Burning Up the Middle East

With a break from standard operating procedure, EvilGM (currently typing) will be filling in an entry after a recent trip to the Middle East.

I have been to Jordan several times in the past, but I’ve never had the opportunity to visit much of the country. This time around I took two days to do a little site seeing. I spent the weekend at the Kempinski Hotel overlooking the Dead Sea (البَحْر المَيّت or al-Bahr al-Mayyit in Arabic). From what the locals told me it is 20km across and about 70km long. In case you forgot it also sits about 420m (1,378 ft) below sea level, which merits the status of the naturally lowest place on the surface of the Earth . You could clearly see the West Bank on the other side in the day, but nighttime lights made it easier still.



Mimicking the locals, I went over to an urn containing a very dark mud, which is used to coat the body before going into the Dead Sea. Although you can pay people to do this for you at the spa, I did my best for free on shore. After slathering the stuff on you sit out and bake in the sun for a while until the mud is not so moist anymore. My initial reaction was one of mild disgust, but when a local Jordanian urged me to “try it,” I gave in. Some people pay thousands of dollars for the privilege, and since most of my cost was paid for me, why not? (Kind of like the time I tried deep fried lamb brains on a previous trip to Jordan. One sampling was enough. I can explain it in gory detail if you’re ever so inclined to hear…)

It took about 10 minutes for the mud to bake in place. I was blacker than I had ever been in my life. The mud is a burnt gray/brown/black mix, even more so once the moisture goes. I walked into the Dead Sea, albeit with some difficulty. I had heard tales about being able to float in the water without any effort, but the experience was still surprising. As I walked into the water I found that it took great effort to remain on my feet. Once I passed my belly button I could no longer stand up and allowed gravity and the waters to carry me safely to my back. Rubbing off the mud took a little while, and the results gave me markedly smoother skin, even on my elbows, which for most guys (real men don’t use lotion) is one of the roughest spots on me.

I tried to “stand up” in the water and was unable to do so for more than brief moments. The salt just pushes you around like so much flotsam. It was somewhat unnerving that although I could force my body to do what I wanted, the environment simply refused to go along. After regrettably getting a touch of water in my nose (it burned for quite a while) I waffled over to the shore and rinsed off. The place is so ridiculously salty (9x the ocean) that you can smell it and see it everywhere. I also found out that Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority are contemplating excavating a canal to connect the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean or Red Sea so that they can replenish the rapidly lowering sea. It is currently depleting at a rate of just under 1m per annum. For the interested you can check out the following link for the Two Seas Canal.



Another piece of interest is Mount Sodom (جبل السدوم‎ or Jabal Usdum in Arabic), which is right at the base of the sea. Per local legend, it is the resting place of Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt for returning to Sodom despite God’s warning to flee. The entire mountain is made almost entirely of halite (rock salt) and is a scant 5x3 miles. The little pillar/spire is called Lot’s Wife by locals.



One of the must see attractions in Jordan, and a World Heritage Site, is Petra (البتراء or Al-Butrā in Arabic). Many people have seen a small part of it when they watched the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Petra is mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls as Rekem and was spoken of by Eusebius, Jerome, Pliny the Elder, Josephus, etc. as a trade hub for a Semitic caravaneer group. You don’t need to know the history to explore and appreciate its beauty. I bought the services of a hotel driver and off we went. Even though it took 3 hrs to reach the site, it was still very much worth it.

After some initially boring structures, you run into the natural, narrow clefts in the rock leading to the main sites inside. The rock clefts run for a good ¼ - ½ mile. Coming out of the fissure you quickly run into the structure used in many movies, as seen below.



The beauty of Petra is that virtually all of the structures are carved right out of the rock as a single piece. It is evident that some pieces were added to the outsides here and there, but most of the various locations at the site were carved from a solid rock face. The natural beauty of the stone, coupled with the obvious skill of the craftsmen, has embodied magnificence in a palpable form rarely seen in this plastic age. If you ever have the chance, I urge you to visit.




One final note on Petra was that you can see the majority of the sections worth seeing in roughly 4 hours. At 1330 the group I was with decided to go and visit the location known as “The Monastery” or Jabal Al-Deir (#24). The map we had been given was fairly accurate so we didn’t fear the seemingly 600m trip from #22 to #24. You should always fear what you don’t know.



