the ISI house - our future home

On Monday evening Jack and I were able to eat dinner at the ISI house. Over a meal cooked by a Japanese resident, we got to know the current house manager, another ISI staff person, and four of the current resident students. We spent about three hours eating, walking, touring, and talking, and by the end of the evening we were very excited about our future. It's a good fit for us.

Also, Seattle is amazingly beautiful. Green. Mountains in most directions. A lake in the middle of a neighborhood. A densely wooded park with walking trails just down the street from our house. And there are fun friends and relatives who hospitably entertained us for our first 36 hours in the city. It bodes well.

We're currently in Riverside, CA, preparing to leave for VN. The curriculum we've been given is excellently written, which excites me.

wayfaring's end

We've spent the weekend in Big Sky Country with Rebekah and her fiance Andy, who have been the most gracious (and fun) of hosts. We've made sushi and mexican soup, we've gone hiking in Glacier National Park and the Flathead National Forest, we've played "Thinkblot" and Phase 10, we've had to rest the brakes before continuing down the mountain, we've reminisced about China and Vietnam and Thailand and our friends and passions, we've been a little disappointed by Evan Almighty, and now we are about to watch an episdoe of Survivorman and eat the local huckleberry ice cream.

It doesn't get dark here until after ten o'clock, and I'm all thrown off.

Tomorrow we drive to Seattle. It will be Jack's first time to visit our new home city. (My second, if you count the eight hour layover Katie and I had there coming home from Cambodia.) After about 36 hours in Seattle, we fly to California.

The pictures:

big sky country

We got to the Tetons and I nearly died.

Our backcountry hike was, as the ranger warned, "up up up up up." And in the altitude, I could hardly breathe. Plus then there were the fields of snow, the rain, the hail, the hard to find campsite (we set up and then found the place where we were actually supposed to set up). So you'll see some pictures of that. Then there will be a few Yellowstone pics, but Yellowstone was kind of one-note (in the educational center, every display repeated "everything you see is the result of geo-thermal activity.") There was the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, Old Faithful, and some geothermal springs with bright colored steam.

You can play Where's Waldo and find Jack carrying the tent in one of these pictures.

We're reading 2 Corinthians in the morning and The River Why at night. I'm reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and Jack is reading a book of Lester Bang's collected essays/articles on rock and roll.

And today we saw (and thoroughly enjoyed) Nancy Drew. Oh, to be a girl sleuth.

from Jackson Hole, WY

We're tired. We've been dirty and camping and moving and hiking and camping and not showering for a while now. We saw Mollie in Denver and visited her church, the Scum of the Earth. Then Mom and Pop Peterson joined us for a couple of days in Rocky Mountain National Park and at Hahn's Peak Lake just north of Steamboat Springs. We've talked on the phone with most of our Vietnam team members, a great group of people, and we've practised playing praise songs on the guitar, and we're trying to comprehend the fact that in just about two weeks we'll be in Vietnam.

Fotolog:











PS- you should try to get your hands on some of the old radio drama Sherlock Holmes episodes. We've been having great fun listening to them as we drive. In fact, we're thinking it's time for a podcast in the old radio-drama style...

here we are

Hey guys -

This is the new site we'll be trying to update at least once a week while we're traveling this summer. We're currently in Denver, enjoying the free wifi at Metropolis coffeeshop.

For now, here are some pictures of our cross-country camping so far:

Matagorda Beach




Galveston:

Houston and College Station are not pictured. Next we went to Enchanted Rock:


And then the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas

And the Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico


Santa Fe is not pictured. Next we went to the Sand Dunes of southern Colorado.


We spent last night just outside of Breckenridge.