until Friday when we hope to catch an overnight train back to Cairo before flying to Istanbul on Saturday. Of course, even getting information about the train tickets was an ordeal. The man at our hotel told us that we could only buy the tickets on the day of the train for a price of 175 LE ($31 USD). He said he'd help us buy the tickets. We declined his offer and instead went to the train station where the ticket seller told us to just buy the tickets on board for 61 LE ($11). It turns out the guy was trying to sell us 1st Class tickets without giving us an option for 2nd Class. Why does it have to be so hard?

Update: we wrote this post at an Internet cafe in Aswan and when we were done the guy tried to charge us 15 LE ($3 US) for the 45 minutes we were on-line. This was about four times what the going rate is. We balked, including Jaimee saying that 15 was more than our lunch (which was true) so he then dropped it to 10 LE which was still over-priced. Then, after dealing with that we thought we'd grab beers on the way back, and I kid you not, the vendor tried to sell us two cans of non-alcoholic beer and pass it off as real beer! That's about as low as you can go!

Luxor it is then!

2010-05-01T05:18:00.000-07:00

In our last post we left it open as to whether we'd head to Jordan and visit Petra or if we'd go to Luxor instead. Well, we decided on Luxor, and it was purely about the money. Going to Petra was just going to cost too much. Here's the breakdown of how much a Petra trip would cost us:

Bus from Dahab to Nuweiba: 15 LE ($3) each
Ferry from Nuweiba to Aquaba, Jordan: $70 each
Taxi from Aquaba to bus station in town: unknown, but let's say $3
Public bus to Petra: unknown, but guide book says $10 each
Entry fees to Petra: ~~$60 each~~ Update: $60 would be for a three day pass, a one day pass is $25 each (or so the guide book says).
Jordanian Visa: possibly free, but more likely 10 dinar (about $15) each

Then we'd have to double those costs to come back (getting another Egyptian visa for $15 each on our way back), unless we continued up further North into Jordan and into Israel before crossing back into Egypt (as there is no land crossing between Egypt and Jordan). So, assuming we returned the way we came, all the above costs add up to well over $500, before even considering food or lodging costs. Visiting Northern Jordan and Israel would have been fun and interesting, but it was never part of our plan so we knew nothing about it, and apparently Israel is very expensive. We met an American on our Mt. Sinai hike who had just come from Israel and he said prices were very high.

In contrast, an overnight bus to Luxor costs 120 LE (about $21). Then we can take an overnight train later back to Cairo, saving on lodging costs in both directions!

So, we leave for Luxor in a few minutes. It sounds really awesome, so we're excited to see the ancient sights down there.

Finally, one picture of the wonderful food that we've been enjoying here. The food in Egypt is outstanding, and one of the reasons we extended in the first place:

From Dahab and Mt. Sinai

Climbing Mt. Sinai

2010-04-30T01:08:00.000-07:00

The first thing one should know about climbing Mt. Sinai is that you will not be alone. Not that I thought I'd have the mountain to myself, but any notions of a "spiritual experience" were squashed along with our bodies into a van with 11 other people when we left Dahab at 11PM. There were numerous check-points where we had to show our passports on the way to the mountain and when we disembarked at St. Catherine's Monastery at 1AM we found a circus-like atmosphere of tour buses, taxis, cigarette-smoking Egyptians and camels. In Dahab, we bought a "package tour" that included a guide up the mountain (going on your own is difficult to arrange) and after getting our guide, he lit a cigarette and led our group to the path. It became clear from the onset that this guide was only there to make sure we didn't fall off the mountain, not befriend us or point out anything of interest.

We walked by light of a full-moon, on a rocky path crowded with what seemed more camels than people. Some found ignoring the offers of "camel, camel" every few steps impossible to resist; we saw one Japanese lady from our group bounding up the mountain on a camel, not to be seen again until 10AM when we boarded our bus back to Dahab. Riding a camel was never a temptation; if walking worked for Moses, I thought, it's good enough for me.

We stopped several times on the way up at one of the many little tea shacks. Tea or coffee is one thing, but Fanta, Coke and Snickers?

From Dahab and Mt. Sinai

The top of the mountain was even more commercialized. Locals sold cushions to sit on and blankets to stay warm at 20 LE a pop (about $4.50). We came prepared for the chill, finally getting a chance to use our 25-degree sleeping bags we'd been uselessly carting around everywhere. We staked out a front-row spot on the top of the mountain and watched the beautiful sunrise.

From Dahab and Mt. Sinai

The top of the mountain was like a mini-United Nations convention. There were people from everywhere, and people everywhere. Our van alone had people from the USA, Canada, Japan and Slovakia, and after the sun came up, wondering around you could hear many different languages.

From Dahab and Mt. Sinai

Many people found the climb to be very spiritual. We saw groups of people praying, chanting, singing, meditating, which I found admirable, as all I could do was gawk at all the people. We took a different path down the mountain, following the "Steps of Repentance", a set of 3,700 steps carved by a monk instead of the more direct "Camel's Route" that we took on the way up.

If we thought the summit was crowded, St. Catherine's Monastery was even more packed. We got to the bottom around 8AM but had to wait until 9AM for the Monastery to open. There was a narrow door to get in to see the second-largest collection of religious manuscripts in the world (outside the Vatican) and to see the Burning Bush of Moses fame. We did see the bush, but passed on the museum as there was an extra fee and the crowds were overwhelming.

From Dahab and Mt. Sinai

Overall, our experience of climbing Mt. Sinai was interesting, definitely not negative, but it'd be hard to call it an amazing experience. I think with a little more effort we could have figured out a way to make it a more personal trip. Maybe climbing it in the late afternoon for the sunset instead? Or staying out at the Monastery (it contains a small hotel) to visit it when the crowds are less, although I'm not sure if there is ever a time when it's a quiet spot. In any event, it is what it is. You can see all the pictures of our climb, as well as some pictures of the very chill town of Dahab here.

We're at somewhat of an impasse with our trip now. We called Egypt Air and extended our ticket to Istanbul by one week since we're enjoying Egypt a lot. We now don't leave Egypt until May 8, a week from tomorrow. For the time until then we have some choices to make. We could travel to Jordan for a few days and see Petra, but we're hesitant to do if the crowds will be like anything we experienced at Mt. Sinai. The other option is to take a ferry across the Red Sea to visit Luxor and "Upper Egypt" before heading back to Cairo for our flight.

We're having a fun in Dahab, a town built for just lounging around. There are many restaurants and cafes right on the water where you sit on the ground surrounded by pillows. Since we didn't have a hotel room for the night of our Sinai trip, we spent most of the afternoon hanging out at one cafe, playing Scrabble and drinking tea and coffee. On our trip to Sinai, we met a really nice Canadian women and last night we went out to dinner with her and two other Americans she'd met earlier who are also on an around-the-world trip. It was fun comparing stories with these two guys. Their trip closely mirrors ours and we could reminisce about many of the same places we'd been so far. You'd think it would energize us to see even more places, but honestly, hearing about their trip and thinking about all the places we've been has made us somewhat tired though (for those really interested, read this blog post that summarizes the "problem"). So, maybe we'll just hang out in Dahab for a few more days, enjoying the wonderful weather.

Cairo and the Pyramids

2010-04-28T00:36:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, Cairo, Egypt will be the largest city we visit on our trip. With a population of almost 20 million it's a sprawling and active city. But despite the insane traffic, it's quite walkable, although crossing the street can be scary at times. Overall, we found it to be a perfect place to visit for a few days.

We were lucky to couchsurf with Lee, an American working for USAid in Cairo. He lives right near downtown, a block from the Nile river. It was great having him to help us navigate around, and since he speaks Arabic, he was able to get us better deals when we went our for tea or dinner. As many non-touristy restaurants don't have menus or prices in English, unless Lee was with us we were routinely overcharged. For example, we had dinner with Lee one night for 13 LE (Egyptian pounds, about $2.50) while breakfast the next morning for me and Jaimee cost 35 LE (about $7). Tea and a sheesha (more about that in a second) with Lee cost 8 LE (about $1.50) one night while tea for me and Jaimee was 20 LE (about $4) in the Islamic Quarter. Although all those prices are quite reasonable (who knew Egypt would be so cheap?) it's annoying to be over-charged just because we're tourists.