Just like in the movies that have the grizzled veteran do “one last job” I should have known that nothing ever works as planned. The map should have mentioned that the drawings for this final section were not to scale (everything else had been!) If they had drawn the map to scale, it might have looked something like this:



Our very own Bataan Death March got longer every time we stopped someone to ask how much farther it was. “We gave up and just turned around,” was our first group's response. Eventually we got, “Oh, just another 20 minutes.” Five minutes later, “Oh, just another 20 minutes.” Another 5 minutes goes by, “I’d guess about another 25 minutes or so.” Eventually we got down to 15 minutes, then 10, then 5, then sweet, sweet victory. (It’s always worse when you can’t see the finish line.) 600m turned into 45 minutes uphill in the sun. I drank 1.5 liters of water on the trip up. I noticed the price of water increased the further up the hill you went. Eventually I gave in. They could have charged a lot more than 2 JD (~$3) for the half-liter of water and I would have gladly paid it. At the top I rested in a tent, bought a Fanta and two Snickers bars and they have never tasted so fine. This little excursion added another 2 hours onto our day and helped me get toasted to a blistering red veneer on both arms, hands, and my neck, SPF 45 and two applications be damned. I suppose 6 hrs in the Arabian sun would be enough to do anyone in. A week a later and I’m still red…

Nature, red in tooth and claw

So, it's spring here in England. The apple trees have bloomed and gone to leaf.
The lambs are out and frolicking.
And, of course, the local vixen has probably had her litter of pups. (The above photo is entitled, "Why I love my camera.") This means she takes chances to get food that she wouldn't otherwise, so once again, we're short one chicken. And again, this is due to the fact that the girls got sloppy closing the gate, leaving it open for only one day -- all it took for the fox to come and take Blondtilla. This also means that Ginger has watched as another of her roommates became dinner. We've renamed her the UnEatable Ginger Brown. On one hand, this is been beneficial as we were planning on giving the chickens away next week, and Blondtilla was going to be hard to shift as she stopped laying to molt (replace her feathers) and then went broody. She was really only good to eat. It might as well have been the fox since we certainly weren't going to eat her. Ginger is an excellent layer, having never slowed down, even in the winter. And since she's fox-proof, everybody should want her.

Lena believes that Ginger survived because Lena has been teaching her to fight. Lena calls her Ginga the Ninja. A ninja chicken is about the funniest thing I can imagine.
The egret returned to our garden to eat our koi from the pond. However, the fish are terribly smart (and they also are ninjas). So it's only frogs for the magnificent egret. (He's sitting on our back hedge in this photo).

Since the very first month that we arrived here in the UK, Lena has been planning her wedding to sweet Oliver. Oliver has been totally on-board with this, and they are dear friends, playing together almost everyday at school. We had him over to play today, and it was sweet to see them together.



When Ollie's mom came to get him, Lena gave him a little kiss on the cheek, embarrassing neither of them. It makes me sad to think that they may never see each other again. It seems cruel to move away, but then that's the nature of this job. It's what brought us here. It's what will take us away.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most;

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Tin Years

May 16th marked our 10 year anniversary which is the tin/aluminum celebration. This sounds miserable compared to a Golden Anniversary, but it sure beats paper. So in honor of this anniversary, we hired a tin can (i.e. bought the tickets) and winged our way to the City of Lights and Lovers - Paris. Ariel and I had each been to Paris, but never together. It seemed like the thing to do.

Unlike ten years ago when we were poor and basically had the low standards of poor people, we booked a suite at the Hotel Chambiges Elysées for our weekend away and made reservations at a fabulous restaurant on the Champs Elysées called Copenhague. The room was fantastic and sumptuous (with taffeta-upholstered walls, high ceilings, and oak paneling/mouldings accenting the room) while the food was blow-your-mind delicious. A colleague at the Paris Embassy had recommended the restaurant for a special night out, but when I read that it was all Danish food, I was a bit worried. It was all Danish, interpretted by the premier French chef Georges Landriot, and we were blown away. Ariel had fois gras twice, and each time was different and wonderful. I had reindeer that was so tender and so flavourful, it melted in the mouth. It was a memorable meal.

The ceiling of Les Galeries Lafayette

True to our eclectic personalities, the only things that I planned were of a macabre theme, and so first we went to the Père-Lachaise cemetery -- basically a really groovy Gothic necropolis.

