Vacation--blog one of god only knows.

This is a multi-part blog...best to stretch out the interesting stuff :)

It is winter and i hates-es the winter. 

So, we did what we always do--spend xmas eve with the family in Seattle and then flee somewhere that i can't complain about being cold.  This year, it was Ecuador, chosen in part because it had the cheapest tickets in south america, in part because of its diverse climates, and in part because i was desperately craving a spanish speaking environment.  let's face it. i belong in south america. seriously. can someone tell adam to work on that?!

after a grueling trip down (17hrs from anc) and an overnight in the most expensive hotel airport in south america (costa del sol in lima) we arrived in quito where we had this awesome looking bathroom at Cafe Cultura.  The hotel is a converted mansion in the Mariscal Sucre disctrict of Quito--known as a tourist haven and much safer feeling than the old city, where creeptastic men crept by us and an old woman in a car gestured at me to keep a close eye on a 20-something with a backpack who we had been watching after his third pass by us.

as you can tell from the story of the lady in the car, most of the people we met were invariably kind and helpful.

i didn't want to translate for days on end, so we had arranged for a tour through Ecuador Adventures (Detour in the US).  the tour was a 7 day multisport tour that would take us around the Andes and Amazon.  while things in Ecuador appear close, the roads make it so that even things a seemingly short distance take longer to get to than expected.

The first day we rode in the van out of Quito south towards the volcano called Cotopaxi.  The views were really stunning and we worked on settling in to our nearly 9,000 ft. elevation.  it was windier than we expected, but warm to us despite it being "freezing" by ecuadorian standards.  that evening we arrived at the Hacienda Porvenir to rest and go horseback riding. Click on photos to make them bigger.  yes, we dressed up in the outfits with ponchos. it was super dorky. and super warm. more importantly super warm because the wind was just ripping.  the horses only had one speed and so the ponchos spared us from freezing to death while avoiding "brave cattle" aka bulls with horns wandering through the hills you see in the background.

 The following day took us through the Cotopaxi national park...where we rode bicycles (me for about 2 mi and Adam for 5 or so) through the park.  The scenery was stunning with vast expanses of paramo (high altitude meadows like tundra) below.


Cotopaxi National Park

Once we were back in the car...we headed south towards Banos. enroute we got to see a delicacy of Ecuadorian cuisine....also called your local pet guinea pig. no. neither of us ate it.

How can you? it probably has a name, like, piggie, or squeek, or something. almost made me vegetarian again. almost.

However, then we got to Banos and i was safe from the little guys haunting my dreams while we checked out this church of a virgen of the waters who performs miracles..lots of miracles, saving people from overturned cars, stopping volcanoes, making waterfalls restart after earthquakes. the thing about miracles is that if you are the one who saw it it is always true and if you didn't see it...well, then you didn't see it.

 

Following our visit to Banos, we stayed at Hacienda Leito in the mountains.  the following day, adam biked down the mountain with Santiago, our guide, pissing off horses and donkeys alike as he rode down over 3,000 feet. The photo below is not only the way adam biked down, its a super pretty pic of Banos.  please note drugs were required to keep me calm while he sped down the cobblestones at 35km an hour. seriously. we clocked it with the car.

radio silence.

i know. it's been three months. i haven't had anything to say even though plenty was happening.
we were here and there and everywhere.  even that sounds totally unentertaining. let's start over.

These are the women of my family. Doing what we do...at home, down south, in ATL.

I am a mere few thousand miles away from crossing into the MVP Gold Status on Alaska.  I have never wanted anything so badly for reasons I cannot explain because this new luggage tag and special boarding powers will result in little tangible benefit. But let me tell you, I will manage it.  Adam once alleged that he was MVP Gold.  (To be clear: HE IS NOT BUT LIES AND TELLS EVERYONE HE IS). He says that it means that when you get off the plane there is a gold plated litter waiting to carry you to baggage claim, that you are fanned with peacock feather palm leaves on the plane, and that if you ordered orange juice it would be squeezed freshly and served in a chalice.  Ok, he might have only said the first one and that you get a crown, but I think the point is the same. i NEED this. Like Q needs drugs and neah needs pig ears. MUST HAVE GOLD.

While speaking about Neah must haves, winter came late here, but despite that we have gone through like 72 booties for the Neah dog. She needs these because she is an athlete. A runner. She can't help it and so she ends up with bloody paws from running on ice if she doesn't wear booties. Dog booties are expensive--new pet peeve for sure.  The "disposable booties" were no more than velcro anklets ten minutes after she began running.  One day, i'm just going to spend all day writing reviews of dog booties. The new ones are dope, they look like anklet booties and have a felty material on the bottom so she can get better traction....she's fast. let me tell you. five points to the pimp dog shoes.

Travelling for work is wonderful. Well, not the part where i want to bang my head on things because of irrational behavior, or the part where my flights get delayed, but definitely the part where upgrades are free and i get to see my girls.

Last week, i spent with Ms. Mossayeb and Ms. Molai in Palm Springs and San Fran, respectively.  It was Ms. Molai's birfday. There was Karaoke, a comedy show, delicious food, sightseeing, stairmaster, and LOTS of laughter.

I know, you are starting to think that i only blog about adventures with this girl, but the truth is that i just save up so that i sound like i have this fascinating adventurous life that is really just a series of lucky breaks.

T minus two weeks till America del sur!!

H to the awaii

First...in case you didn't know...i love that this woman met me in Maui and that she rolled up in this PIMP mobile:

and you better believe those men RAN to help her get out of the car and lei-her.

