Four on Friday

Catching up...

1. Fall leaves photo tradition. So, I try every year to take photos of/with boys featuring autumn's changing colors. When they were younger, this often meant pictures of them in leaf piles and throwing leaves at each other. These days, so long as I get a photo, I'm happy. :) Here are our pictures for this fall...

Nathan, Micah and I went up to Estes Park for a day last month and just wandered and ate and enjoyed the time together.

Asher took these for me at a park near campus.

And Noah had to wait a bit longer for the leaves to change color but got this shot recently in Korea during a hike.

2. Magnets. When we travel, we try to bring home a magnet to commemorate our experiences. I finally added our magnets from our birthday trip...

(For what it's worth, when this box is full, we're definitely going to look for shadow boxes that open from the front instead...that will be way easier for adding magnets, lol.)

3. Fall, generally. It's been a pretty gorgeous and long fall here. I very much appreciate it. :) I've been tackling a number of seasonal tasks and things to get ready for the end of the year. For instance, October saw some car maintenance, sprinkler blowouts, insurance updates (and more since Nathan's employer switched plans...ugh, lots of paperwork and legwork to get Micah's prescription moved and filled again), meeting with our financial planner to get ready for taxes, and shots for most of us (covid and flu shots, plus shingles and pneumonia for Nathan and I since we're now 50). Not the most exciting stuff but necessary and nice to have done.

And here's a photo I took during one of my walks with Deanna last month...so beautiful.

4. Halloween. Micah was the only one of us who dressed up for Halloween...but he had three different costumes, so maybe that covers more, lol. (The three costumes were for different days and different parties with friends down in Boulder...but he neglected to take a picture the first two days.) Below is the photo of his Braveheart costume...

He was aiming to be William Wallace, mostly because he wanted to use/wear his kilt. ;) (We found a bunch of random pieces from old Comic Con costumes to finish out his costume, including that wig, lol. He couldn't find blue face paint and was disappointed that more of his friends hadn't seen Braveheart so didn't know what he was going for.) 

While Micah was down in Boulder most of Halloween weekend, the rest of us watched our neighbor set up his inflatable forest and then handed out candy from beside our firepit set up in the driveway. We ended up buying the right amount of candy this year, which was nice...only had about 40 trick-or-treaters. 

And that's some of what's been going on around here...hope your November is off to a great start!

Twenty Five

Yesterday my Noah turned 25! Given that he's in Korea right now, and thanks to the time difference, we ended up not actually talking with him until it was Nov 3 for him but it still counts. ;) 

Here's a photo he took last week while at one of the national parks there...

On his actual birthday, he took a sunrise hike near his AirBNB...

...then spent some time at a mall and watched a movie (in Japanese with Korean subtitles, lol). 

He's got just over a week left in Korea--where he's been applying for jobs and doing a little sight-seeing--and then he'll head to China to see the Great Wall before returning home. 

This past year has been full for him...he traveled with friends to Japan in January and then lived in Japan from June to August, has been in Korea since August, and will be in China for a week-ish. He'll have been on his own for almost six months when we see him next (in person) and he's surely grown and learned much during that time. (We're looking forward to hearing all about it!)

Obviously, we didn't do anything on his actual birthday but will celebrate when he gets home. Happy birthday, Noah!

Birthday trip: Days 14 & 15

Days 14 & 15 were travel days. We checked out of our place in Dubrovnik and settled in for a long day of driving back to Zagreb and the airport. Along the way, we decided to detour a short way to stop at Zadar. 

This is the view from one of the rest areas we stopped at. It was vast and a cool surprise... 

We made it to Zadar after about 4 hours and parked and walked to the sea organ...an architectural sound art instrument that plays music by way of sea waves and tubes located under a set of large marble steps.

Visually, the sea organ just looked like big steps at the water's edge. I have videos capturing the sound, but don't know how to post them on my blog. (I think my old plan doesn't support that.)

We listened there for a bit then went in search of some quick lunch. Along the way, we saw these...

No idea what they were but they were cool looking. Guess we'll have to go back to explore further. :)

After our quick lunch, we got a last gelato...

...which was delicious. We also grabbed coffee and tea before getting back on the road. It was another three hours to Zagreb. We returned the rental car, having driven almost 1500 miles. We got through security and found some dinner before heading to our gate and had an uneventful flight from Zagreb to London.

We arrived in London, went through passport control and customs and then out to catch an Uber to the AirBNB we'd scheduled to get a good night's sleep during our long layover.

The next morning, we Uber'd back to the airport and made it through security again. We had a lovely brunch then stopped for sticky toffee pudding, per Micah's instruction...

