First the bad news...a very dear friend lost her son in a car crash on the highway yesterday afternoon. He was in a car with a single sailor on the way home from the paintball field. The father was on deployment and is on his way home now. The Mom and daughter are very close friends...please pray for them. This community is amazing...everyone has really come together to support them.


Ok...enough of that. Heather and I did the Base to Base run yesterday - about 7.75 miles. I'm pretty sure I PR'd - only 1:16 - slow, I know, but still fast for me. My knee was very sore yesterday afternoon and today my calves are tight. But other than that I feel fine. Heather did spectacular, as usual. She was only a few minutes behind me. She thinks she beat last years time by a few minutes.

About a week ago we went for an awesome bike ride - about 30 miles with a good sized climb. There was 9 of us. We started from the Mineo housing (bout 30 minutes west of were we live) and climbed the hill to the town of Gramichele (grah-meh-kel-eh).


The ride started out pretty flat with just a few rolling hills. The crux was a about a 1,200 foot climb to the town of Caltigerone (cal-ti-jerome-eh).




The view from the top of the hill was inspiring - inspiring enough to take a water break and snap some pictures, anyway. The valley way in the back ground in the top left of the photo is where we started. You can barely make out the road behind the power line tower.

In the town of Gramichele, we stopped for a cappuccino and a raviola, which is the whole reason for the bike ride in the first place.

The town square, or piazza, is newly refinished and is just gorgeous. We stopped for a group photo after our snack.

















The E-ticket ride was the descent...1,200 feet of switchbacks, 6 miles in about 15 minutes. I was up to 37 mph at one point. Not since high school (La Jolla Shores Blvd from Torrey Pines) have I been that fast on a bike. I little sketchy but still fun.

The ride back home was short. We came down the hill fairly close to where we started. Looking forward to summer...

Ciao,

Bud

Backpacking on a Volcano in January

Nick and I went on an overnight hiking trip up on Mt. Etna with Boy Scout Troop 53. There's not many times that you get to say you went backpacking on a volacano in the winter.

The trail we hiked is part of a system that goes all the way around the mountain. The round trip distance was 7.3 miles and at one point we climbed over 4,900 feet (to 4,9001 feet.)

We set up camp and then went for a short walk to a lava cave. Did some splunking (sp? cave exploring) and saw a couple of wild horses. When we got back to camp, it started raining. Just light sprinkling at first, but by 8:00 pm it was coming down pretty good and turning to big, fat, honkin', wet snowflakes.

Nick and I have a couple of small pup-tents. The tents are new but the design is old and we didn't have a rain fly. They leaked. We gathered up our ground pads and sleeping bags and migrated to the rifugio. Nick fell asleep as we discussed all the character we were building while laying on a frozen conrete floor in a cabin on the side of a mountain in the dead of winter as opposed to playing X-box all day or something like that.

I tossed and turned all night - finally getting up to go pee at around 3:00 am. I pulled my boots on and wandered outside in my long-johns to a light dusting of snow and a crystal-clear sky filled with so many stars it was hard to find a constellation. If I wasn't so cold, I would have stayed out for a few minutes.

We were up at 7:00 am the next morning, had some coffee and oatmeal and started back down the mountain. What took us four and a half hours to climb up the day before only took an hour and a half to descend.

I tried to sleep on the 90 minute drive home, but was too uncomfortable. We got dropped off at the rec center parking lot a couple hundred yards from the house and hiked home with our packs on through the neighborhood. Nick went upstairs to our bathroom scale and weighed himself with and without his pack. His pack weighed in at 26 lbs - and that's after we had ate all the food and drank all the water out of it! Nick's only 85 lbs (soaking wet) so that was quite an accomplishment for him.

We had a great time and decided that by this time next year, we will be much more experienced and prepared for a winter backpacking trip on the side of a volcano.

Ciao,

Bud

This is a test...

This is a test... This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the Federal, State and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, the Attention Signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions. This station serves the Sigonella area. This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

Ok...it works. And I've migrated, too. Yahoo 360 had acted up a few times for us (as well as some friends) and I had been thinking of making the switch.

Heather and Tom were doing geography today:

Heather (pointing to the U.S. on a map) - "We live in the western hemisphere"
Tom - "No we don't. We live in the eastern hemisphere"
Heather - "Oh! Your right!"
Tom - "We live on the other side of the world!"

Meanwhile, Nicolas had jumped ahead in his history book and was looking at castles in Germany. Why do the castles in this book look so nice, while the castles where we live are just a bunch of big square towers? How cool is it that he compares our boring castles to the rest of Europe's cool lookin' castles?!?!

The smartcar commercial is a funny one we see on TV all the time. Smartcars are these super tiny little cars, made by Mercedes and the company that makes Swatch watches. They're all over the place here and kind of cool looking in a I-wouldn't-want-to-own-one kind of way.

ciao,

bud