It's been months in the making, this little adventure of ours, the one where we run away, leave loved ones at home and pretend that the world has rolled back to 2005 and we are on the beach in Eilat sipping limonanas.  Except now, make that virgin pina-coladas and we are almost a decade older, she's a decade more buff, and i am a decade more sleep deprived.

there was a shark attack the day we arrived about a half mile down the beach.  it's been all over cnn, so you probably saw that the young lady didn't make it.  it gave us a little perspective about how lucky we've been--literally through wars with rockets, moves back to the US, and marriages.  it also made us a little more skeptical of getting in the water to see the sea turtle who makes his home off our beach by that reef just off the end of my feet.

we explored the island, hiking with Hike Maui to a 480 foot waterfall near Hana you see in the top picture.  i should clarify, she RAN the 4 mile hike about three times while i meandered, shaking trees to get guava and foraging for passion fruit and ginger flowers to suck like the honeysuckle of my childhood summers.

we at delicious food, basked in the warm sun, laughed and laughed, and all too soon it was over and seemed, at least for me, like a five day dream.

Love me mountains

We went to Denali National Park and went flight seeing....could have touched the mountain we flew so close to the North face....but looking the opposite direction, the colors were INCREDIBLE.
No doctoring done, i swear.

a flying leap off the blog bandwagon

blogging, fail.

i would love to pretend that the reason i haven't been blogging is because we haven't been doing anything, that i have been lazily lying around at home, that i have been soaking in the sun.  Truly, for most of June, i was soaking in the sun--here in Anchorage--i know, it's hard to believe i am saying that.

The last weekend in June i needed to attend a meeting in Seattle, so i called up Court, demanded she let me crash on her couch and soaked up her amazing spirit for two days.  she always has couches that demand visitors love them.  we reminisced about dus moving in unexpectedly five years ago and how lucky we've been since then.  we walked around capitol hill and found this guy spread out in the window, inhibitionless.

by the way, if reincarnation exists--which i doubt--this wouldn't be so bad.

the thing about summer is it always makes me a little nostalgic.  i find myself seeking out old friends, strengthening old bonds, making sure the little pieces of me that were left around the world are still with their rightful owners.  it fills up my heart and sets me at peace.  but it's a tricky beast, nostalgia, because you have to remember your choices, reaffirm and own them. 

so, here's to the summer of my reconnection....and if you have a little piece of my heart that hasn't touched base in a while--give a girl some love.

dear n.k. you created a monster.

Dear N.K.:

You came to visit and she loved you will all 55lbs of allergy inducing fluff she had.  You taught her a new trick, to shake; and while she pretended she didn't get it, I would like to present you with a story adam just told me:

Lately, at night Neah has been getting up at 3:30am and whining.  While i pretend to ignore her, adam takes her downstairs, checks to see that she doesn't want to go outside, that she has food and water and then gives up and comes back to bed.  She wanders to his side of the bed, whimpers in the dark, and then this happens:

yeah, seriously, she puts her paw up in the air and holds her hand out like she wants a treat. he reaches out his hand and she puts her paw in it and stares intently and expectantly at him, and whines.

You've created a shaking, treat wanting, middle of the night monster.
just thought you should know.

us.

Reasons for spare keys, a list

1. When you are sick your brain doesn't function, you are a keyless idiot;
2. When you husband is in Fairbanks all day, he can't help said keyless idiot;
3. When you spare key keeper is in Denver, he can't help either;
4. When you gave the last spare key to the cleaning lady and she hid it somewhere you can't find, calling her names doesn't make you less of a keyless idiot;
5. When you take your key off your key chain so your AWESOME house guests can use it and then forget to put it back in the right place, you, yourself, sick girl, completed the prerequisites for the title of keyless idiot.

In case it wasn't self-evident, I locked myself out of the house.  It was a particularly genius move, since I left the garage entry door unlocked the first time I went out and then deliberately went back to lock it.  Brilliant.  Worse yet, was that I didn't realize it until I was at my office to grab documents for a mediation and couldn't figure out which key unlocked the door because i usually gauge it in relation to the house key. See number one above.

This leaves me, however, with time to kill now that the legal part of my brain turned off and I am unable to enter the house until Adam gets back from square-banks in like an hour. 

Have I told you yet that our old plasma TV died? Adam says it was because it didn't like having to play the Vampire Diaries, but i told him that was just an ugly thing to say---Damon is eye-candy, so clearly that show isn't to blame.  Anyways, this resulted in a near death experience for Devin, who had to help Adam lift the 400 lb contraption off the wall. The next day, I come home and it is dismantled and Adam is staring at lots of tiny white little fuses, making noises that I could have sworn sounded like angsty squeeks (but he would deny--insert martha melodrama comment here) about not being able to tell on site if they were blown.  You see, the internets--all of them--had told us that when there was a "pop" followed by "no picture but sound" on one's "plasma" it meant that some board or fuse in the back XSUS or YSUS something had blown out. guess you need a fuse tester or something.

Anyways, the end result was me sitting on the floor in fred meyer, then best buy, then walmart, then target staring at TVs which basically have NO difference at all scrutinizing the resolution when my face is three inches from it (rather than the ten feet it is at home) and reading specs about refresh rates and blah blah blah.  So, there's a new TV, which is the largest that will fit on the wall (because god forbid we don't get the biggest one that will fit) and it somehow connected itself to the internet--genius smart TV. Please feel free to come ooh and aaah at the TV (and its warranty plan). oh yea, but i can't go watch it because---ready for it--i'm locked out.