I just got back from another business trip to Phoenix. As usual I can't talk publicly about who we did work for or even the partners or platforms we used... which were cutting edge, expensive and freaking amazing! What I can briefly talk about is the cool Kildeer bird we saw protecting it's eggs in the back lot of the Scottsdale Cardno Office, the great people I worked with and the great views I had from our job site, both of mountains and cool critters!
With Emily gone this weekend to Waldport for a girls weekend on the coast I decided to get Leo out of the house for a bit. Leo’s getting a little creaky with age so instead of an epic 3,000 ft climb in the gorge we stuck to a couple hundred feet over 4 miles up the Wauna Viewpoint off of the Eagle Creek trailhead for some views over the Bonneville Dam and the Gorge. Read on…
Just a quick note that Emily and I had a wonderful time going to see Heiroglyphics with Conrad at the Wonder Ballroom tonight! Bad Habitat opened for them and were also amazing. It was great to see Deltron there (although he was high as hell) and Pep Love was great on stage. Their performance was short, under an hour, with no encore, but it was worth it for sure at the small venue. We had some bbq dinner at the People's Pig before heading over. Sad note of the night was hearing that Phife Dawg from the iconic Tribe Called Quest had passed away. RIP Phife.
This year Emily and I were able to get 4 weekends in at Meadows Ski Resort. First with Ian where I got stuck in a tree well taking a safety break in the woods with him. Then a couple times by ourselves where I relived my youth hitting the terrain park with a bunch of mute 360's and the half pipe where I can still boost out above the rim, although all of this was much less graceful than it was five years ago.
Our most recent day was with Eric when we met up with Porter and some others after only about 3 runs on very wet, sticky snow for a bbq in one of the parking lots. It was a short day skiing but a good time meeting good people at the BBQ, one of which, Peter, is a guide on Denali and had some good beta for me. A great connection. Not much skiing for us this year with Africa in the middle but at least the mountains got more snow this year than the last 2 combined!
Just days after our yard remodel was finished and our hot tub was installed and heated up Jen and Jason came up for an early Easter dinner/birthday dinner for Eric on Saturday night before we went out for the annual bar crawl. It was a great weekend of friends, drinking, and enjoying for the first time our new backyard! Read on…
I late January Emily and I had taken a Saturday to go check out the home and yard show at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. We had done so with the idea of getting some initial research done on landscape companies that might re-do our yard this late summer/fall when we had saved enough money for the work. Read on....
This weekend Emily was visiting family on the East Coast after one of her now monthly work trips to Atlanta. I was invited by Jason to come down to Corvallis for the night and head to Shore Acres Park on Sunday just south of Coos Bay for a photoshoot of some enormous waves that would be hitting the coast from a storm system offshore. Read on…
This year Emily and I once again hosted the SuperBowl. Mike and Jess didn't make it down for the game and there wasn't much interest from anyone in the area because nobody we knew were actual fans of the Ravens or the Broncos, but it was the 50th Super Bowl so there had to be good commercials... And a good game of football is always worthy of a gathering.
The game also served as a great way to bring old QSI friends and our colleagues back together. Baqar, Ryan, Brian, and Matt all came over as well as Jason, Lindsay, Nate, Anna, Josh, Misty, Conrad, Tom, Andrea and Eric so it was a good showing. There were some decent commercials but the highlight was seeing everyone's favorite Patton Manning win the close game with a late touchdown that gave him the win for likely the final game of his career. Ryan had made spicy pork soft tacos and there was lots of other good food and drinks. Good times to end the pigskin season.
Today Emily and I decided to get Leo out for a hike. We had skied the weekend before with Ian at Meadows ($80) so we didn't want to spend the money again for ski tickets. Instead we picked a nice 8 mile loop in the Columbia Gorge that we hadn't hiked yet knowing that we might encounter snow but risking it anyway. Read on...
I'm not going to go into too much details about this business trip because it involves clients I should not be talking about in a public blog. But... I will say that it was an amazing trip. We got to demo our UAS platforms for clients and got a lot of positive interests from some big industrial companies in the southwest from it.
Our trip home was quite the journey. Instead of flying directly back to KJO from Zanzibar we instead had to go through the Tanzanian capital of Dar Es Salaam where we had a 3 hour layover. Then we had a 2 hour layover in KJO before departing back through Ethiopia, then through Dublin to Dulles and finally back to Seattle!