Coincidentally, Ariel's watch died while we were there. (We did not bury it.)
While I had been to Père-Lachaise before, neither of us had ever been to Paris' catacombs, and in my amazing planning (which included taking no books of either the travel or language variety), I only wrote down which Metro stop we were to disembark from. We wandered around and finally went back to check the neighborhood map at the Metro station to find that the entrance was directly across from the Metro station -- we had passed it repeatedly.
We walked about 500 metres through the old quarry corridors until we arrived at the ossuary where we traversed another half kilometer surrounded by bones stack 6 feet high and 10-15 feet deep.

Sacré-Coeur Basilica at Montmartre

At the top of the Eiffel Tower, having weathered a dreadful storm in the queue, we saw, not a rainbow, but a raincircle. From our vantage point, the rainbow made a complete circle. We took the stairs down.

All photos taken by me, except for the ones taken by Ariel. Special thanks to Kira for taking our kids.

Unspeakable Things

A few months ago I was doing some research on the Mayas, and reading an article about their amazing genealogical records, I came upon this image. And when I first saw it, I thought, "I know exactly how he feels." Yes, that man's family history is doing unspeakable things to him, so badly he's had to go to the local Medicine Woman and get a salve. I don't care for family history. My grandmother and my mother-in-law both are quite keen on it, but I don't get it. My interest in my family goes only so far to the people I know or their immediate relations. But I don't care to know if I'm distantly related to the president (gosh, I hope not!) or anything like that. I don't care for name-dropping of the living or of the dead. Until last week.

Last week, it was my birthday, so I received the obligatory birthday phone calls all day long, often from members of my family from whom I don't hear very often, like my mother. So my mother mentioned proudly that my grandmother (the family history hobbyist) had discovered that we are direct descendants of Geoffry Chaucer. There was talk of divine birthright and the such, and I have to admit that there was a welling up of familial pride in my heart. I was tickled pink, and when I was off the phone, my grandmother sent me a guest pass to Ancestry.com so I could see for myself. Sure enough, there was a direct line of parent to child all the way down to me.

This in turn stirred up in me a longing for my oft-derided ancestral name-dropping, so I set about to learn of these famous people to maximize my bragging, starting with ol' Papa Geoff. G. Chaucer begat Thomas Chaucer who begat Alice Chaucer (m. 1430 to William de la Pole) who begat Jane de la Pole who be-- wait. Here's the problem. Because all of these people are famous, especially William de la Pole, there is a lot known and written about them. Like how William fought in the Hundred Years War, and on June 12th 1429 he surrendered to Joan of Arc at the Battle of Jargeau, and how 9 months later was born his daughter Jane -- to the nun he slept with the night before he surrendered. Only 8 months later did he then marry Alice Chaucer with whom he had only one child of note -- John. Which would mean that Geoffry Chaucer is my 21st great step-grandfather. Which basically counts for naught.

As I work my way down the line, the known history gets fuzzier and fuzzier as each person gets more and more mundane, so there may be other breaks in the line (but that won't be recorded by Henry VI's war historians), so I may not even be related to William de la Pole.

There are lots of contemporary descendants of Jane de la Pole who have found themselves no longer the distant progeny of the great bawdy poet from London (he never lived in Canterbury). And like them, I too feel like genealogy has violated me in some unspeakable way.

And now, I'm going to go get some salve cake.

The Sinister Infidel

Normally, I write about my own adventures, and only mention Ariel when he tags along. This is mostly because Ariel goes to boring and/or miserable places for the most part, and when he does go somewhere cool, he spends every waking moment in the Embassy or eating at groovy restaurants (which he tells me about over the phone at the precise moment when I've had Cheetoes (unfulfillingly) for lunch). But he never goes and sees/does anything cool.

Until this (next-to) last trip. The trip itself was to an rather uneventful location: Amman, Jordan. Ariel's been there once before, and true to form, he never plays the tourist (i.e. he doesn't bring me back anything nice). But he did have an adventure. In the airport Sunday night, he was carrying a big bag of heaviness with his thumb hooked under the strap, and the bag slipped off, pulling his thumb in the wrong direction backwards. He heard a melodious ripping sound that came not from the bag but from inside his hand. So the following day, he did what you do when you've ripped off your thumb and can no longer bend it -- he went to work. As the hand turned black through the day, his coworkers advised him to see the doctor. Not the embassy medical unit -- no, he went to the Arab Medical Centre -- yep, a Jordanian hospital.

Now, I have to admit that as far as Middle Eastern Countries go, Jordan is our #1 Arabic-speaking ally and is fairly Western, but let's be honest here -- when you think of a hospital in the Middle East, you ironically don't picture Mount Sinai.