Although Egyptians are very friendly, we found scams around every corner. We like to give people the benefit of the doubt when they offer to help us, but we found many people had ulterior motives. This happened on our way to the pyramids yesterday. Surprisingly (at least to us), there are several pyramids right outside the city limits of Cairo reachable by public transport. Lee directed us in the general direction of the buses that head down there, and while we were looking for a connector bus a man offered to help us as he said he was going to the pyramid area himself. Maybe that should have been our first clue that it might be a scam, but the second was that his phone kept ringing and he said it was his wife calling him multiple times. But, he seemed like a nice guy (he even paid our bus fare for us) and we kept following him until he finally brought us to a tour operator way away from the main gates to the pyramids. The guy inside gave us a hard sell on an entire pyramid tour including camel rides. Wouldn't you want to trust this guy?

From Cairo

We had a rough idea of the entry fees to the pyramids and this guy was charging us double what it should cost to do it yourself. Plus, we didn't want to ride camels. Eventually we declined his offer by insisting we didn't want to ride any camels. Which led him to yell probably the funniest thing anyone has every yelled at me as we walked away, "If I see you on a camel later, you'll be in trouble." So I guess it was worth all the hassle just for the quote.

We found the main gates to the pyramids and after paying the entry fee walked around on our own. The pyramids are quite impressive, especially given that they are so close to Cairo. We went inside one of the pyramids which was quite interesting. It was a long, narrow, steep tunnel into a large cavern.

From Cairo

Coming from India where it was so humid, the weather in Cairo has been such a relief. It's hot, but since it's a dry heat it's very comfortable. And the food has been a very pleasant and yummy surprise. Egyptians eat pita bread at every meal, and similar to the thali meals of India where you get to taste many different dishes in one meal, they do similar things here; a meals consists of small dishes of foul (pronounced fuul - bean dip with tahini or oil mixed in), potatoes, baba ghanooj (eggplant spread) and numerous types of salads, mostly with cucumbers or tomatoes. Lee also took us to a Yemen restaurant where we had very yummy vegetable soups and more types of dips with fresh pita.

And given that we're in Egypt, we tried a sheesha (called a hookah in the USA) at one of the numerous Sheesha cafes that are everywhere in Cairo.

From Cairo

You can see the rest of our Cairo pictures including our wanderings around the city, including a few hours spent walking in the Islamic Quarter (where our pictures don't have captions as most of the time we didn't know where we were). We only stayed two nights with Lee in Cairo and yesterday took a nine hour bus ride to Dahab, on the Sinai peninsula of Egypt. It's very touristy here and a popular place to scuba dive in the Red Sea. The only hassle so far has been the overpriced taxi into town from the bus station. But so far it seems like a nice place. We're going to attempt to climb Mt. Sinai, hopefully even tonight (it's best to hike it in the dark because of the heat) since today is a full moon. We'll post more about it in a few days.

Mumbai and Good-bye to India

2010-04-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

Mumbai has been a surprise (in a good way). When we were in Goa we met two Brits who flew into Mumbai and immediately bought 1,700 rupee (about $40) 1st Class train tickets to Goa. They said Mumbai was crazy and insufferable (you got to love Brit-speak) so they got out of there right away. The $40 train ticket should have tipped us off that we shouldn't necessarily trust their description, as we paid 800 rupees (about $18) for two tickets in non-AC Second class from Goa to Mumbai.

Everywhere we've been in India people have told Mumbai would be crazy, with beggars everywhere, slums all over the place, unbelievably bad traffic, etc. And then they would go on about the local trains, how crowded they were and how we should avoid them at all costs. Well, to that I would say, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. It is all those things, but it also some how works. Mumbai has a wonderful vibe, a feeling of being alive that we didn't feel as much in the other big cities of Chennai and Bangalore. Surprisingly, Mumbai reminded us mostly of Bangkok, with a large working class and lots of "regular" looking people milling around, busy doing whatever it is that Indian working class people do. Our impression of course comes from staying in a middle class neighborhood in North Mumbai with Gaurav, our couchsurfing host.

From Mumbai

Our train ride from Goa was quite pleasant, no real issues, apart from being over 12 hours long. There was ample food available from vendors walking the isles of the train; we sampled biryani, pakoras, somosas, bananas and frozen fruit bars (kept cold with dry ice!) all washed down with about 10 cups of chai throughout the trip. Indians certainly stay well fed on the trains.

We spent two full days exploring and walking around Mumbai. Each day we started with coffee in Gaurav's apartment, then took a rickshaw to the train station and then a local train to whichever part of the city we were exploring that day. The local trains are something like I've never seen. Apparently there can be up to 7,000 people in an 1,800-person-capacity train during rush "hour". The train pulls up and it's an instant shoving match to get on the train. On one train we tried pushing to get into the car but it was solid people, so we rebounded out and tried the next car. Compounding the problem was that about 1/3 of the train cars are "Lady Only" cars with slightly more room in them, but since Jaimee and I did not want to be separated, Jaimee often ended up being the only woman packed like sardines in the train cars. I really wanted to get some good pictures of the chaos on the trains, but when you're surrounded by so many people, it's a little hard to snap a good photo.

From Mumbai

Mumbai has been unbelievably hot. They're having a heat wave right now; it's been about 100 degrees with 70 or 80% humidity and even the locals are complaining about the heat. Needless to say this makes for pretty poor sight-seeing weather. We tried our best and saw some neat sights. The architecture is pretty, and the city has a very cosmopolitan feel to it. We didn't take a ton of photos while we were here, but you can take a look at the whole set here. A quick note about the "slums" of Mumbai, which you won't see in any of our pictures. They are definitely apparent and quite sprawling, especially along the train tracks. We didn't get any good pictures mostly because we didn't want to gawk and stare and also because once you stop moving you become a target for beggars or people selling stuff. The slums and the way that so many people live in them are very fascinating though.

Tomorrow we fly to Cairo, Egypt. We arranged to stay with a couchsurfer, an American working for a non-profit organization there. He can host us for two nights and then we'll take a side-trip either down the Nile or over to the Sinai Peninsula.

Beaches and Churches

2010-04-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

We've spent the last five nights in Goa, splitting our time between three nights in the South Goan beach town of Colva and two nights in the "city" of Panaji. We survived our overnight train ride from Hampi which was actually quite enjoyable. Our sleeper bed had just been cleaned (it still smelled of cleaning detergent) and we only saw one cockroach in our section of the train! We decided to head to Colva because the South of Goa has a reputation for being more laid back than the North. The town was full of Indian tourists, with the odd European tourist here and there. Technically it's off-season in Goa and for good reason. During the day it is almost unbearably hot (temperatures well above 100) and very humid. And the water is so warm it hardly refreshes. Fortunately, there are frequent breezes, but in the middle of the day even the breeze can feel like a hair dryer. (I'm making it sound terrible; it really wasn't that bad.)

We went to the beach a couple of days (it was nice, but not like our beach routine in Kerala) and rented scooters another day to tour several of the beaches.

From Goa

Indians are pretty interesting at the beach. They congregate in the trees just off the beach, setting up camp around blaring stereos and coolers full of cold drinks. We drove our scooter out to a beach called Lover's Beach expecting a nice romantic spot but all we could hear as we approached was Bollywood music. The trees near the beach were full of dancing Indians and the beach was full of men and women playing in the sand and surf. The women go swimming while covered in their saris or kurtas and the men are split between those wearing pants in the water and those who wear just their underwear. Needless to say, it was a surprising scene.

