One goat, two goat, three goat, four...: Travel

This feels kind of like one of those posts from many years ago, when a lot of my photos were travel pictures. But it’s much more unusual given the last few years. Which was on one hand nice. And on the other, I do really like staying home and not running in a million directions, and last couple of years had provided a nice dose of that.

Last December we went to NY to visit Saba and Safta and see Rafi and celebrate Great-George's 105th birthday

Then I started doing more field trips again for work.

Here are some pictures from Dairy class (cows and cheese and milk and ice cream, etc.) this winter/spring semester.

cheesemaking

milk bottling plant

butter plant

cheesemaker

milking cows

ice cream

wintery farm tour

calf

We watched parts of the winter Olympics from home

And then I took a strange trip in March helping tour Danish agricultural students around California (it had been a potential job/side-gig, but it turns out that guiding bus tours of 50+ 18-20 year-olds visiting America is way less appealing than groups of 10+ 25-30 year-olds on day trips (or even overnights); although still cool to see large production of onions, carrots, broccoli, avocados, and the like).

apparently young Danes on a bus in the U.S. drink a lot of soda...

April was a Passover visit to New York.

May I went by myself to a conference in Georgia, and Safta was around for a lag ba’omer campfire while I was gone.

When school let out in June, all of us took off with 11 of my students for a tropical agricultural class in Costa Rica. The university where we were originally supposed to go (in 2020, and now in 2022) turned out to still not be open to visitors covid-wise, so the trip ended up being a little more itinerant than planned, but interesting. Highlights included coffee farms, cacao/chocolate, sugar cane production, pineapples, dairy/cheese, botanical garden/fruits, and a homestay with a family full of grandkids. Also wetlands and volcanos and wildlife and all that stuff.

met up with an old friend from Peru who lives in Costa Rica now

volcano crater

coffee growing on hillside

Noa in the rain

cheesemaker

bananas

other fruits

cacao beans drying

cacao beans being taken out of their fruits

waterfalls

stores

bananas

sugar cane

fire for boiling cane juice into sugar

smaller scale sugar production (panela)

taking pictures of sugar production

pijuayo

pineapple fields

wetland birds near Nicaraguan border

egg sac on a leaf

Shortly after getting back from Costa Rica, we started more non-work travel – to Vancouver to my brother’s wedding party and an associated visit to our old stomping grounds in Washington State – complete with hikes (including a surprise rattlesnake encounter that required bush-wacking off the trail to avoid it), cherries, salmon swimming upstream, and views. Li’el took to sketching parts of our travels, including portraits of friends we visited briefly in Oregon on the way back.

Noa likes to set up elaborate scenes with cars or stuffed animals and put necklaces on them and act out books we have been listening to. I think the best travel version was when she expanded her repertoire of play items/characters to include statues of Jesus and Mary (from our later-in-summer trip to MN)

Soon after this, Oren and Noa decided they'd had enough and found spots under and around the table to go to sleep while Eytan and Li'el schmoozed their way around the guests.

rattlesnake!

bush-wacking to get around rattlesnake

cherries!

salmon!

our old house (now painted blue)

kids' old daycare

our other old house

making tortillas with friends who had a dancing horse (below)

picking cherries

Last trip of the summer was Minnesota, for Mike’s cousin's wedding and a first return visit since 2019. We drove rather than flew, which was easier than when we did it in 2018 – kids are notably older, and very happy with the (long) Wings of Fire audiobook series. Visited some friends along the way, and found that the well-remembered yurt we had stayed in in a park in Ohio on the last half-cross-country-trek had been taken down over the last couple of years.

we got to stay one night in an RV on the way

cow sculptures at the University of Minnesota

and a gorilla sculpture at the Como Park zoo (where I think the best part was when we saw a monkey and Oren exclaimed, "Look, he's using his prehensile tail to wrap around the rope!")

Oren's half-birthday at grandma Kathy's house

And Mike ended up standing in as the wedding officiant

plus a lake at the park where the wedding party was held

friends in Wisconsin

In agricultural news back home, cows are growing and grazing, sheep got sheared, and inspired by Li’el’s class and a long-pondered interest, we tapped a maple tree for the first time this winter for syrup. Horseradish grew in the synagogue garden and we fought groundhogs in our home garden and synagogue garden every time we swooped back in from trips.

garlic drying

horseradish

maple tapping

pre-shearing

post-shearing

Mike’s dad and stepmom moved next door this spring, trying to downsize and needing a little extra support health-wise. Larry came out in March while Sandy got their Minnesota house ready to sell, and then we kind of traded off all summer who was home and who was gone.

Birthdays included Oren's 7th in February

Li'el's 9th in April

Noa's half-birthday (and Timber's 11th) in May...

And Eytan's 11th in August

In addition to Larry and Sandy's arrivals, Grandma Kathy visited in April, with all sorts of highly anticipated baking projects.

And the kids created a "restaurant" where you ordered through plastic tubes through the window from a rainbow-colored menu.

There were some hikes (although not as many as last year when we had more stay-home time) and some mermaid costumes and some knitting and Eytan took “Ranger Snackoon” from his classroom on a series of outings around town. He also participated in a study at University of Pittsburgh about math and brain development and got to have a picture taken of his brain (MRI) while playing number games…

School was a little more normal this year.

Eytan, Li’el, and Oren’s classes all had class plays.

Eytan joined the reading competition team in spring.

Noa and Li’el got to be part of “reading buddy” groups together.

And strings players (3^rd graders and up) got to play all together again.

There were some spring festivals...

A broken thumb...

And some play time with friends

During the few weeks this summer we weren't traveling, we managed to go to a place called Idlewilde, about an hour from Pittsburgh, which was sort of like an amusement park for slightly smaller kids.