Pining for the Fjords

Athena with her owl - this will be explained further below. Just be patient! As my birthday present to myself this year, I decided to pull the trigger on a thought I'd been having for the past few years - it was time for a new tattoo!   As some of you might know, I already have a few different tattoos.  I waited until I turned 30 to get my first one, figuring by then, I might have a decent idea of something I'd want on my body forever; my first piece was done by an artist in Casa Grande, Arizona (where we were living at the time), and it's a large osprey (to symbolize my Florida roots - the osprey is the mascot of the University of North Florida, where I earned my degrees, and you find them all over the state) holding a pair of running shoes in one claw and a pink ribbon with Mom's initials in the other (she was fighting breast cancer at the time). My second tattoo is on my right thigh, and it's the work of an artist in Peoria, Arizona; the main ...

Like in past years , the first day of November saw us starting the drive to Phoenix to participate in the annual Ragnar Trail run series, held at McDowell Mountain on the northeast side of the city.  From reading the blog, you know we've done this race many times before, and this year, our team ended up being four married couples: myself and Chris, Bryan and Jen, Amadeo and Christina, and Jake and Keeli.  While all of us have experienced Ragnars before (Keeli as a photographer and our resident nurse - this would be her first year actually running), we've never had this specific lineup before - we were excited to get there and spend time with our buddies! Getting ready to start! From left, Keeli, Jake, Bryan, Jen, Chris, me, Amadeo, and Christina I should point out that I took very few pictures this year, so an advance thank you to everyone for sharing their shots with me. We learned a long time ago that camping the night before is a must to securing a good ...

In Part 14 of the France blog posts, we were awoken in Mont Saint-Michel by crazy Brother Larry, who just can't be trusted with the abbey bells anymore. "If you could at all avoid having your car explode on this part of the freeway, we would oh so appreciate it. Merci!" Within an hour or so after leaving Le Mans, we found ourselves in Chartres, which was not only on the way back to Paris but also had a lovely cathedral we were interested in visiting.  I'd read there were parking lots near the cathedral itself, so we dropped the address for it into Google maps and let it go to town.  That's not a problem in countries like the USA where all of the roads are wide and mostly passable, but as we got into old town Chartres, we found out the Google lady had vastly overestimated our interest in squeezing even a small rental car down medieval, cobblestone drives. Um, this feels like a fairly tight fit. This is a two-way road, with an old l...