We were in Colva over the weekend, and at night the town was crawling with people. The beach parking area had so many motorcycles it looked like a motorcycle rally. That's something that we still haven't gotten used to in India yet (as you can tell by us mentioning it in nearly every blog post): everywhere you go there are masses and masses of people. It makes India very interesting, but sometimes it's a bit tiring when you want peace and quiet. Our guest house, called the Golden Rose, was pretty peaceful though, outside of Colva by about a quarter mile or so. They had a small restaurant on site so we spent a couple nights just hanging out on the patio chatting with the other guests, one other American (from Dorchester, MA), a couple of Brits, an Australian and a Danish kid.

From the beach we took a bus up to Panaji, the capital and more or less geographical center of Goa. It is a really pretty old Colonial town. The Portuguese came here in 1510 and at one time, it had a larger population than either London or Lisbon. The Portuguese influence is mostly seen in the architecture and cuisine. Besides the myriads of churches (more on that in a second), many of the building in Panaji have an old battered, European look to them. The food too is very different from the rest of India. Coconuts and cashews rule here. Many dishes are made with both, often through the use of feni - a liquor distilled from either cashews or coconuts. Meat and seafood are also much more prevalent; you can get chourisso (spicy red sausages flavored with feni), many kinds of fish and vindalho (a pork stew of vinegar, garlic and spices). Being India, there is still plenty of veg food, but interesting to see the differences in cuisine from one region to the next. Goa has the largest variety of foods of anywhere we've been so far.

We took a side trip from Panaji to the city of Old Goa and were mesmerized by all the churches. If you want to see old cathedrals, this is the place to go. Apparently in the 1500s Priests routinely wrote the Pope in Rome saying that there were so many churches that the sounds from all the bells were colliding with one another and they requested something be done about it. Here is Se Cathedral, the largest cathedral in Asia, also containing the largest church bell in Asia:

From Goa

Another highlight of Old Goa was learning about Saint Francis Xavier. He is absolutely venerated here. He came to Goa in 1542 and spent the final 10 years of his life touring around Asia (going to various points in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Japan) before dying off the coast of China in 1552. We stopped in a small reading room near the Basilica of Bom Jesus (where Xavier's body is entombed) and read a small graphic novel (okay, really a cartoon but calling it a graphic novel makes it sound legitimate) about his life, and browsed numerous books about his mission and travels. Here is a picture of a statue of St. Francis Xavier as well as the tomb that holds his body. Every 10 years on December 3 (anniversary of his death) his body is taken out and paraded across the street. Apparently, even with all these parades his body is not decomposing. What a miracle!

From Goa

Tomorrow we take a 12 hour train ride to Mumbai, our last stop in India before we fly to Cairo on Sunday. We sent out 13 couchsurfing requests before we finally got someone to host us (although we ended up with three positive replies so we picked the best sounding one). Given everything we've heard about Mumbai we wanted to couchsurf so as to get the "insider" (and safe) view of the city.

Take a look at all our pictures of Goa. We also mapped out most of the pictures, which you can view on the map if you want to see where in Goa we went.

The Ruins of Hampi

2010-04-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

This is post #100 of our blog, and as we said in our previous announcement of our return to the US on June 10th, we're having fun in Hampi. Hampi has been a nice surprise. It's touristy, yes, but given that it's somewhat of the off-season it's not overrun with tourists. I think the temperatures in the low 100s are part of the reason for it being the off-season, but despite the heat it's been a fun couple of days here.

Hampi is a World Heritage Site encompassing ruins from the 14th to the 16th centuries when one of the largest Hindu empires in Indian history lived here. Together with piles of huge boulders it has a very "other worldly" vibe to it. In fact, the landscape reminded us a lot of Joshua Tree National Park in California (minus the 500 year old temples). There are also rice paddies and banana plantations along the river around the small village of a few thousand people.

From Hampi

We payed a rickshaw driver to take us on a three hour tour which was a pretty good deal as it allowed us to see a lot of the ruins that are outside the main town. Renting bicycles is popular here, but in the 100 degree heat we decided to pass. Also, even though there isn't a ton of traffic we were still nervous to rent a motorcycle or scooter as the roads aren't in very good shape and there are a lot of hills and curves.

A cool part of the tour was at one temple where we got to feed the numerous monkeys that were climbing all over the relics:

From Hampi

We also climbed a hill on the outskirts of Hampi to catch a beautiful sunset from the hilltop temple. It felt nice to go for a little hike, the views from the top were outstanding:

From Hampi

In other news, we used an Internet Cafe to file an extension of our taxes which gives us until October 15th to file our returns. And we did a lot of research and planning for the last two months of our trip. We also booked our next two train journeys within India. Tonight we leave for Goa on an overnight train (we'll see how that works out for us) and then next Thursday we take a 12 hour train ride from Goa to Mumbai. Then we fly out to Cairo on the following Sunday. It will be nice to hit the beaches of Goa for a few days. Hopefully we can find some relief from this heat. We encourage you to look at all our photos from Hampi.

The End is Now in Sight

2010-04-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

We're having fun in Hampi, which we'll post about soon, but we have big news that deserves its own blog post: we booked our tickets to return to the United States!

We will fly into Boston's Logan International Airport on June 10th at 6:25 PM. You can now mark your calendars and stop asking us when we'll be back.

After much searching of plane tickets and inquires into the use of frequent flyer miles we ended up booking tickets on Iceland Air. In searches they came up the cheapest and we were able to include a four-day layover in Iceland which will be a nice finish to our trip (outdoor saunas anyone?). Plus, it will be close to the summer solstice so it will be fun to have super-long days.

Additionally, we booked our tickets out of India. We leave Mumbai April 25th for Cairo, Egypt, where we have a six day layover before heading to Istanbul, Turkey on May 1st. Since our Boston tickets leave from Frankfurt, Germany on June 6th, that means we'll have a little over one month for Turkey and Europe. This is shorter than we'd hoped, but we'll make it work.

Some might be thinking we're coming back sooner than expected, which is sort of true. We decided to come back to the US in June for several reasons:

My sister is expecting my first nephew (her first child) in early June and I wanted to be back to welcome him into the world
Jaimee's brother is graduating from High School and we wanted to be back to celebrate
Jaimee's cousin is getting married the same weekend as the High School graduation
My Aunt & Uncle are vacationing in Martha's Vineyard the first weekend we get back so we thought a vacation from our vacation would be a great way to re-acclimate to the USA.
Our trip isn't really over until we start working again, which if we have anything to say about it won't be for a few more months!

We've updated the finances page and calendar page with this new information. Check those out if you're curious as to what our flights cost.

This is all very exciting, but a little sad too in that we now have an end date for our trip. It's been amazing so far, and we do have close to two months left which I'm sure will have many more adventures!

Indian Family Homestay

2010-04-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks to couchsurfing, we stayed for three days and nights with a wonderful family in the outskirts of Bangalore. Vijay and Niya are a couple expecting their first child at the end of June, and staying with them for the summer is Vijay's 15 year old nephew Gollu. They are a super nice couple who own and run a furniture design and manufacturing business, and Vijay designs bicycles in his spare time. He even created a custom bamboo bicycle and was profiled in an Indian environmental sustainability magazine. (The bicycle was on loan to a friend so we couldn't get any pictures but you can read the profile (sadly, no pictures though) of Vijay here.)

We were treated just like family and had a lazy, laid back weekend with them. They live in a four story apartment building and are very friendly with all their neighbors. All the kids called me and Jaimee "Uncle" and "Auntie" which was pretty cute and they enjoyed playing Scrabble and UNO with us. One afternoon I borrowed a bike and went riding around the neighborhood with Gollu and the other kids from the building (think the movie The Sandlot but with the kids' uncle along for the ride :-). And another afternoon we all went to Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, a huge 100 acre park in the center of Bangalore. Here we all are in front of a big tree in the park:

From Bangalore

India continues to amaze us. The divide between the rich and the poor is mind boggling. The neighborhood we stayed in is a fairly new development and in between the new apartment buildings live hundreds of people in make-shift tents. While Vijay and Niya have a housekeeper who visits daily to clean (and even does the previous night's dinner dishes!) and they drive a small Fiat sedan, the people in the "slums" outside cook on open-air fires and live under plastic tarps. While looking off their rooftop balcony you can see naked kids running around amidst garbage below.

