Red Tile Roofs

A large part of Prague's charm is it's red tiled roofs.

There were other ways of getting around than our feet, which were hurting.  We took the tram up the hill to the Strahovsky Monastery and walked down to the castle and into the old town where our hotel was. 

 

Other people tried these novel ways of seeing Prague.

The Monastery Library was one of my favorite spots of the trip.  Again, no interior pictures allowed and I was sorely tempted to cheat on that one.  They just had hall monitors everywhere so there wasn't much opportunity.  The amazing interior room was in the process of renovation (another theme of the trip), but they let you step into the construction doorway so you could see the extraordinary painted ceiling and the stunning rich redbrown woodwork of the walls and moldings.  The inside of the bookcases was painted a sky blue color that coordinated with the ceiling.  There was a wide hallway filled with display items collected by the monks over time. that connected another beautiful room full of books.  The second room also was not accessible except with your eyes.  NER thought a study station created to allow many books to be out and accessible via rotating shelves was just what he needed.  It did look pretty useful.

The hallway was more amazing than one would think at first glance.  One of the hall monitors provided a guide to the hallway written in English for us to read.  Elephant trunks, a Dodo bird, many kinds of apples were among the goodies preserved by the monks. One wall was books, beautiful books, all bound in white or variations of white.  Perhaps shaded by the amount of use they got.  They were medical and chemistry and law books of their day.  The "best" books were at the end.  They had a collection of books about trees.  Each book was a box made to look like a book and made out of the wood of the tree (with the bark still on it) and containing sample leafs and nuts or fruits of the tree.  I suppose thirty or more trees were represented. For those of us that love trees and books.... These were delightful!

Time and Times Past in Prague

We just returned from an amazing two weeks in Eastern Europe with NER helping us get around.  We may have been able to do part of this without his help, but I don't think we could have survived or experienced Ukraine the way we did without his language skills and know how.    We visited Prague, Cracow, Lviv and Kyiv with a few hours in Amsterdam on the way home. 
It will take several posts to share the fun.  I will try to not share the fatigue.  There was plenty of that as we adjusted to the time difference and traveled by overnight trains with middle of the night border crossings.  These destination cities have also become destinations for parties of young people well into the night.  One place we stayed provided ear plugs, a thoughtful and useful gesture.

Prague was beautiful, amazing and overflowing with tired tourists.  Some of the pictures do not tell that story as we got up early to avoid crowds.  We were well tired by our last day there.  The first day and first thing was a trip to see the clock.    

  
I love that the feast days and the zodiac co-exist on this face of the clock.
We got there just as the apostles were coming out of the window for their hourly tour.  We went back another early morning to understand the mechanisms and information provided by this beautiful timepiece.

No family vacation in our family is really complete without a stop in a cemetery.  In Prague the cemetery was the Jewish Cemetery that is part of the Jewish synagogue tour.  This cemetery was used for centuries.

   You don't get to take pictures in the synagogues but it is rather interesting and the first one we went into had written on the walls the names of people who were killed in the holocaust of WWII.  People still leave tokens on the headstones, perhaps for family but perhaps to remember and honor the victims.  This unknown woman was a French speaker.

 

This building was the building of the burial society and housed artifacts related to burial - not as gruesome as it might seem.  As you can see the crowds are increasing. 

Enjoying the Family

July gave us a chance to spend a little time with our out-of-state kids.  We didn't take many pictures, but we enjoyed being with them.

We stopped in the "burg" to see Katie, Martell and Sally.  We didn't take the camera to the geology museum, but we enjoyed watching Martell give a tour to some cub scouts and seeing the exhibits and the famous fish tank.  Before the fish died due to a power outage.

We enjoyed playing with Sally and watching her play.  We brought the little grocery cart that has been living in the rafters of the garage for many years and Sally liked pushing that around.

Martell had class, but we talked Katie into going to the water park with Sally.  It was a  quick visit - just before nap time.  But we loved watching her explore firmly attached to her mother's finger. Her hair doesn't look that red indoors or even when it's wet indoors, but a little damp in the sunlight it seems quite red.

