Christmas in California

I've finally worked at Myriad long enough to earn holiday pay between Christmas and New Years so for the first time in years I was able to spend a significant time at home for the holidays. Jailynn's family and Nate's family were both there and we had a lot of fun. Mostly playing at the beach, eating lots of really good food, geocaching, hiking, along with some other fun things thrown in... as well as Katrina's baptism which I managed to take no pictures of. I guess I was too busy writing my talk for it.

Christmas Eve

Clam chowder at the end of the pier

Geocaching in Santa Cruz till mom said no more!

Fresh Delicious Yummy Mouthwatering Crab for dinner. Katrina didn't agree...

but everyone else did and we ate it all up...

Dad pulled out the banjo and sang the grand kids some of the old songs he sang us when we were kids....

...including this one....wait what? That's a song you sing to kids?

Nate jumped in with some John Denver songs on his guitar and got us back on track.

Christmas

All the old stockings from when we were kids...plus a few

Jailynn's birthday in Carmel and Monterey.

The Tolls were late getting there due to this incident...

Carrie and Simon on Carmel Beach

Kris and Josh on Carmel Beach

Kjirsten and Katrina on Carmel Beach

Fish tacos at Phils in Moss Landing

...and calamari for Harrison

And of course a mint chip roll cake from Baskin Robbins! It wouldn't be a birthday without one of those!

I believe there was some geocaching thrown in there along with afternoon tea and scones at The Tuck Box in Carmel and a mad dash for Dippin Dots on Cannery Row.

Another Beach Trip with the Tolls in Santa Cruz

Kjirsten and Katrina not making faces. What's going on?

While geocaching at the beach we saw a million raccoon prints. It looked like a herd of monkeys.

Ice Cream at Mariannes after a tasty dinner across the street at the Santa Cruz Diner

Geocaching with Jailynn along Westcliff (this is Jailynn not me, I know it's hard to tell from behind)

look close for the beach chair on the rocks...how would it be to live there...

One of my favorite houses along Westcliff Hiking in the Redwoods

The old lyme kilns were cool. We climbed all over them and inside too.

There were roots growing through the rocks inside and it looked really neat

Can't go anywhere without a little geocaching too...dad signing the log

Other entertainment by Simon: He got in my room and stole my shoes... Maybe it was Simon who stole my car too...

OLE

I'm being spontaneous again! On Wednesday I planned another adventurous trip...possibly the best one yet. I leave on Tuesday so stay tuned for tales of Tango, Gauchos, and lots of delicious meat! Temporary Update: I went to Argentina. It was awesome! Loved every minute of it. Got home to find my house had been robbed and my car stolen. Did not love any minute of that. Grrrr. Pictures and stories on both will be coming soon.

Geocaching All Over Idaho

Over Thanksgiving I went with bunkerdave on a 5 day geocaching trip across Idaho making some great progress on the Cache Across Idaho challenge cache (GC1HXKC). Basically trying to find at least one geocache in each of the 44 Idaho Counties. We didn't get them all of course but we got A LOT! Here's all the counties we hit in blue and next is the 1800 mile route we took.

It started with a drive to Meridian to his parents house. Usually this drive takes 5 hours...it took us ten and included a really funny story of me stepping in a giant pile of poo and getting it all over the car and then while attempting to clean it up having to explain to a cop what we were doing cleaning up poo in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Geocaching...duh!

We then cached around the Meridian/Boise area taking a break for a great Thanksgiving dinner with his family. We'd go out for caches and then keep going and going and end up getting back to the house sometimes as late as 4am. Then we'd have to sleep in so long the next day we'd barely have any daylight the next day and would end up night caching in the dark again. It was a vicious cycle. Some of these day trips took us as far as Ontario Oregon where we found a geocache on the grounds of the hospital where Dave was born...

(This is at the hospital cache in Oregon. I like the close up because it looks like he's signing some kind of magic glowing scroll or something....nope just Tupperware.)