Bangalore is an odd mix of old and new India. Walking around the city has a very cosmopolitan feel; there are lots of well-dressed young people, lots of malls, but also cows roam the streets and the ubiquitous Indian garbage is everywhere. It also felt strange when Sunday afternoon, driving home from the park we stopped on the side of the road for fresh sugar cane juice. A man took a whole sugar cane stalk and pressed it through a machine, selling us yummy glasses of juice for 7 rupees (15 cents) each! What can you get for 15 cents in the US? Yet just down the street is a mall with all the luxury brands like Tiffany, Rolex, etc., selling for standard US prices.

From Bangalore

The city also has frequent power outages, often lasting only a few minutes, but sometimes hours at a time. This added to the contrast as one day we were cruising through one of the downtown malls when the power cut out - the mall was an eerie quiet without the sound of the background music or hum of the air conditioning and all the escalators were still.

We ate wonderful food with Vijay and Niya, both of whom are great cooks. They tried teaching us a few different recipes, but as even the "simple" recipes require a cupboard of spices we probably won't be doing too much traditional Indian cooking back home. In addition to home cooking they also took us out to a night market where we had delicious street food, including masala soda (tastes kind of like Moxie).

It's been fun seeing how middle-class (upper class?) Indians live and seeing a non-touristy side to India. Tonight we take an overnight bus to the town of Hampi, a site of old temples and ruins from when it was a major city in the 1300s. We're not sure how much longer we have in India. Niya invited us to her family home in Gujarat, a little north of Mumbai; she's going back there in two weeks to stay with her family until she gives birth. Although it would be awesome to stay with her and her family, we don't know if we'll still be here two weeks from now. After Hampi we plan to visit Goa and then Mumbai, but for how long in each we don't know.

We didn't take a ton of pictures in Bangalore, but the ones we did take are here.

Temples, Palaces and more

2010-04-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

There's a temple around every corner in India. But similar to how we felt in Thailand after seeing our first few dozen temples, after a while they all tend to blend together. It's not to say they lose their luster or beauty, it's just that after 237 days on the road, we're starting to get a little burned out of all the sights.

We also miss our routine of Valkara. Other than possibly Pondicherry, we haven't found a place in India yet where we feel comfortable and relaxed. We went from Valkara to the town of Alleppey, the center of the famed backwaters of Kerala. The town is built around the houseboat cruise industry, we couldn't go five feet without someone offering us a "houseboat" tour. Partly because everyone was doing such a hard sell, and partly because the canal system looked like it was full of sewage, we decided against a cruise. (To see what everyone told us we were missing, see these pictures from a google search.)

From Not Backwaters

We continued up the coast to Fort Cochin, a city described by our guide book as "an unlikely blend of medieval Portugal, Holland and an English country village grafted onto the tropical Malabar Coast." They forgot to mention the myriad tourist restaurants and trinket shops, but otherwise it was a pretty cute town, but we happened to hit it during a couple of days of intense rain storms which somewhat limited what we could do and see. We did have our best meal in India to date though, and one of the simplest: called Kati rolls, they're essentially fried filo dough wrapped around roasted vegetables and spices. That and some fresh lime sodas (lime juice squeezed into a glass and topped with cold sparkling water) made for a scrumptious dinner.

From Fort Cochin we braved an overnight bus to Mysore, up in the mountains of South India. It was a Super Deluxe bus, but we were aware that they slap the word Delux on all sorts of things that are no such thing. This bus wasn't too bad, except that when we got to the state boundary between Kerala and Karnataka (at 3AM) we had to wait until light to keep going. Karnataka has a law against driving at night because of accident danger. Which begs the question, why didn't the bus just leave Fort Cochin three hours later to avoid having to wait? Not sure, except it did allow us to catch a few hours of sleep while not going up and down and around on the windy, rough roads.

Mysore has been somewhat of a disappointment. It contains Maharaja's Palace, supposedly one of the grandest palaces in India. The orginal palace was damaged by fire in 1897 so they rebuilt/renovated in 1912. It is beautiful from the outside, but we didn't pay the 200 rupees (nearly $5) each to go in. Why? We didn't feel like it (plus 200 rupees is more than two meals for both of us). Plus Jaimee has spent the past couple of days suffering from a head cold/sore throat and hasn't really felt like doing too many touristy things.

From Not Backwaters

We did take a ride up to Chamundi Hill, where there is a beautiful Hindu Temple. The day we went was some sort of holy day and the temple was swarming with people; the line to get in snaked all the way around the temple. So again, we contented ourselves with pictures from the outside. Then on the way down, our rickshaw driver wanted to take us to all sorts of silk and natural oil shops. The rickshaw drivers are all in cahoots with the stores around here. Same with the hotels. When we got off the bus in Mysore, we were accosted by rickshaw drivers all wanting to show us business cards of local hotels. It's a bit much, especiallay after being on a bus for 12 hours (almost four of which it was stopped, because in addition to the mentioned "wait for daylight" break we also stopped at a restaurant around 11PM).

We topped off our stay in Mysore by visiting the quirky Rail Musuem, which our guide book called "A must see." Not sure about that, but we did snap some pictures of random ancient machinery to keep my Uncle Neil happy. Take a look at all our pictures from Varkala through Mysore.

Tomorrow we head to Bangalore, the "Silicon Valley" of India, where most of the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) takes place. We've arranged through couchsurfing to stay with a 30-something Indian couple. We're looking forward to getting off the tourist trail for a bit and meeting some locals.

A Day in the Life

2010-04-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Well, we've been in Varkala for four full days now, each day essentially taking the same shape. We usually lounge around in the mornings, heading to breakfast around 9 or 10AM. There are plenty of places for breakfast along the cliff, and we've sampled the various places. You can get an Indian breakfast of dosas (savory crepes filled with potatoes and spices) or more American/Australian breakfasts of eggs (or baked beans) and toast. Many of the breakfast places also bake good German bread. We linger over breakfast with lots of coffee, often playing Scrabble or writing in our journals.

Then, after changing into our beach attire, we walk down the stairs to the beach, rent an umbrella and hang out for a few hours, taking dips in the water in between games of Scrabble or reading. In lieu of eating a full lunch we usually buy a whole pineapple or some mangos (or both) from one of the numerous ladies plying the beach selling fruit. They slice the pineapple right in front of you, and the pineapple is so ripe you can eat the whole thing, core and all.

From Into Kerala

Then, around 5PM we pack it up and head back to our "resort" for showers and dinner. We choose from among the many restaurants along the cliff for dinner. Or, we'll walk to the Temple Junction, where there are a few local restaurants, one in particular that we've gone to twice. They serve really good thali, a staple meal of South India, which is rice served with several types of sauces including daal (lentils) and curried potatos. Traditionally you mix the rices and sauces together and eat it with your right hand, but this restaurant is nice enough to include a spoon.

After dinner we might sit in the air conditioning of the Internet cafe for a half hour or so, or hit up one of the bakeries for lassis and chocolate cake. Then we head back to our room, arrange the mosquito net and go to bed.

One of the best parts about this whole routine has been how little it's costing us. Anyone who's interested in a cheap beach vacation would do well to consider India. Yes, getting here is a hassle (and expensive), and there are Visa concerns (like applying and paying ahead of time) but it has been one of the cheapest places we've stayed so far. Here are the typical costs for the day I described above:

Room: Basic room with a mosquito net and fan costs 400 rupees per night, a little over $9 US.

