Aching for Life

Over Thanksgiving Break, to celebrate Ryan's mom's 60th birthday, we rented a little house outside Kings Canyon and spent three days hiking around the most beautiful redwood forests and snow-lined hills. One of those hikes was the Little Baldy trail, a moderate trail with stunning vistas of misty mountains and fun twists into fir forests (lots of baby Christmas trees!). We worked our way up to a plateau of solid rock, and there was a family resting there. Since the view there was breathtaking, we thought we had reached the summit already, but the mom told us that the real summit was a little way further. A hiker we had passed by earlier had told us that there was a bit of icy snow near the peak, and so we decided it might be safer if Mom stayed on the plateau with Zeke while Ryan and I continued on. The view on the actual summit, as you can see from the top picture, was phenomenal, and even more beautiful than on the plateau - a panoramic view of snow-lined ridges and ...

According to Ryan's classmate and our pilot, this was the fastest plane available at the Palo Alto airport Back in October, Ryan arranged a fantastic date for us - flying over the Bay Area in a propeller plane!  At that time I was still really nervous driving a car (and had gone on the highway for the first time maybe a week before), but somehow I ended up in front in the co-pilot seat and I had the chance to fly the plane for about a minute. Needless to say, it was a very frightening 60 seconds for the 4 people on the plane.  Thankfully, the beauty of Golden Gate Bridge emerging from the morning mist helped us quickly transition out of that heart-in-throat moment. Here are some highlights from that gorgeous morning. There were a gazillion little buttons and controls. But I was most impressed by the communication with the traffic control tower... I had no idea what they were saying to each other with all the numbers and letters! Take off ... here we go!!! ...