We were picked up this morning at 8am from the resort with a new driver and after almost a full 2 hours of driving we arrived at a boat launch into Menai Bay Conservation Area just south of Stone Town in the off the small town of Fumba. Interestingly, our driver had to “pay off” some officials that stopped us along the way (apparently, this corruption is quite common). This area was known for it’s turquoise waters and abundant marine life.
We were able to get a hold of Eco & Culture late the night before to cancel our visit to Jozani Forest. This allowed us to sleep in a bit (as much as we could with the heat) and then spend a morning and early afternoon relaxing by the pool. If you know me, you know this meant about 20 minutes floating in the pool before getting stir crazy so I walked up to the dive center and grabbed a mask, snorkel and boots and headed off into the Indian Ocean for some snorkeling.
Today was scheduled as a down day for us with no tours planned. We simply needed to be transported from Stone Town to Sunshine Paradise. Well, this turned out to be more difficult than we thought it would be. We were picked up at 9am after a nice breakfast in the Tea Room (always rough climbing those hot stairs to the top). The hour drive turned out to be a full 2 hours as our driver took us to the wrong hotel.
When I say I had rough night I mean it. I was up 2-3 times to the bathroom not knowing what was wrong with me. When we eventually all got up to get breakfast I thought I had passed through the worst of it and was able eat a decent amount of food, once again at the Tea Room up a hot flight of stairs. I had coffee and a little bit of juice as well. I took some Cipro and headed out with our guide on our scheduled Spice Tour, a 30 minute drive away.
We weren’t sure who was going to pick us up to drive us to the airport for our flight to Zanzibar but we were delighted to see Shange again! I really do think he grew to like us a lot, evident by his big hug for me when he saw us. On the drive to to the airport we finally got to see Kilimanjaro cloud free for the first time from the valley. It was hard to believe that 6 days earlier we had been at the top! My chest still remembered though!
It was really hard to say goodbye to a teary-eyed Emy this morning. Last night’s beautiful sunset had marked the end of the year as well as her trip. She had to get back to the states for a school trip to NYC and she was being picked up by Stacy’s husband (co-owner of Duma) to be driven to the airport right after breakfast. She had put all her imagery and footage on a hard drive that Eric had and I promised to get her edited photos as soon as I could after returning home.
The alarm to wake Emy and Eric didn’t go off so we got a slightly later start closer to 7am with Shange. Getting down to the crater floor early was the best bet to see the most animals before they bedded down or went to shade in the warmer afternoon. We made sure to pay our bar tab before leaving the lodge (Eric even got tracked down by someone who thought he was dining and dashing!). After a great breakfast we were on the crater rim road and then headed down into the ancient caldera, with just a quick sign in at the entrance gate.
After packing up and another great breakfast we were back with Shange on Safari checking out tawny eagles, kites, wildebeest, elephants, and a lot of giraffes. We were on our last morning game drive around Chaka camp before a long drive to Rhino Lodge and the Ngorongoro Crater. We spent a lot of time in the morning off-roading looking for leopards to no avail. What we did find was a mother cheetah with two of the cutest kittens we’d ever seen. We pulled up with several other vehicles and watched them playing with each other and tackling their mom’s tail playfully for over half an hour before moving on. Simply adorable.
Today we awoke to staff politely waking us up saying “your showers are ready”. After warm showers I grabbed my GoPro outside which thankfully wasn’t stolen by a monkey thief. We grabbed all the batteries we had been charging overnight and headed to breakfast to meet up with Eric and Emy, passing by two big giraffe grazing on nearby trees. We also saw a couple big hot air balloons sailing by in the distance headed towards the Serengeti.
This weekend Emily and I had planned on heading up to the Tilly Jane hut on Mt. Hood but after actually getting packed up and driving a bit towards it we hit a giant rainstorm in the gorge and decided to bail. There was no wood at cabin this time of year, everything was soaked, the trail would be a bog of mud and snow and I would have been hiking in my plastic ski mountaineering boots... and Leo if soaked would have been cold and stolen my sleeping bag so we decided to bail and head back to the house. 
But, we did decide to get leo out of the truck for a short walk around Latourell Falls which we hadn't been back to since our engagement photos in 2013. He enjoyed himself on the short loop hike and I got some HDR shots of the falls and historic highway bridge along with some macro shots of flowers and a really cool looking snail that we helped across the trail. Other than this short outing it was a pretty quiet weekend for the two of us after our work trips the week before.