Food: Breakfast at one of the tourist restaurants for the two of us is 180 rupees, about $4. A pineapple on the beach is between 60 and 80 rupees ($1.30 to $1.80), depending on size, mangos 20 or 30 rupees each (50 or 60 cents). Dinner at the local restaurant is, no kidding, 120 rupees ($2.75), including (non-alcoholic) drinks. At the tourist restaurants it's about twice that, but for variety we've had sunset views and excellent North Indian food (naan, various types of masala or korma dishes) for about 300 rupees ($6.80). If we want dessert, it will cost about 100 rupees ($2.25) for shakes and chocolate cake.

Other: Umrella rental is 150 rupees ($3.40), bottled water is about 50 rupees ($1.25) a day for the two of us. Internet is 40 rupees (about 90 cents) per hour. That's about it, as there are no transport costs since we walk everywhere.

If you add it all up, it's about $25 to $30 per day for the two of us. This is about 1/4 of our allocated budget of $100 a day for our trip. Of course, the $100 a day includes airfare and transport costs, but still, it's very cheap (and fun) here. You can see why we've stayed four days.

But, there is still a lot of ground to cover in India, so tomorrow we're heading to Alleppey, about 100 miles north of here to see the famed "backwaters" of Kerala.

Because it's there

2010-04-02T23:18:00.000-07:00

As we've mentioned before, a lot of our trip has been about visiting places merely for the sake of visiting them. We had very few pre-conceived ideas of where this trip would take us, other than a rough outline of regions we wanted to visit (i.e., Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, etc.). We'd work out the specific places within those regions later.

And so it is with India. Chennai was one specific place we wanted to visit in order to see the development team I worked with in Seattle. But otherwise, we had no real game plan of what to see in India. We're winging it as they say.

India is both a good place and a daunting place to be winging it. Good in the sense that public transportation is incredibly extensive and amazingly cheap. No matter where you want to go, there is a bus or train that goes there. (And if the bus isn't leaving soon enough a rickshaw will take you there.) Essentially our planning goes something along the lines of looking at a map, seeing what towns/cities are nearby and reading about those cities in our guidebook (we're using Lonely Plant's South India guidebook) to see if they sound interesting.

So it went with deciding to go to Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India. Just like when we headed to the northernmost point in New Zealand, we looked at the map and thought it would be neat to see what the meeting of multiple seas looks like. In this case, the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea.

We started off on the train from Madurai, where as we mentioned previously we bought second class open seat tickets. The train was a half hour late and when it arrived, people rushed to get aboard, and being that we were wearing our backpacks, we were last to board. This was unfortunate because it meant that all the seats were taken. There were people everywhere, crammed on the benches or sharing two to a seat, even squatting in the luggage racks. Sitting on the floor was not a good option as there were swarms of cockroaches roaming the floor; we didn't even want to set our bags down. For a few minutes at the station we contemplated just bailing and getting off the train, but then a nice older man came to our rescue. He offered Jaimee his seat, and then the man opposite him offered me his seat (he said he was only riding the train for a few more stops).

Our fellow passengers on the train were very friendly. Many wanted pictures with us (almost everyone has a cell phone camera), and we took a few with them too, Jaimee with the female passengers and me with the male passengers. (Indians don't really mingle in groups of both sexes unless it's a family.)

From Into Kerala

We got into Kanyakumari late at night and wandered around until we found a hotel. It wasn't the nicest place but the price was right (250 rupees, or a little over $5). We explored Kanyakumari the next day, which basically took about five minutes. For an Indian town, it was very small, a few streets and a market with stores selling trinkets, saris and electronics. The real reason to come here is to see the meeting of the seas and visit a couple of neat memorials on two islands a short ferry ride from the jetty. There's a huge memorial to Swami Vivekananda, known at the "Wandering Monk" because of his prabrajya (period of wandering). He seemed like an interesting guy and you can read about him in the given link. The other memorial is a huge 133 foot tall statue dedicated to the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar. They call it India's Statue of Liberty and was erected in the year 2000 after requiring the work of over 5,000 sculptors.

The ferry rides were quite an event. Kanyakumari is very popular with Indian tourists and the ferry was packed. They hand out life jackets to each person for the ride, and many passengers acted like they'd never seen a life jacket before. Given the general disregard to passenger safety seen elsewhere on public transport, these life jackets must have represented the epitome of luxury. It was an amazing sight, seeing Indian women with colorful saris and men in proper clothes (Indian men dress very sharply), some with turbans, all strapped up in life vests. This for a five minute ride (literally).

While wandering around the memorials many people wanted to take our picture. It was really weird, but usually we'd oblige. Which led to one funny incident where an Indian woman approached us with her camera. We assumed she wanted a picture with Jaimee, but when Jaimee went to pose with her, she politely said she was from Canada and wanted a picture of herself, and herself alone with the statue in the background. Here are a few pictures while hanging out on Thiruvalluvar's toes:

From Into Kerala

After seeing the two memorials and a small Gandhi memorial (some of his ashes are entombed here) there wasn't much else to do so we decided to head into the Indian state of Kerala. Kerala is one of the wealthier states of India and gets a lot of tourism to their beaches and water canals. It took three buses (and seven hours) to get to Varkala, about a third of the way up the coast of Kerala. This is a totally different side of India than we'd seen so far. Verkala is a tiny village built along a cliff, with a beautiful beach below. Although technically it's shoulder season (the monsoon is coming soon) there are still quite a few foreign tourists, definitely the most we've seen since arriving in India.

We've been here three nights, probably staying at least one or two more. It's relaxing, as the beach is a short walk from our little bungalow, and there are lots of little restaurants and cafes along the cliff. You can rent umbrellas and lounge chairs on the beach, and so far we've been lounging around relaxing and reading (we both found the book Shutter Island to be a great beach read). The cliff top is technically a road but it is nothing like the normal honking and loud traffic that has been so common elsewhere in India. We're enjoying it here immensely.

From Into Kerala

See the full set of pictures of Kunymari and our stay in Varkala.

As a side note, some of you might have noticed that our Spot check-ins have been less frequent. Well, apparently, Spot coverage in India is not very good. Not sure why this is, since Spot works off GPS, where the G stands for Global, but you can see on this map from the Spot website (reproduced below as well) that India is an area with only 20% reliability. In other words, many of the Spot check-ins may not come through. We'll still try, but they won't always work. Compounding this is the general lack of free Internet here. Very few hotels have wifi (certainly none of the budget places we've stayed in have had wireless) so we've been using Internet Cafes, which there are plenty of but we don't like to spend our time sitting in Internet cafes when we could be on the beach.

Insane India

2010-03-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

The Indian tourism board uses Incredible India, including a website Incredibleindia.org, as a catch phrase to promote tourism. After a week here we think that Insane India would be more appropriate. Whether insane or incredible (or both), India so far has been pretty amazing, on many different levels.

First there are the people. With a population of over one billion, India is teeming with people. There are people everywhere, driving cars, riding motorcycles, riding buses, pedaling richshaws, herding goats, leading cows, drinking chai at little street side chai shops, peddling trinkets, selling flowers, or just hanging out with friends. Go out at night and the number of people in the streets doubles or triples. Whereas we noticed that more people came out at night in Southeast Asia, it is even more pronounced here (it's also a lot hotter, so the nocturnal behavior makes sense).

But unlike Southeast Asia where people seemed to be content to sit still (unless on a motorcycle), here people are on the move. I have no idea where everyone is going all the time, but it seems everyone is going somewhere, no matter what time of day.

