CREEPY

OK this is just weird! Julia usually hangs around our flat on the weekends, and since I have to stay late at the church they ride with another person to and from church. When I got back to the flat on Sunday they had both changed into lounging clothes.



Now this would not be out of the ordinary at all, but when I looked closer I realized that the shirts they were wearing went together a bit too well.




Now this was completely unplanned, they both came out after changing and realized what they had done. It is bad enough that Josie and Julia act like sisters, but this is really just creepy!

The Tough Hike

I want to share some pictures from the toughest day of hiking in the Pyrenees. Out of the five days of hiking this one was by far the hardest for me. It was also the most fun. I don’t remember the name of the place, but the ridge you see in the back of all the pictures is part of the border between France and Spain.


This is the view from where we got out of the mini-bus to start our walk. You can see the beautiful waterfall in the distance. What you don’t realize right away is that those tiny little dots you can just barely see on the trail are people! I kept taking pictures as we got closer and the waterfall just kept getting bigger and bigger, the distance was very deceiving.


This picture gives you a little bit of an idea as far as scale, if you compare the people in the foreground with the tiny dots on the trail near the waterfall. This is also a good view of the seasonal waterfall locations: see the black streaks on the rock off to the right of the main falls, during spring thaw each one of those marks is the location of a waterfall.


There’s Josie, with a hiking pole in each hand working her way up the trail. I took this picture from the top of a boulder that was probably about 9 feet high, 20 feet long, and 15 feet wide. I love this kind of terrain; boulder strewn fields are some of my favorite places to play around. I love scaling the boulders and jumping from rock to rock. When I was growing up Mom always told me I acted like I was part mountain goat, I guess with that and her assertions that I was part monkey I’m wondering what that says about my Mother….LOL I know I will pay for that one.


As you get closer to the waterfall the trail gets harder. The path seems to get steeper with every step. Again in this picture you have a couple people in the foreground and if you look hard you can see tiny people on the trail. At least at this point they actually looked like people and not just little dots.


The closer I got to the waterfall, the more I started feeling like I was in one of those endless hallways, where you can walk and walk but you don’t seem to get anywhere. The sheer size of the waterfall was really amazing.


This picture really does not do the waterfall justice since there is no sense of scale, but it was just such a beautiful sight.


Here is a picture of me in front of the waterfall. See that look on my face, if that looks like pain it’s because IT IS!!! The last part of the climb was incredibly steep, only our guide, Rob and I went all the way to the waterfall. It hurt to do it, but I could not hike all that way and then not go to the waterfall.


This is not the best picture, but it does give an idea of how steep the final part of the trail is. You can also see that the trail disappears on this final climb. Instead you just have one huge scree pile, so your footing is always fairly tenuous. If you look really hard in this picture you will see a small white dot down where the trail turns, that is Josie.


I zoomed in as much as my little camera would and if you look in the middle of the picture on the right hand side you can see Josie standing there in a white t-shirt. Also if you look at the way people are going back down toward the trail it shows you how hard this terrain was. Instead of gingerly walking down picking each step and still sliding I decided to go down differently. I RAN! I just zigzagged down the hill angling toward large rocks that I knew I could used to stop myself if I had to. I think the other people thought I was nuts, and I know Josie did not appreciate it, but I knew what I was doing. Nobody ever believes me when I tell them that, I have no idea why!

This was not the prettiest hike we went on, but it was definitely the most fun for me, I really enjoyed it!

Soaring with the birds

While we were in Bareges, France we took one day off from hiking and went paragliding. It was something I had been looking forward to for several months. Since Josie and I had never done it before we decided to try a tandem jump with the instructor. The “instructors” picked us up in Bareges and drove us up to the top of the Bareges Tourmalet at the end of the valley. The drive up the side of the valley was much more dangerous than the flight could possibly be, it was easy to tell why these guys were paragliders and not professional drivers! Josie was white-knuckled!

Just a note: the first two pictures are not either one of us, just someone else that was out that day. Unfortunately I did not get my camera out before we took off and could not get to it while in the air.


Once we got to the top we checked the wind, it was no good on the Bareges side of the peak so we got back in the van and drove across the ridge to the other side. Once we got over there we loaded up with gear and hiked a little further up. The instructors prepped the parachutes and then we got strapped in. I will let Josie tell you what happened to her if she wants, although I’ll give you a big hint later on! Once we were strapped in and the wind was right Patrick (the instructor I flew with) kited the chute and we started walking down the hill. Once the chute caught the air it pulled us back hard, at this point it was time to run off the side of the mountain.



