Well, of course we have tons to write about, but in the meantime playing catch-up seems appropriate.

Boise, with a full-family holiday session, was lovely. Mama and Papa had all five of their "kids" together, which happens too rarely, and we had lots of fun bickering, laughing, talking and eye-rolling at each other. Pictures can be found here.

Snowshoeing! We managed to get out once, with Amy, who is a committed cross-country skier. She allowed as to how snowshoeing was fun, too, though, and even wants to go again.

For the second half of the holiday season, we flew to Las Vegas, to spend New Year's with David's family. (Really, it's the only draw to Vegas, since we're poor gamblers and disenchanted by the growth in the city.) Of course, I managed to be sick the entire time we were there, lying in bed moaning to myself and reading an interesting, though rather biased, book about the Byzantine Empire. David had tons of fun scanning in old family photos and documents and is now seriously considering buying a scanner so he can continue the fun.

And now we're back in Pittsburgh, starting the new, and last, semester. Excitement for all!

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You'd think we would be done traveling for awhile, especially since school started August 28, but as it happens, you would be wrong. Uncle Alan, David's uncle, and his fiancee Ellen, were married in Danvers, MA Sunday at noon, so of course we had to go. David has been dragged to any number of my cousin's weddings over the last ten years and is now almost perfect at establishing the relationships of everyone in the rather large extended family on Mama's side. But until this summer I haven't had a chance to meet any of David's extended family, since Steven's side hides out in New England and Sharon's side is scattered places we don't get to.

In addition to meeting lots of family, we also got to see some friends. Zach and Corey, newly married and living in Northampton, let us crash on their futon Friday and Sunday nights. We had a great time stuffing ourselves with wine and cheese, being shown around their new town and sampling breakfast at two of their favorite places. Saturday night Christa, Greg and Helen drove up to Haverhill from Cambidge to have dessert with us. Christa and I have been friends since high school, but haven't seen each other in almost six years, which made meeting Helen, their four-and-a-half month old, lots of fun. Fun because I adore babies, but even more fun, since she is extremely cute and very well behaved.

It was actually quite the baby weekend. Two of David's cousins, Kristie and Richard, along with their spouses, have small children. Ally (Alessandra), is nine months old, and the daughter of Kristie and Mark, while Richard and his wife Brynn have two children: Acher, almost three, and Annelie, who's eight months old. All very happy children, so of course David kept himself busy during most of the reception by taking lots of pictures. As a bonus, I got to hold Annelie during the ceremony, since her parents had wedding duties. We had a slight disagreement over who should have control of my earrings, but we resolved it amicably.

In all, an excellent weekend, though next time we may try to avoid all the driving and fly in. Especially since we have so much family to visit, now.

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Boise, Idaho is where we've spent the last week in recovery. The tail end of the trip in the U.S. was, sadly, over-planned, over-optimized and over-strategized, which left us in a haggard state. Minutes after arriving at SFO, we sped in a rental car toward Portland. Of course, in the bay area "speeding" means going about 10 mph because there's so much traffic, but still, the jump from the flight to the car was hurried. In May, before leaving for Seoul, we had planned to camp at Mt. Shasta; however, we were too exhausted to make it that far and ended up camping at Stony Gorge Reservoir, which is a fine place to be unconscious from jet-lag, even with loud, obnoxious Humvee-driving neighbors. In the morning, we drove too quickly past some beautiful countryside, and waved out the car window at Mt. Shasta, before arriving in Portland to visit family. We had a great, but not long enough, time visiting and got to go on a peaceful Wilamette cruise before continuing to Boise.

While we've tried to recover since Monday, not all of the last week has been idle: several thousand pictures (seriously!) have been whittled down to several hundred, which were organized, captioned and now populate one of several online albums. Since we were unable to post pictures in China, some pictures have been added to old posts. We also finally managed to transcribe and post a few of the last blog entries from the trip and I got the GPS data downloaded and mapped. If you're a geek, like me, here are boring (or, maybe interesting) details about our trip:

• Within Asia, using buses, trains and ferries we moved from one accommodation to the next for a total of more than 7,400km (~4,600 miles), which works out to an average of more than 100km (~62 miles) per day. (Of course, the distance would be longer if I included the walking, hiking, motorcycle rickshaws, a traghetto, an inertial ropeway, subways and taxis, but that seems like overkill.)
• Details about where we stayed on each night of the trip are organized in a table. On average accommodations cost $32.42 per day, while the average cost of staying in either a tent, hotel/hostel or transport (with a bed) was $2.92, $26.58 and $204.04 per day, respectively--each roughly ten times more expensive than the next, which, ironically, is inversely proportional to how well we usually slept in each of the types.