Second, there are the sights. Everywhere we go there is something incredible to see. Today, I walked into a temple and after putting my shoes into the "chappel" rack I turned around and was face to face with an elephant being fed a bottle of orange fanta soda. Then, since it's supposed to be good luck, I let the elephant touch my head (sorry about the lady blocking me in the picture, but it's kind of hard to get a stranger-free picture around here):

From Pondy and Trichy

After staying with the couchsurfer in Chennai we set out for Pondicherry (Puducherry). We stayed at a wonderful guest house that doubles as an ashram. We had a balcony room overlooking the ocean and it was far enough away from the street that we could even hear the waves crashing. The beach in Pondicherry wasn't really for swimming, it was all rocks, but there was a wonderful walking area where many locals strolled up and down enjoying the ocean breezes. The walkway is currently under construction, but I imagine when it's finished it will be even nicer:

From Pondy and Trichy

We enjoyed Pondicherry quite a bit; for an Indian town it's really laid back, the French-influenced section of town was somewhat free of traffic so it was nice for strolling and we found a few nice restaurants. We even managed to catch a free outdoor music concert one of the nights. From Pondicherry we headed southwest and inland to the town of Trichy. We missed the direct bus that went there so we took two local buses connecting through a nearby town. Local buses in India are quite an experience. They are packed to standing room only and since we have our backpacks on one bus they charged us a ticket for our bags. (I'm not going to complain about this because buses are ridiculously cheap; the two local buses for the four hour journey from Pondy to Trichy was less than $4 for both of us, including paying extra for our bags.)

Accommodations in Trichy were pretty dumpy but we did pay extra for air conditioning which was nice considering it's averaging about 95 degrees with high humidity every day. We went out to the Rock Fort Temple (where Jaimee and I got blessed by the elephant) and climbed the 437 steps (barefoot, in the sun) to the top. The views were outstanding and we also chatted with a group of teenagers who were hanging out. Like most young men in India, they are studying computer science at the local university. Although sometimes the crowds of people can be seen as a liability for India, seeing the huge number of young people, many of them studying hard in schools, you can see the flip side of having a huge population. There is a very large (and growing) talent pool for new workers.

From Pondy and Trichy

Now we are in Madurai (see previous post for a map), again staying at a not so nice place, this time without air conditioning, and no screens on the windows. We lathered up with bug spray before bed but considering how much I was sweating I had to reapply once in the middle of the night. The consolation is that it was very cheap (300 rupees, or about $6.50) and they have free filtered water. That's one thing that India does well - clean drinking water. All the restaurants, bus stations, many of the hotels, even the temples provide clean, filtered water free of charge. It's obvious that a lot of effort has gone into providing this on such a large scale. It's nice to fill up our water bottles; Jaimee and I both hated buying so much bottled water in SE Asia. Now if only India could do something about the mounds of garbage everywhere. Garbage really is a problem, and I've seen many people just toss things right in the street. On one bus, while sitting in a traffic jam caused by a ox-drawn cart with a broken wheel that was blocking one lane, a passenger got off the bus (easy since there are no doors), walked over to a street stall selling some sort of milky liquid, came back on the bus, drank his drink and then tossed the plastic cup into the street.

Anyway, take a look at our full set of pictures from our last few days on the road. Later today we're heading to the very southern tip of India at Kanyakumari. We're taking the train. I have no idea what it will be like as we booked an "open seat" which costs 32 rupees (about 75 cents) each for the five hour train ride. We stopped at a travel agency in town where they wanted to charge us 650 rupees (about $14.50) each for the same journey! We didn't know what it should cost, but that seemed high so we literally walked across the street to the train station and bought our 32 rupee tickets. We'll see how it goes.

Jaimee has already said that we need to treat ourselves to a nice place to stay pretty soon; we're not sure if that will be in Kanyakumari or later in Kerala or Goa. But no question, between the heat and crowds, we're already in need of a vacation from our vacation.

Welcome to India

2010-03-25T09:47:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, Vietnam was perfect preparation for our visit to India. As readers of our blog know, we didn't find things to be very easy in Vietnam. Buying bus or train tickets was difficult, it was impossible to not get ripped off by taxi drivers, even finding decent, non-touristy food, and getting what we ordered (or wanted) was not always possible. So, the bar of expectations was pretty low when we boarded our flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Chennai, India.

Our flight went through Singapore and we had a wonderful seven hour layover at the Singapore Airport. Wonderful because the airport was clean, we could drink the water from the water fountains, there was cheap food and free wifi. We also visited the post office in the terminal and mailed back 13 pounds of stuff we didn't need to carry around anymore.

We landed in Chennai and passed through customs without a problem (we lucked out being non-Indian as our flight was 90% Indian and "foreigners" had their own customs line at the airport). We had arranged to couchsurf in the southern part of Chennai and after a harrowing ride in an unregistered taxi (at one point I tried rolling the window down and found the door handle instead, but was able to hold on and not fall out) we arrived after midnight.

As usual with couchsurfing, our host is wonderful. She's an American from Connecticut, recently living in Vermont and Colorado before moving to Chennai with her three year old son last year to teach middle school at the American International School. We had fun playing with her son Elijah. Well, at least he had fun. I was mostly a prop (okay, I had fun too):

From Chennai

The reason we started our India tour in Chennai is because when I was working at Keynote Systems in Seattle, I worked closely with a development and support team in Chennai. I'd met two of the people from the Chennai team when they came to Seattle for a visit, but unfortunately one of them was in California for training and the other works in the Bangalore office now. However, I did meet the rest of the team, all of whom I had never met in person.

From Chennai

The office is located in an office park in southern Chennai and illustrates the incredible contrasts that have come to represent modern India. Inside the office park you'd think you were in any other corporate office park in America (complete with security that seems to exist more for show than for real security). Outside, however, is another story. The streets are lined with small shops and run-down buildings and are clogged with rickshaws, motorcycles, cars and buses. Even the train station right next to the office looked abandoned and as if it had been bombed.

About 40% of the people in India live on $1 a day, and wandering around Chennai there is evidence of poverty everywhere. Yesterday we took a walk down to the beach (supposedly the second longest beach in the world) and were amazed at the living conditions of people along the water:

From Chennai

During our three days here (be sure and look at all our pictures to see what we did while here), there have been moments when Chennai seems like a modern, cosmopolitan city, but then we'll pass piles of garbage in the streets or catch the strong whiff of urine to remind us that India is still quite a poor country. It will be interesting to see more of the country and visit some less urbanized areas (although even "small" towns here can have close to one million people). Our planned itinerary is to basically head south along the east coast until we get to the bottom of India, then head north along the west coast through Kerala and Goa until we reach Mumbai. We might also take a detour to Bangalore depending on our time and interest. From Mumbai we'll determine how much further north in India we want to go. Here is a map of southern India which we'll update with the places we stay as we go along:

View World Trip in a larger map

Tomorrow, we're catching a bus to the town of Pondicherry (Puducherry), a seaside town with a strong French influence. The bus station we leave from has its own wikipedia page (found while trying to figure out how to take the bus) which says that at 37 acres it's the largest bus terminal in Asia. In many areas it seems, India is all about extremes.

The Things We Carry

2010-03-22T06:56:00.000-07:00

Now that we've been on this trip for 220 days, we are doing a backpack cleanse. I wish this meant that we were actually washing the packs, because that is one thing I have dreams about! Every time we put them into the cargo hold of some South East Asian local bus, I cringe! I remember the time we weren't allowed to put them in one, not knowing why, only to stop at a cattle/goat farm next and put twenty or so goats down there instead! I also think about the overnight bus that left Asa eaten alive by bed bugs the next morning and cringe to think we might have stow away critters in our packs. But, I'm not talking about that kind of cleanse...I'm talking about the kind of cleanse where we take everything out of our packs and decide once again if we really need to carry it from place to place.

We have a few categories of things that we've been carrying. There are the things we use often. This includes our summer weather clothing. Or at least much of it, since there are a couple of shirts that I don't really like to wear now that they fit pretty strangely in the arms/shoulders. We wear our sandals almost every day and Asa is better about wearing his trail runners than I am (I like to just hang mine from a loop on the back of my pack). We've used our sleeping bag liners quite a lot too. They are perfect for overnight buses, guest houses without blankets, and places with suspect levels of "clean." Also included in this list is the current guide book for the country or region we are in, the camera, the netbook, the iPod, the Kindle, and the chargers and cords for most of these things.