David and Mike and Nate enjoyed some good laughs and went to Sacred Harp singing.  We went to church in N&M's ward.  M played the organ and N taught the priesthood lesson.  Good to see them contributing and to meet people in their ward.

 

Sue and Mom/Grandma went to a quilt show.
We enjoyed taking the grands around to various places including Erin Thomas' marriage to Travis Mumford.  It gave us a good idea of their amazing strength and vitality and insight into their limitations in this 10th decade of their lives.





+One the way home we stopped at Shoshone Falls.  We've never stopped there before, but would like to see it when the water is high.

The last stop was one or our traditional favorites, Deadman's Pass overlook in Oregon where we ate our cheese sandwiches and drank our V8 juice and stretched our stiff legs.

Rasmussen Family Reunion

All of the first two generations were there
       Many of the next two generations were there.... Sixty-five or more in all.
               Some were missed and some are yet to be born...

Gretchen planned generational challenges.

Kathy! Kathy! Kathy! - she gets the cookie from her forehead into her mouth without hands!

Ann was the winner with four cotton balls transported by nose

Shooting pop can pyramids with rubber bands

Three legged races and cherry seed spitting were for the greats

Gary and Mignon Mills Family

 JD & Ann Hancock Family

 David & Paula Thomas Family

Paul & Leslie Williams Family

David & Sue Rasmussen Family

UMMMMMM.......

David gave me a chocolate tasting party for my birthday.  About nine varieties of Chocolate arranged from light to milk to dark and darker.  yummmmmmmmy. A few friends enjoyed the initial party with me and  I've taken the leftovers to several other little outings with friends.  They were all amazed.

The Birthday Boy and his Day

My Birthday gift to DER was a day away - it certainly was a selfish gift.  It was a good restorative day.
We went to Ebey Landing State Park.  Ebey Landing was once one of a series of WWII era gun emplacements intended to protect Puget Sound.  It is not the most extensive of them.  It is smaller than Fort Casey and Fort Worden.

One of the entrances  to the facility used to store ammunition and materials is shown here.  In this place all the small rooms are off to the left of this one short hall.  We didn't explore much because we hadn't brought more light than DER's keychain flashlight.  The exit is shown from the inside below.  Obviously some efforts have been made to remove graffiti

When this emplacement was built, they made brick tree wells to allow existing vegetation to thrive as they covered the concrete bunkers with soil.

 There are warning signs all around the hillside that caution you about falling into one of these overgrown tree wells.

Along the networks of bike trails you will see this structure that was once support for the water tower, small wild flowers and Rhododendrons in the wild.  We were there too soon in the year for a beautiful display of blooms.  Another year.....  I didn't take pictures of the heavy "tinder" in an area that is just left alone.  As most of our hiking is on maintained trails, this was a surprise to me.  This was a second growth forest.  There were no real tree giants to be seen.

We had a picnic with a view of a shimmering sea.

 

We didn't cook but I liked the shape of the rusty curlicue on the grill that was available.

A walk in the woods led us to a small lake being fished by a bald eagle.

And we enjoyed walking along a typical rocky Puget Sound beach populated by ribbons of kelp. driftwood, seagulls and....

.

......the endless fascination of seafoam waves approaching the shore.

Quieter Pleasures

The "wow" factor may be what we first notice, but there is a quieter beauty.

 The beauty of small things,

 of small things multplied many times to make a rich carpet of oxalis.

 

The beauty of changing conditions. 

Here a late frost browned one camellia bloom, 

but the later bloom is was protected by a slower maturation and is beautiful.

And the beauty that shows us the passage of time in unlikely ways.

There is beauty in the small fresh new growth of red leaves against a sage green trunk  and






  

 the irregular shapes of trees against the sky.

One of my favorite small unobtrusive beauties are the textures of
tree bark.

Then there are the weeds....

 Who knows what beauty lies unnoticed when all we see is the wow factor.