Figure 8 On A Bike

It's time for us to crash someone else's travel plans: Susan's mom, dad, sister, and our two nieces were in Colorado for a week, so we got to join for their last 3 days around Twin Lakes and Leadville . 3 days of walking less than 2 miles a day, hanging out and recovering around the spacious "cabin" up on the hill above Twin Lakes, and eating as much food as we can. Even better, they brought a bag that had new shoes for us, and we could send a few extraneous items (like the Microspikes, no longer needed for the mostly-thawed mountains) back home. The convenience! Definitely worth it for cramming into the trunk of the Forester and trying not to bang our heads along bumpy dirt roads; who knew the Forester was a 7 passenger vehicle? 

We woke up at Ben's mom's. She had made us a welcome home basket complete with Nebraska themed t-shirts which meant we had something clean to wear! Which was great as our travel clothes reeked. We enjoyed delicious waffles for breakfast with Greg and Sue and then borrowed their car to head to my parents'. My dad was home with the littles and between hugs and conversation and entertaining children we managed to do a load of laundry, add our luggage to the our hoard in the basement and locate some respectable looking clothes for Easter the next day. On Sunday we made it to Easter service with Ben's mom and Greg and Jacob. We were offered coffee at the entrance, and my raised Catholic self was very confused and said "no, thank you" and thinking 'that's allowed!?!'. We probably could have used the coffee as we were still fighting jet lag. After the service, the family converged at Greg and Sue's and we got to see most of Ben's family. T...

Frozen Barskoon Falls high over the valley From Almaty in Kazakhstan we took a bus to Kyrgyzstan as we had read about a very cool ice climbing area there. The bus meandered slowly west to the border with Kyrgyzstan. Once there we had to get all of our stuff off the bus, waddle to the Kazakh border desk, stand in the wrong line, and waddle to another line. Once in the correct line, I was met with a border agent’s halting English and I didn’t recognize the name of Almaty’s airport so I got a few more questions, but eventually he allowed me to leave Kazakhstan. Ben benefited from my hard work and made it through with no questions.

Hello dear Figure 8 Readers! My name is Hong-Yen, and I’ll be this week’s guest blogger. Saturday, Nov 25 Daily journal entry - No sleeping in. Breakfast and second coffee. Shuttle to the airport. What should have been a short flight turned into a long day of delays due to weather. We finally get to the guesthouse at 9PM after a long and somewhat perilous drive in the storm.   Our last second coffee at the airport

Maria and I got dropped off at the Antalya airport together for our flight to Istanbul . Maria had a much earlier flight than me so she was allowed to go through security and I got to wait between security one and security two of the airport. It is more awkward than I realized trying to hang out in public places and not sit. I spent some time pacing. I spent some time reading leaning against a wall - oops, leaning is also NOT great for my back. Back to standing straight and reading. But then a nice family waved me to their seats when they left them and I didn't know how to turn that down politely so I took a seat for a while and then creakily stood up after I was sure they were gone. In the end, I paid for some curly fries from Arby's so I could stand at their high table to eat and read. Eventually I was able to go through second security and wait at the gate. Where I did some floor stretches. On the flight I sat for take off and landing and for the ten minutes we hi...

Views of Antalya and the surrounding peaks from the top of a climb As our plane entered the skies above Türkiye, Susan and I craned our necks to catch glimpses of the mountains that began to appear below. "Wow, look at those peaks." "Is that snow?" "I don't think so, it can't be snow, it's too warm still..." "Then what is it?" "Rock, I guess?" "Really? That can't be rock, there's so much of it." "Maybe it's a mine? I think I see a road leading up there..."

We left Tromsø slowly. Definitely were delaying some goodbyes with a long breakfast and more rounds of tea and coffee. Some readers may know that Ben and I tried to rid ourselves of caffeine addiction before we went on this trip. That is out the window at this point. Cristobal is far too good at caffeine preparation between being Chilean and thus maté, being married to a Welsh woman and thus tea, and living in Norway and thus coffee. Leaving Tromsø we had to tackle the big hill to get to the other side of the city...I had to push. My excuse was I saw another guy pushing his bike...so I do what the Norwegians do. We made it out of town without any extra stops and head on our way. The Eurovelo 1 route had some construction on it so we detoured along the coast. We weren't too upset by this change as it removed a lot of elevation gain. We also got to check out some ancient petroglyphs which was pretty neat. Susan coming up the bridge out of Tromsø

Waiting for us in Tromsø were our friends Ellie and Cristobal. Ellie is actually from Wales in the UK, but Susan met her while they were both teaching English in Punta Arenas, Chile; Ellie met her husband Cristobal there as well, and somehow they've now moved about as far away from the southern tip of Chile as you can get on a globe. They were out working when we arrived but left us a key to get in and an adorable welcome message, which worked out really well because it gave us time to clean up a little. When you haven't seen someone for 7 years you probably don't want your smell to be the first thing they notice! Life's too short for bad maps