In May, 2022, my dad was admitted to the hospital with a shingles infection that resulted in a shocking acceleration of his Alzheimer’s disease and he has been in memory care since then. He is currently at Emerson House in Portland, OR. (shout out to Adinah, Jose, and the other caregivers!)

It has been a tough few years but for the first time, Erin and I have a window of relative stability at home to once again explore. So tomorrow, Dec. 31st, we are headed to Nepal where we have tried twice already to visit, but have been thwarted first by the 2015 earthquakes, which killed 9,000 people and devasted the infrastructure, and second by their first Covid-19 lockdown in 2021. Now it’s finally happening, and we decided that this adventure promises to be too epic not to memorialize on the blog. So here we are.

Oh, and in the meantime we have both tired of Portland as our home for a variety of reasons. Depending on the day you ask it’s because of the drug problem, homelessness, spike in obnoxiously loud trucks and motorcycles, and/or the weather.

In November we rented out our house on the street where we’ve lived for 17 years and have been house-sitting via Trusted Housesitters for the last two months (click here for a discount code if you need pet care or want to stay for free around the world while getting good kitty or doggie snuggles). And thanks to my mom we kept our outdoor gear in her garage and our bed in my childhood bedroom so that Erin and I have a home base in between sits.

A quick note about the blog! We ditched Flickr for the Microsoft OneDrive cloud. After we completed the move of 10,000+ photos in November we gave each other high fives and canceled Flickr. Then realized all of our previous blog posts were linked to Flickr. So yeah, many of our old posts have broken photo links (we’re working on that). Also, late last night I thought I’d try a new “theme” for our blog only to discover that WordPress “retired” our old theme so there was no going back. So yeah, everything looks different and we’re at our wits end. But you know, lower the bar…