2013
Christmas 2013
Happy Holidays!
Well Hugh and I did the hike up Kilimanjaro and summited in on January 24th at 6:14 AM (1 minute before sunrise) Tanzanian time! What an experience! We are both so happy we did it. I put my story of the hike on a website – www.travellightphotos.com. Hugh has his own on Google, but neither of us have exactly figured this out. I’ll let you know if we have figured it out by next Christmas.
We followed the hike with a safari – which seemed tame in comparison. I’m still working on getting that on the Travel Light website. I was too tired from the hike to thoroughly enjoy the experience. It didn’t help that I was expecting far better accommodations on the safari than the hike and that wasn’t the case. We were still in tents – although they did have beds, but no running water or flushing toilets. Well if we did have running water, we couldn’t drink it. But we did see elephants, giraffes, lions, zebras and so much more. We all spent hours attempting to identifying all the unusual birds we saw along the way.
After that trip, we stayed around Phoenix until late September when we took a trip to Vermont to take some photographs and see the fall colors. In October I went to England with some friends to tour the south coast area, went to Paris for a couple of days and then to London for about 5 days. We were in Hastings, along the sea, the night of the St. Judes’ storm. I stayed up most of the night watching the seas crash to shore. Both Evelyn and Trish felt there beds move from the storm. It had been feared it would be the storm of the century, but I don’t think that happened. What I learned was the media overplays everything in the UK just like the US.
We stopped in Dartmoor so I could photograph the thatched houses, and so many interesting historical places along the way Winchester, Battle, St.Ives… In London – we saw a theater production, walked over the O2, and took a ride on the Eye , ate too much and drank far too much.
I came home for a couple of weeks and then went back to England with Hugh to celebrate Thanksgiving with Tim and Julianna. Well we forgot to celebrate. But we too had a fantastic time. We took a night photography class along the Thames, saw David Cameron at the question time in Parliament, took in a theater production and walked and walked and walked. We also ventured out to Rye in the South of England as we are still looking to buy or rent someplace small. We loved the town and its close proximity to an international Eurostar station in Ashford.
Hugh and I also started remodeling the house this year. It has been a long time-consuming process. Hopefully everything will be done by late spring. But most of the year we have lived in a state of chaos, not something I deal with particularly well. Right now we have some carpet and some concrete in our living room, dining room and hallways. It has been like that for months. I believe my contractor will be finishing this sometime in January or February, but I thought it would be November or December. So I could be wrong about the timeline. I did find the silver lining – cleaning seems irrelevant when the house is so tore up!
Next year is shaping up to be another year of travel. We hope to go to Jordan and Cuba on photography workshops – and of course, England. England in May will be to celebrate Timothy’s graduation and we’ll probably go again in late fall early winter.
Hugh and I keep busy with our lives in Phoenix – so much to do, see, read….so little time. Hugh still is retiring later in 2014 or early 2015 and I’m still undecided. I love my business, and I still get a great deal of time off to travel and pursue my other interests. So for now I’m not making any decisions.
Wishing all of you the best of holidays whether it be Christmas, Hanukkah or both…followed by a happy and healthy New Year.