And then we boarded our 9+ hour flight from London to Denver...

We tried to think of the flight as just an extra afternoon (given the time zone difference)...watched some movies, finished my book, did a better job of staying hydrated. We arrived safely and made it through passport control, baggage claim and customs in amazingly quick order...then found Micah waiting to drive us home. 

And that was our trip to celebrate turning 50 this year. :) It was wonderful.

I'll be back later with more wrap up and other things. Whew.

Birthday trip: Day 13

Day 13 was our last full tourist day. We walked the short distance to Dubrovnik's Old Town, figured out how to buy passes and found the Ploce Gate entrance to the City Walls walk. We did the full perimeter, counter-clockwise as required...stopping along the way to take plenty of photos...

We spotted more than one fellow traveler toting Rick Steves guide. We also had it, but didn’t carry it with us during the day.

After we finished walking the walls, we exited back down into Old Town and climbed these stairs...

(It's hard to see, but the stairs go all the way into the distance.) We ended up at Lady Pi-Pi's for lunch. This was the statue out front...

It was wonderful! They grilled the food just feet away from us...

Yum! We then walked back down and found gelato then decided to explore the Rector's Palace. This was a banister that caught my attention...

(Yes, there was a lot of other stuff. Like I said, this was day 13 and we were a little photo'd out.) After the Rector's Palace, we went back to the gelato place for coffee and tea (and gelato)...

...then decided to split up again for about 90 minutes. Nathan went to some museums and found our dinner spot and made reservations and explored other areas, like a hole in the wall to a restaurant and swimming area on the outside of the wall. I shopped and had some lovely conversations with some jewelry vendors. 

We met back up and had an early dinner at a restaurant called Azur, which was delicious...

This was CroAsian something other Laksa?? I really should take pictures of the menu, lol. It was yum.

We then walked back to our place...stopping to capture this pirate ship sailing into the sunset...

Nathan turned around and went back out to swim in the Adriatic for a bit while I caught up on some things. And then we had to pack and check in for our flights...

Birthday trip: Day 12

Day 12 found us in Montenegro! We drove from Dubrovnik down and into Montenegro…took an alternate border crossing (less busy)...and survived some dubious directions from Google Maps to eventually get on the main road around the bay area there thru several little towns. We stopped in Perast where we had a nice chat with a young local guy and took a boat out to a tiny island...

The island is called Our Lady of the Rocks and has an interesting history. 

(Yes, after our experience in Mostar, we carried our rain coats with us to start the day, lol. They weren't necessary at all.) This was our driver and boat (taking others back to shore)...

After a bit on the tiny island, our driver picked us up and took us to Perast, where we enjoyed lunch and their local dessert... 

...then found some gelato before we climbed the tower...

This was one of the more difficult towers to climb. It's hard to tell from this photo that Nathan took but even short-little-me had to bend and contort to make it through some of the areas...Nathan was literally crawling and had to go down some areas backward on our way back down. The woman selling admission did warn us, lol.

But the view was worth it...

What you're seeing is the town of Perast and in the distance is Kotor.

While we were at the top, a fellow tourist offered/wanted to take photos of us for us. She posed and directed us all around the tower, lol.

We all climbed back down (carefully!). We then returned to our car and continued our drive around the bay to Kotor. Once parked and inside the city walls, we discovered this very odd Cats Museum...

The walls were just covered in random drawings and sketches and paintings of cats…in the rooms and hallways and everywhere.

And there was an actual cat! Nathan was checking to make sure the cat was alive…it was pretty darn chill. Nathan took a lot of other cat pictures in Kotor (of actual cats, not the strange drawings and such, lol).

After that, we stopped for coffee and tea and wandered...

Full disclosure, by this point in our trip, we'd stopped caring as much about all the details and history so I don't know what church that is behind us, lol. 

In any case, we climbed a bit in search of the entrance to the city walls. We were in the wrong place initially but it was a beautiful view...

We then found our way up to walk the city walls. From them, we marveled at the paths up to a church and fortress on the hill (St John's Fortress). Turns out that's what the steps we'd originally tried led to. If we'd had more time, we probably would have continued up the path...next time. :)

We walked around the fortified city walls and saw a pomegranate tree...

...and found a random dragon engraved on a wall...

We then got down from the top of the walls and got more gelato and returned to our car to drive a bit more then catch the ferry across the bay (rather than retracing our steps back around the bay)...

On the ferry (it was a very short trip so I just stayed in the car), we had to wait a few minutes for the cruise ship that had been at Kotor to clear the bay...

Nathan caught this from the ferry.

Once across the bay, we stopped for dinner before continuing back to Dubrovnik for the night.