There are the things we know we will need again, but wish we could magically store them somewhere else for now. This is where all of my socks would go. I don't wear them and can't remember the last time I wore the right shoes for them. Our sleeping bags have gone unused since New Zealand but we know we'll need them again in Europe, so they take up lots of space in our backpacks. Our colder weather clothes are sitting right next to our sleeping bags too; except for the few days we wore them in North Vietnam, we hadn't worn them since Christchurch, NZ. Our gloves and hats also have been taking up space for that day when we might wear them in Europe. We are also carrying around a woven beach mat that came in handy in Malaysia but we haven't used since. I'm hoping for some beach time soon!

There are the things that we haven't used much, but I'm glad we have them, just in case. There's the water purifier, which we used in Malaysia until Asa got sick (we don't know why he got sick, but aren't taking chances any more). Along with the water purifier and our SPOT goes 12 AA batteries, because the battery life is pretty low for the purifier and we still hadn't changed the original set in the SPOT. But, we never used the purifier enough to run out of even one set. And the SPOT is still kicking it with the set it came with. We have 13 AAA batteries, for our headlamps and after complaining about the low light in my headlamp since we went caving in NZ, Asa just changed them for me. I also carry a sewing kit, which I've used a few times (and should use it on those shirts that are fitting weirdly). I carry my crochet stuff, but finding wool/yarn and space for my projects isn't a priority with my super full pack. I also carry a special card/poster that our friends Greg, Laura, Sara Anne, and Brendan made us as our going away card. Its a print out of a globe adorned with photos of our summer trip and how to ask for the bathroom in many languages. I love it! Its getting flimsy now from being in my purse, and I don't look at it every day, but I'm glad that I do have it!

Then there are the things that we packed determined to use them, but haven't. Our rain pants are the biggest example of this. We knew, knew without a doubt, that after hiking so much all summer we would hike in whatever weather presented itself in New Zealand. But, when it came time to tramp in the "weather" we just didn't want it to be wet weather. Also in this category are the vitamins we drove all the way across the country, poured into a ziplock, and carried every day in a backpack since. Asa took about two of them. They are now discolored and smell worse than any vitamin I've ever smelled (Asa just threw them away). There's the nasal spray that the pharmacist in New Zealand recommended. It made Asa sneeze worse than the allergy it was supposed to treat. But we've still got it, because it was expensive (also just tossed)! There is my knee brace. My knee was killing me whenever I hiked down hill, even slightly back in the summer and fall. But after a month of resting it in October and the beginning of November, I haven't even thought of it (not even when we climbed up and down Mt. Kozi in Australia). Our travel coffee mugs have fallen from daily use since we got to South East Asia and they are big and bulky and clang around. I worry that they will fall from the pack, yet we still carry them. We also carry around a few tea bags. They are very old now, but we didn't want to waste them and we might like some hot tea someday, won't we? I've also carried those two picture communication books that I made thinking they would help with any language barriers. They haven't proved too useful, as they food pictures don't really match up to what is on offer here.

We have used up or broken a few things in our 220 days. I've worn through my only pair of jeans and had to replace them. I've also had to replace two bras since the ones I brought totally ripped apart. Asa had to go out today to try and find a guy who could repair his sandal, though he came back without the repair done because the shoe shiner wanted to screw it back together and that would injure his foot badly. The worst loss of the trip was when I got out of the camper van in Australia and ripped the iPod radio transmitter from the dash because it got caught in my shoe. It was a weird freak accident, but it made our long Aussie road trip and the following three Kiwi road trips less musical! Asa's rain hat has seen better days. Our playing cards are sticky and difficult to use these days as well (we actually bought a replacement set tonight).

So, we've taken everything out of the packs. Its a wonder that everything fit in them in the first place! Here's a photo of the contents of Asa's pack:

We hope to be able to send this stuff home (sorry Dad!) tomorrow from Singapore. Sending packages from Vietnam isn't advised and we have a pretty long lay over in Singapore anyway. We are sending home the two smallest pack towels since we usually just share the biggest one, as well as the water purifier with its filter topper and a few of the batteries for it. We will no longer need the South East Asia Rough Guide or the Vietnam Lonely Planet. We'll send back the Cu Chi Tunnel book, since it's out of print now in the States. The rain pants are going home; who are we trying to kid? An extra hat that I made for Asa at Christmas time is shipping out. We're sending back a few of cords and adapters that we don't use anymore (like the camera cord that we never use since the netbook has a card reader and my iPod headphones since we only have one jack in the iPod and Asa's are better). My knee brace is going back. We are also shipping one of the picture communication books. Asa's rain hat isn't coming with us; the brim is broken and a wire sticks out of it. My old sunglasses are scratched up, and I scored those new ones the other day during our adventures in Saigon.

We'll see how the packing and moving around goes now!

Update: We shipped a box of stuff from Singapore Airport today, weighing a little over 6 kg (13.25 lbs) and costing $88 SD ($63 USD) to send, which although a lot of money is totally worth it. Our bags feel so light now. Here's the box of stuff at the Post Office in the airport (which is really nice, by the way):

Cu Chi and Lai Khe

2010-03-22T02:50:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I wanted to come to Vietnam was to see some of the areas where my dad served during the Vietnam War. Although 70% of the Vietnamese population alive today was born after the end of the war in 1975, the landscape still bears the evidence of the war. One area where this is most apparent is the Cu Chi tunnel system about 30 miles outside of Ho Chi Minh City.

This elaborate underground system (at the peak of activity there were over 250 km (150 miles) of tunnels) enabled the Viet Cong to fight (and win) the war despite having fewer resources and firepower. In the beginning when the US came to Vietnam they didn't know about the tunnels and actually built a few bases right on top of the largest sections. Eventually they discovered the tunnels and developed methods of fighting and destroying them. However, because of how well they were built and the nature of the clay that they were burrowed in, many of the tunnels still survive.

The tour is somewhat surreal at times. For example there's a large section of primitive traps that the Viet Cong developed which our tour guide was a bit too enthusiastic about: "Look, here is a bamboo booby trap that plunges sharp bamboo right into the American's knee!" The "video" they show you is pure North Vietnamese propaganda from 1967 (literally, it was produced in 1967). And, there's a shooting range as part of the tour where you can shoot M-16s, AK-47s or one of at least 10 other types of guns (bullets were between 15,000 and 30,000 dong (75 cents to $1.50) each depending on the gun, with a 10 bullet minimum). In case you're wondering, we didn't try the guns out. Those who didn't want to shoot could buy ice-cream instead (and listen to the loud bang as others shot guns about 30 feet away).

We got to climb into and through the tunnels. Here's Jaimee poking her head out of a very small tunnel entrance:

From Saigon and Army Bases

And, here I am climbing around on a tank that acted like an adult jungle gym:

From Saigon and Army Bases

Today, we hired a private guide and car (which came with a driver in addition to the guide) to take us out to Lai Khe, the area where my dad was stationed from 1967 to 1968. When we booked the tour we were warned that there isn't much left of the American base, but to our surprise our guide Hung showed us several bunkers, and an old airstrip. Hung was also a veteran of the war, working for the North Vietnamese Army from age nine (!) to 19. He retired in 1975 as a 19-year old officer and was sent to Czechoslovakia to study for six years. He was really cool, and he even bought us our coffee when we stopped at a little road-side shack near the old base (the picture of him in the hammock was taken while getting coffee). Here Hung and I are on the old airstrip:

From Saigon and Army Bases

It was hard to imagine what the area was like during the war. Hung emphasized how much it's changed because of the war. He said that prior to building the base the Americans razed the area, both with bulldozers and with chemicals such as napalm and Agent Orange. And since the end of the war, farmers planted rubber trees, the Chinese built a couple steel factories and there are lots of industrial brick and ceramic kilns in the area. All that's left of the American base are a few bunkers and the crumbling asphalt from the airstrip (Hung pointed out that it was actually good quality asphalt). Be sure to check out all the photos from both Cu Chi and Lai Khe.