Once we were airborne it was absolutely phenomenal. Josie and the other instructor had taken off at the same time, and I could see them as they circled off to try and gain some height. The day was beautiful and the air was clear, I think there were 2 clouds in the sky. The only unfortunate part of the whole thing was that we were not able to find any major thermals, so the flights did not last as long as I had hoped they would, but it was still very much worth it. During the flight we descended about 800 meters. When we got to the landing area the only thing left to do was to quite literally “hit the ground running”. As you can see from the picture below Josie evidently runs different than other people….LOL

Good Friends

I have been promising pictures for quite some time, so now I have decided to deliver on that promise. I want to show you some of my good friends from Nigeria. Many of the people in the pictures are people I met at work, I don't have a lot of pictures of people from church; I will try for those in the future. About two months ago several of us met up at a restaurant here called Barcellos. We had a great time and just sat around and talked.



OK so Josie kind of stands out in the picture! Across the table from Josie is Ayo. Next to him is Duala, and the tall guy on the end is Gbenga (and trust me the guy is tall, if we stand around and talk for too long my neck hurts from looking up!). The dapper looking fellow in the suit is Fawaz. We were really having a great time, I'm sure the other people in the restaurant thought we were crazy, we were loud and laughing and just generally enjoying ourselves. We need to do it again, soon!

Unfortunately not everyone that was invited that night was able to make it.

This is Titi, and I love this picture because I think it really captures her personality. Titi is just over 4 feet (in heels!) worth of attitude! I love her to death, and we tease each other incessantly. Her favorite phrase when she talks to me is "You know, I really don't like you". Titi and most of the others in the pictures, work for contract companies that have come in to do work on our project. Titi had the misfortune of getting stuck in a desk by me for several months (and she may never fully recover!).

This is Eyiuche, she works for the same company as Titi. For the most part she worked upstairs, but she would come down and chat regularly. They have finished their projects, and so they are not around the office anymore; it has gotten a lot less fun since they left though. Eyiuche ,another Titi (their boss), and I had a long discussion one day as they were telling me about how much it would cost me to pay the "dowry" for my second wife. Not that I'm planning on having one, I can barely handle the one I have, but the discussion was quite hilarious. I will have to tell that whole story some other time.

Two other people that were not at our little gathering were Okechi and Femi, they definitely qualify as good friends and I would not want to leave them out of this post, I just don't have pictures of them.

This is our friend Victoria, we met her at church. Victoria was a student in Lagos at the Nigerian Law School. She was never very fond of Lagos though, she is originally from Abuja and she always tells us how much better Abuja is. She finished her schooling and I think has now gone off to BYU for a while. We love Victoria and we miss her.



OK I just wanted to share some of my friends here with everyone back home. As always I will keep trying to get more pictures to post.

Irony

OK so here is an ironic situation. I started this blog because I thought that I would keep it up-to-date better than Josie was doing on hers, well I think we have now proven that I am just as bad (or worse) at not updating my blog. I could give all sorts of excuses, but then someone would just make fun of those, so I will solemnly shoulder the responsibility.

Now on to the update:

Things have been pretty busy around here. Josie and I left Nigeria for an interim leave in France during the first part of September. We spent a week in the small village of Bareges. It was absolutely beautiful. We spent several of the days hiking in the mountains, we averaged about 10km per day. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. I will have to get pictures from Josie so I can post them, we loaded all of them on her laptop while we were in France.

After Bareges we went to Paris for three days. Originally we were supposed to fly directly back to Lagos after we were done in Bareges, but when we were making the plans we could not get a flight back to Nigeria for three days. (Begin sarcasm) So we bit the bullet and struggled through three full days in Paris....it was awful (end sarcasm). The weather was really nice and we got to see a lot of the sights in Paris, we did the standard touristy things just so we could say we had. We went to the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa, which is quite a small painting to have such a big deal made out of it! We toured the Egyptian artifacts and also an exhibit from Mesopotamia, it was really cool.

Every since we got back I have been trying to catch up. A week and a half ago I was called as the First Councilor in the Bishopric at church, for those that are LDS that are reading this try to control your shock and laughter! It came as a bit of a surprise, but we have a really neat Bishop and I am really enjoying working with him.

I think I am going to leave it at that for right now, I do have some photos to get posted, and if I don't forget I will put them on tomorrow.

Signing off
Binky the Slacker