To those of you new to visiting my pages, the writing is to help me remember. Ignore it if you'd like! Pictures are at the bottom.
Yes, Dave pulled off a pretty good surprise holiday. While I was being thoroughly annoyed by my boss' frequent requests about my planned travel and planned time off which was pretty difficult to predict with ailing family, Dave and company (friends, family and my boss, it turns out) managed to be sure that my schedule was free for a surprise trip to Mexico with friends.
Pam and Kevin hosted us at their place in Loreto, Baja California Sur [Sea of Cortez] for a week. Loreto is a sleepy town on the gulf with easy access to the beach, a great Divemaster and Dive shop, and great food! It was a great week. I'll share just one story before the slideshow:
Things were a little crazy before the trip an because of family events, I ended up flying down to Loreto on my own, one day late. As I started to fill out the Immigracion form, I realized that I had no idea where I was staying! I also didn't really know how I was getting from the airport to the Dive shop where I was going to meet Dave, Pam and Kevin. Thankfully, my sister and I had texted the night before about a hotel in Loreto and I had taken a screenshot of the google search result. I had an address to write on the form! The proprietor's name was committed to memory and I figured I'd make it into the country.
Then, there was my ride from the airport to the dive shop...Walking out of the airport, I saw a sign reading: ELIZABETH LITTLE. Walked up to the guy, he spoke no English and didn't actually know what the sign meant. He clearly wasn't there to pick to me up. He started talking to a couple other guys who appeared to understand the sign even less. I said I'm looking for 'Raphael' and then a 3rd guy showed up, took my bag (after a little struggle as I don't normally give my bag to strangers) and motioned for me to follow him. He led me to a cab. Great. I'd messaged Dave the night before to say that I had USD, but no Pesos. He said, no worries, I'll leave some in your regulator bag. Good thing because now I needed to pay a cab fare! Off we went with me just hoping that I wouldn't be driven into the desert and left without water to apply the things I'd read about while on the plane (see photos and you'll understand). We meandered around town and showed up at the closed Dive shop. Someone saw us though and let me in. I started digging through my bag -- no Pesos...there wasn't enough money in the till at the driving shop to cover the fee either, so the kind guy who let me in used pesos from his own pocket to cover my ride!
That's all -- the rest of the stories are with the photos. Click on 'Visit Gallery' at the top of the slideshow below to view the comments for the photos.
Our Holiday of 2015 was mostly unplanned as fires demanded the destination to change one week before our departure. The original trip plan, with a hike chosen for each day, looked like this:
The Washington State fires closed down four of the planned hikes, so I spent a day and half researching Oregon and decided we should visit Bend based on this article: Epic Trail Getaway: Bend, OR.
Now that we're home, I've created a map of the actual vacation:
We came home via Amtrak, the Coast Starlight. Many of the photos will show a bit about this surprisingly entertaining portion of the holiday.
Thanks for patience in reading my banter. You have two viewing options for the photos: 1) Hit play on the slideshow below, or 2) Select the 'Visit gallery' option at the top of the slideshow where you can spend as much time as you like with each photo while reading my witty commentary on our adventure.
Sometimes, it's ok to be less original. In the end, it probably works better and looks better anyway. At least that's what I'm telling myself as I choose to use this as my blog platform rather than rebuild my website.
Sirocco became a part of our family in 2010. Photos here are not terribly exciting. I enjoy seeing how he looked when I first got him compared to now. I better add some 2014 and 2015 photos!
This year, we had post-high school graduation number six. Here are photos from the latest for each of us. Notice that I'm not writing about who finished first, who is the oldest, or any other potentially inflammatory conversation topics among us. I bet just looking at these photos you would never have guessed that any of those topics could result in conflict...
Here's the latest:
Maybe we look younger in these photos:
Potentially, we look even younger in these photos (see how I did that? You're now involved in the 'who graduated first' conversation!):
Ok, it's not fair, I threw a pic of grandma in here.
Ok, it's not fair, I threw a pic of grandma in here.