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The post title is not one we made up (despite David's great wit), but something we saw on a sign in Arches National Park in Utah. We had a great time on the trip. We camped and hiked for about a week, partly in preparation for the camping and hiking we'll be doing this summer and partly just because we wanted to. I've never spent much time in Utah, but everyone who's been has talked about how gorgeous it is and how good the hiking is, so I thought we should go. David thought I was a little weird about it, since he grew up going to Zion and Bryce fairly often (it's nice to know growing up in Vegas has it's advantages!).

We went to Arches first, which surprised us because it was PACKED! I felt so silly--I had somehow assumed that peak season wouldn't start till after Memorial Day, so we'd have plenty of space in the campsites and there wouldn't be a long line on all of the hikes. I was wrong on both accounts. We ended up staying on BLM land for most of the week since the campgrounds in the parks were all full, and we saw a lot of other hikers while we were out. Having said that, we had a great time and are already planning our next trip, which we'll try to do in the off-season.

One of the neatest things about the trip was learning about cryptobiotica, the thin, fragile crust that protects the desert. We knew the desert was really delicate and the ATVs and cars (or even footprints) last for a generation, but we didn't know why. It turns out the 'crypto' is what is so fragile. It's made largely of silicon, but also has some sort of bacteria that actually "fuses" the grains to one another to form a protective layer that keeps the sand from blowing away and therefore nourishes the plants that grow in it by keeping water in. If the crust is broken, though, the sand starts blowing and if it's broken in large chunks, the sand will blow to cover the adjacent crypto, thus starving it of oxygen and killing it, too. Judy, our ranger guide for the fiery furnace hike (too many people have damaged the rocks, so you have to go on a guided hike or buy a permit), told us a cute saying the rangers have, "Tip-toe 'round the crypto and don't bust the crust."

While Arches was beautiful, our favorite park was Capitol Reef, pictured below. You can do free backcountry camping (not that we had time), there are tons of trails, maintained or otherwise, and the primative campground in the south of the park was beautifully placed. Our favorite hike, though, was the 9 mile loop of Lost Canyon in the Needles district of Canyonlands. It went from high desert to a lush valley with running water (and lots of mosquitoes!) to slickrock.

We really hope to go back soon, especially since we missed so many other parks, not to mention all of the areas we didn't get to in the 3 parks we did manage to spend some time in. A week was definitely not enough! But we were unbelievably foul by the end of the week without showers, and while it was great practice for this summer, we were in need of some hot water.

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Eleanor, my youngest sister, graduated from San Francisco State U. this weekend with a masters in psychology. We missed her undergrad graduation since I was in Morocco and David was in Italy, so we couldn't very well miss this one, even if we had a great excuse. Instead, since we'd already decided our next big trip was to Asia, we just arranged to fly out of SFO, which we thought would work perfectly.

We needed to get to San Fran, though, so we thought we'd do a combined "camp in Utah" and "see family" trip across the country. To that end, we flew to Wichita and visited with John and Rosie, old friends of Papa's, and then drove to Denver to see various cousins, which was a lot of fun. We then hiked in Utah (see Geology Happens), which was fabulous before heading to Las Vegas to see David's family and some of my cousins, before leaving for San Fran.

This all sounded like an excellent plan before we actually started on the trip. But then we had to pack. Not only did we have to pack for Asia, we had to pack for the U.S., which included camping and a fancy graduation party, two rather dissimilar events. The resulting packing frenzy was not pretty (pictured above), but David's such an engineer that we had to lay it all out. We made it, though, and now we leave tomorrow for Seoul. We have three months in South Korea and China. We're excited!

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