Our Journey continues… We had a great time staying with our friend Jeanette in San Francisco. She got us to experience the area in all its diversity. Before we left, we went inland to Yosemite National Park for a couple of days. This was a beautiful area, and I’m glad that we went there in the tourist off-season because by all accounts the park becomes one big traffic jam in the summer. We had to buy snow chains to get into the park since the roads became snow and ice as we went up out of the valley to Badger Pass. This is a small ski field with only three lifts and it also had some good trails for cross-country skiing. This only cost $15 instead of $80 for downhill skis and a lift pass, so we took the backpacker option and had a great time. Cross-country is a good way to get moving on skis even with no experience. Its doesn’t have the same speed thrills so it was good for Tamar! It keeps you warm and you get lots of exercise.
The next day we went back up to Badger Pass, for a snowshoe walk with the park ranger in the woods. There was 5 feet of fresh snow and about 9ft of snow in total. Even with the snowshoes we sank in to the snow to our knees. The ranger first explained how the trees survive up to the -50°F conditions by having sap as antifreeze in the branches and by standing straight up and having very springy branches so that they can survive heavy snow. He also talked about the animals: how some migrate and some hibernate and lots of rodents can survive under the snow. As he talked about them he would pull a stuffed rodent out of his jacket and then put it on his hat… I wondered what those wide brimmed hats were for!

Next State… Oregon we pretty much drove right through but we did stop to see the giant Redwoods there are groves of these massive trees in northern California and southern most Oregon it was impossible to capture the size of these trees in a photo. So you will just have to go and see them for yourselves! Here we also camped in the rain and mud in our backpacking spirit.

Moving swiftly on to… Seattle, Washington where we stayed with Daniel Long and his roommate Seth. Congratulations to Dan and Devorah on getting engaged! It was cool being able to spend time with them. We also met up with Kellye Olive, a friend of Tamar’s from college. She's a Tai-Kwon-Do black belt and although she never hit us, she murdered us on an uphill power hike.

When we got up to Canada, we stayed with Corinne Miserva in a little town by the border and spent time visiting Nomi Pritz, Tim Brown, Heidi and Rob Martin, Sarah Peachey and Reg Wall. Our day around Vancouver included Granville Island (a man-made island with a local market and private owned shops – not a franchise store in sight!) and Stanley Park where we had the most inspiring time feeding chickadees with seed that an old man gave us. I think he was an angel.

We drove through the Rockies and Jasper Nat’l Park on our way to Edmonton and got to go camping again. This time reminded me of my wilderness survival training from when I was in college – it was FREEZING! But I survived it and Piers downright enjoyed it because he had the benefit of using Corinne’s military-issued sleeping bag rated to -40°C.
We picked up Corinne in Edmonton (she flew out) on our way to see Verity & Jonathan Klassen. What a treat to reminisce about our college days, I think Piers even enjoyed it. She’s having a baby in July and no, I’m not jealous!
We went to Three Hills to visit all the stragglers from when we were there. We saw Tom and Leah, Bruce, April Lanigan, Yi, Shannon Weiss and some more non-aviation people. It looks so different. They've torn down half the town! The Prairie half only. I'm really happy I attended when it didn't look so flattened.
We're staying now with Corinne's parents. She was here with us till yesterday morning but we couldn’t leave here until our car got fixed. The distributor melted from the inside. Thank God for Youth for Christ! They've fixed it for a fraction of what the garage we had it towed to offered. We’ll be heading south to Montana tomorrow and try to make it to my aunt and uncle in Denver by the 13th for the Seder. Happy holidays!