...and all the way up to Riggins Idaho near the 45th parallel. As soon as we drove into Riggins I said, "This looks like the kind of town with good chicken friend steak, let's find somewhere to eat!" We picked the one diner out of 3 in the town with people in it(all with burly beards) and boy was my prediction correct...delicious...and covered in gravy. Best chicken fried steak ever. Dave kept ordering it other places thinking it'd be the same but he was always disappointed.

Most the trip we went on 2 lane highways which allowed us to stop at almost every Idaho history or geological sign we saw, even the ones without caches. We ended up reading a lot about volcanoes and Lewis and Clark. We passed through some cool little towns, saw some neat views, and became proficient in climbing barbed wire fences. (I however stumbled into a pile of barbed wire not being used for anything and ripped a number of holes in one pair of pants. These are now my designated geocaching pants) We even had a nice dinner in Sun Valley, and an excellent prebreakfast jeeping/hiking adventure over the hills above Salmon Idaho... where I forgot to bring my camera. But I took a couple pictures afterwards. I was so hungry after the hike but there was a cache by the river and Dave said no food till we found it. This is the river, and were I finally got my food. An open faced roast beef sandwich with more delicious gravy. I can't believe how much gravy I ate on that trip!

We ended the trip with a cache in an old V8 engine out in Teton County before driving strait home. Well, almost strait home, we stopped and took a picture by the Cache Bridge sign just for fun...and found one more really old cache by the Teton Dam...then we went home.

Here's a couple more memorable caches along the way- This was a weird cache we found called Jailhouse Blues. It's a urinal from a prison. If you look it's a toilet with a sink on top combo. It was out in the middle of a field and a funny surprise. Geocaches like this are always fun to find and unexpected.

This was my favorite cache of the trip. We parked at the top and went over the ridge to see this bridge. It's an old sheep bridge and so rickety and scary looking. I was very hesitant about crossing it. It looked like every crazy stereotype bridge from old western movies and cartoons. Dave however just walked down and went over it without thinking. I figured if it could hold him, it could hold anything. Really cool... but still scary.

Orderville with Andy

My adventurous summer continued into September with an invitation from Andy and Emily to hike Orderville Gulch/Orderville Canyon with them. I love slot canyons. LOVE THEM so I couldn't say no. It was kind of short notice and a little tricky to get work off but as I've been able to do with every other trip this year I managed it. They called me on Monday, I picked up some trekking poles on Thursday and Friday we were heading South. We camped that night in Zion and grabbed a few geocaches and ice cream cones in town. It and the first time I'd been down there in years and the first since they had the trams going. They worked out really well. Andy and Emily made some blue cheese mac'n'cheese for dinner, Emily's brother slept in the car, Em and her mom took the tent and Andy and I just rolled our bags out on a tarp. It was so warm in fact I think I was only half in my bag that night.

In the early early morning we caught a van up to the top of Orderville which is a tributary to the Narrows. It's shorter by a few miles but has a little more canyonerring involving some ropes and swimming along the way. We hiked for awhile and saw some great rocks, grottoes, slots, plants, tree jams...then we hit the water. We tried to high step it and stay dry at first but by the end we'd all gotten dunked more than once and had to swim with our packs over our head or throw them to each other and jump in a pool. We had to rappel down some really cool spots with boulders and waterfalls. I tend not to be in a lot of those shots as I kept going down first and taking everyone else's picture. A few times all you could think of was getting to the end and putting on those dry socks you knew you had in your pack. We got back as the skies turned gray and we heard thunder up above. The last couple miles through the Narrows were a lot different and I'm glad we did Orderville instead. We grabbed some Elk burgers in town before the long, tired, dangerously sleepy drive home.

Group picture at the beginning...all dryThese are a few of the first obstacles we came to. They got better and and better but unfortunately there was more water at each one and eventually we were over our heads and swimming and it's not too easy to swim and take pictures at the same time so some of the best stuff I can't show you.

The first jump. It was pretty cool at the time but eventually we all had to do some that were worse.

This the official Zion National Park sign in the canyon. The tax payers really paid a grundle for this one!

This is my favorite picture I took. It was at the very end of the day in the Narrows.

Group photo at the end about 10 hours later and all wet.

Another Amazing trip! Thanks Andy and Emily!