I won't say that it was completely anti-climactic to visit Lai Khe, but it is something that I've wanted to do for many years and it's kind of strange for it to now be over. I am sad that my dad is no longer living as seeing the area brings to mind many questions of what it was like when he was here. He didn't talk about the Vietnam war very much and, as he passed away when I was 16, I never really asked him too many questions about it. Now that I've visited his old base, I think the only quest left with regard to his Army stint would be to look up and find some of his fellow soldiers. But, as he never talked about any of them, I don't know how feasible this would be. In any event, this is a digression for another day...

Tomorrow we head to India! After two months in Southeast Asia, although we've loved it here, I think we are ready to move on. Plus, there will be Indian food!

An adventure and what we've been reading

2010-03-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 but most people still seem to call it Saigon) yesterday night after an 11 hour train ride from Quy Nhon. We immediately noticed that Saigon is very different from anywhere else in Vietnam we've been so far. It's much more modern and fast paced with taller buildings and a lot more neon signs. And, although there are still hundreds of motorcycles, the city the streets (and sidewalks) are wider so it doesn't seem as crowded as Hanoi.

However, there are still loads of people trying to sell stuff on the street which leads to our latest adventure. As many of our readers know, we use a Spot Satellite GPS to update our position to a Google map in real-time (an embedded map used be on the side of the blog, but is now permanently located on this page instead). We attempt to "check-in" with the Spot device every time we change locations, but since it requires Satellite reception to work, it can sometimes be tricky to get a Satellite lock in the city because of tall buildings. Usually we scope out a flat area away from tall buildings to do a check-in.

So, this morning we found a park with a wide view of the sky, and set the Spot down while we rested in the shade a few feet away. Of course, as we already knew, once you stop moving you become a mark for people selling stuff. "Don't squint," I told Jaimee. "Why?" she said, but then looked up and saw not one, but two people approaching with sandwich boards made of sunglasses. The funny thing is, Jaimee actually wants new sunglasses so it wasn't completely annoying, although having two people at the same time was a bit much. Jaimee begins trying on sunglasses, and suddenly a shoe shine guy comes up and starts trying to shine my shoes. This is silly because they are trail running shoes, but he thinks they need cleaning so he takes a toothbrush to them. "No, no," I say getting up and trying to get him away. Meanwhile Jaimee is haggling over the price of a pair of sunglasses she likes. Eventually the shoe shine guy goes away but when he leaves we notice our Spot is gone!

Darnit! I think I'm more embarrassed by the irony of losing a device that displays its exact location to a map on the Internet, but Jaimee and I jump into action. The sunglass lady claims the shoe cleaner stole it and we can see him moving down the street and he seems to be moving a little fast to be an innocent shoe shiner. Jaimee is still haggling over the sunglasses so when she screams, "This is too much" referring to the entire situation and not the price, the lady immediately comes down in price to Jaimee's first counter-offer. Money is exchanged and we were off chasing the shoe shiner.

We bolt across two lanes of traffic and down several blocks never losing sight of the guy. We run past some tourist police and while I blow past them in pursuit, Jaimiee stops to talk to them. "I lost my GPS," she says, "and I think that guy up there stole it." The tourist policeman, clearly not understanding what a GPS is says, "Your my GPS is gone?" I reach the shoe shiner and inspect his box of shoe shine stuff. Nothing. Ditto for his pockets (although he did try and sell me some orthotics that were in there). We call off the police (who at this point were running down the street to meet me).

We run back to the park hoping that maybe we just mistook where the Spot was supposed to be, or that it was maybe thrown away as it was kind of close to a garbage can. As we're rifling through the garbage (not recommended in Vietnam, by the way) Jaimee notices some guy across the park pulling the Spot out of his pocket. Relieved, we approach him and tell him the Spot is ours. He hands it over and I immediately notice that he'd pressed the Help function which is supposed to put a Help icon on the Google map. Fortunately I could see that there was no satellite reception so I'm pretty sure the Help request didn't work. Luckily he didn't try the 911 function.

Anyway, he indicated he wanted some money for "returning" the device. We were happy to have the Spot back and even if he'd first stolen it, it seemed worth it to us to have it back so we decided giving him some money was okay. The only problem was that I only had 100,000 dong or 10,000 dong bills, worth $5 and 50 cents respectively (and there was no way we were giving him $5 for stealing our Spot). We saw that he was selling 5,000 dong lottery tickets so we thought as a compromise we'd buy two tickets for 10,000 dong. He thought this was a terrible idea and refused. He wanted more. Forget it, we thought and walked away. But he followed us, so we walked faster and he walked faster and began to pout. He was really upset. I offered to buy the two tickets again, but he said "no, more money" instead. No way, we thought and really began walking away fast from him. He followed us, screaming and yelling behind us for a good four or five blocks. Where are the tourist police when you really need them? Eventually, we lost him through some traffic. We went around a few corners, found a cafe and relaxed over some iced coffees. The only good to come of this is Jaimee's new sunglasses:

We spent the rest of the day going to two museums, The Museum of Ho Chi Minh City and The War Remnants Museum. Both were very interesting and contained your standard assortment of tanks, planes and exhibits. (See our photos for details.) The War Remnants museum is particularly good as it contains lots of great photographs from both American, Vietnamese and foreign photographers. It's highly recommended.

We also made our plans for the next two days. Tomorrow we're taking a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels (see book below), an area about 30 miles from Saigon that saw lots of fighting during the Vietnam War. And on Monday we hired a car with a guide for the day to take us out to the two different bases that my dad was stationed at during the war. Neither base sight is on a standard tour so we had to hire a private guide.

Lastly, I thought we'd mention three excellent books about Vietnam that we read recently:

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham. This is half-memoir, half-travelogue. It follows Andrews on a solo bicycle trip throughout Vietnam. He was born in Vietnam, moved to Louisiana (and later California) when he was nine years old and took this bike trip in Vietnam when he was in his 20s. Reading the book makes Vietnam sound a little intimidating as he encounters no end of problems and issues during his time here (and he even speaks fluent Vietnamese). But the book offers some good insight into the mindset of a Vietnamese-American family and the nature of home.

The Tunnels of Cu Chi, by Tom Mangold and John Penycate. While possibly not appealing to everyone (it doesn't shirk from graphic descriptions of war) this book provided a lot of background about the tunnels that we'll see tomorrow. Essentially, the tunnels were a huge underground labyrinth right underneath some of the largest US military bases. The book describes the fighting that took place in the tunnels from both the US (including a few Australian tunnel "rats" as the fighters were called) and the Vietnamese side. Like many war stories, the waste of human life is very tragic.

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram, translated by Andrew X. Pham (same author as above). Dang Thuy Tram was a North Vietnamese doctor from Hanoi, who traveled to the South of Vietnam to work in a medical clinic supporting the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. She was killed by Americans who found her trying to escape from her clinic that was being bombed. Her journal was discovered and saved from destruction and eventually even returned to her family in 1995 by the American soldier who saved the diary. It's a chilling view of how despised American were and how indoctrinated and idealistic many communists were at the time.

These are just three of the books we've read since we last talked about books on here. Here's a little Amazon.com widget that contains some of the other books we've read:

Amazon.com Widgets

Most of the above books we read on our Kindle, although since we only have one Kindle we still scrounge around for paperbacks so that one of us can read that while the other uses the Kindle. If you're really interested in how a Kindle works for travelers, take a look at this detailed post from some other world-travelers (notice that they have two Kindles for the two of them). Overall, like us, they think the Kindle is pretty great, although there is definitely room for improvement (i.e., the wireless isn't very good internationally, graphics are horrible, and the web browser is atrociously bad) but as an e-reader it performs great.