Sunday drive

Aimee and I were bored out of our minds and I was feeling couped up. So I told her lets just go for a drive somewhere, anywhere.

We ended up on the top of whatever hill that is at Point of the Mountain where everyone does their parasailing. It was a nice view and it salvaged what had become a gruff day.

The view out our window

You gotta enjoy life's simple pleasures and one of mine is looking out our living room window every morning. Its not Sound of Music inspiring every day but for a stretch of a few days back in early May it was. Luckily I gave the windows a good cleaning on one of my days off sometime around late April after Aimee had reminded me it was warming up and it was time to get the screens put back up (I take the screens out of the windows for the winter, Aimee thinks its weird but in my world it makes sense).

So I gave the windows a good cleaning, got the screens put back in, and then we got lucky with a late spring snow storm. The snow had melted pretty much from all of the lower elevations at that time but here we got a gift with a new blanket of the white stuff. One morning I woke up, looked outside and started singing, "the hills are alive with the sound of music." I grabbed the camera and snapped the two above photos to capture the moment. And yes, those are taken from inside the house looking out my clean windows! Then I ran outside and snapped the third photo just out our front door.

I'd love to go to Switzerland or Austria some day, but until then I'll just have to look out our living room window.

Oeno Island

The Pirate Code



Trip to Chile, Feb - March 2010

So Madison, Jacobi and I were headed to Chile via Caracas and Buenos Aires when during the early morning hours on Saturday February 27th one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded hit southern Chile. We were in the Buenos Aires airport when it happened waiting for our 830am flight to Santiago and ended up spending 4 days in Argentina waiting for the Santiago airport to re-open. We made the best of a difficult situation and eventually made it home and luckily the area the kids live in did not suffer as much damage as other areas.


The worst of the damage came from the tsunamis that hit up and down the southern coast of Chile. The above picture is one that the news channels in Chile showed many times and probably is "the face" of the earthquake damaged areas.


While we waited in Buenos Aires we watched a lot of tv to say the least. One of the programs we watched was a touristic show highlighting Chile. They mentioned Valparaiso's Hotel Reina Victoria and that it was the first hotel built in all of South America which was something I did not know and I decided to be sure to take a picture of the hotel when we finally made it back. I've only walked by the hotel at least a few hundred times.


This is a closed gate in the doorway of a building that back in 2004 burned due to a gas explosion that happened across the street in a busy area of Valparaiso. This is another building I've walked by a few hundred times and it was sad to see what was left. Many people died as a result of the explosion and fire and the Refugio sign (Refuge) I would have to guess is meant as a place for the spirits of those people.