This was how the conversation went over the phone (edited for brevity and humor):
Ariel: "The guys from the office took me to a Jordanian hospital."
Me: "Did they remove your thumb?"
Ariel (ignoring me -- the secret of our marriage): "They took an x-ray to see if I broke any bones."
Me: "Then did they remove your thumb?"
Ariel: "It turns out I ripped 2 of the 4 ligaments that hold your thumb in place, but didn't break anything."
Me: "So they removed your thumb?"
Ariel: "The doctor said I had what they call 'Goalkeeper's Thumb'-- it's a football injury."
Me (disappointed): "Football? So they didn't remove your thumb."

As you can see, Ariel came home with his x-rays in a groovy envelope marked with Arabic -- making it official. But no thumb in a jar (which I'm certain they would have confiscated in customs -- which would have made an even cooler story).

The bad news is, that as a result, Ariel learned to swallow pills. Yes, my grown-up husband couldn't swallow pills without gagging and spitting them back out. This is why it's by the grace of God alone my husband does not have malaria -- because he can't swallow his anti-malarial medication. But now, he learned on this trip (a sure sign that there was no Internet in the hotel room -- he must have been really bored). The reason this is bad when, yes, this is technically good news is that now I have nothing even meager of his to balance out my own craziness. When faced with potential mockery of my terrible phobia of human beings, I used to be able to retort, "Yeah, sure I'm deathly afraid to talk on the phone to the pizza delivery boy, but, um, you can't even swallow pills! So yeah!" Now, I got nothin'.

Just for fun, I added the word "kafir" in Arabic on the x-ray for a bit of authenticity. Yes, I have a list of weird neuroses, but can you write "Infidel" in Arabic? I didn't think so.

My Free-Range Chicks don't lay eggs

I don't watch the news, but I do pop over to CNN and Digg every once in a while to collect all the important stuff. So, I did hear in early April about a woman (Lenore Skenazy) who let her 9-yr-old son take the subway in NYC. I don't live in NYC. I have been to visit and found it generally to be a swell place. The only disagreeable people I found there were A) the street-side Rolex salesmen, and B) this one waitress in SoHo who looked at me like I was a complete idiot when I asked her how the heck it was 2:30 in the afternoon and they were still serving brunch. Look, I'm from the South, and I'm pretty certain that we invented brunch, and even if we didn't (we didn't), I'm fairly certain that a meal whose name is a portmanteau of "breakfast" and "lunch" should probably finish up before noon. I'm just saying.

What was I saying? Oh, yes, NYC. So I can't say that I would send Lena on the subway in NY, but that has a lot to do with Lena being completely unfamiliar with the city. If she had grown up taking the subway (Tube/Underground/Metro) daily, I think (I hope) that I would probably do the same thing that this woman did: set up a very controlled opportunity for my kid to show his mettle. I have done the same sort of thing for the girls, getting them accustomed to being home alone. When Lena was 5, I left her home for about 30 minutes. She was ill and a barf-o-matic, so I taught her my cell-phone number, had her practise dialing it, wrote it all over the house, and then went to pick up her medicine. She called me every 3 minutes while I was away, just tickled that I would answer when she got to make big-girl phone calls. That thrill improved her health vastly more than the medicine I was picking up.

This woman was dubbed America's worst mother, and I have to wonder at what sort of horrible standard of child-rearing that middle-class money affords us. Kids take public transport every day. They come home to empty houses. But are their mothers bad? Do we (and I mean the helicopter parents) think that if they really loved their children, they'd find a way out of the working-class tier they're in? they'd buy them a cell-phone? escort them to their friends' houses after vetting them and all of their immediate neighbors? Do we love our children more if we lock them in a very safe cage and keep them from any hint of danger? Our children have never been safer than they are in this generation. With the exception of the risks from traffic (and we all know my fear of children + traffic), the risks and rates of abduction, assault, and abuse have decreased since I was a child. The only increase has been in the reporting of isolated incidences, giving us a false sense of constant and imminent danger. This is why I don't watch the news. The very nature of my job as a mother is to make my job redundant -- my goal is to push these little chickies out of the nest and watch them fly away.

At this moment, I have no idea where my kids are. Okay, I have some idea. I could narrow it down to a postcode (we have a fairly small area covered by our postcode). Somewhere, Lena is riding her bike, and Livia is running behind trying to smack Lena with a bamboo pole. (This is an eccentricity that cannot be explained in this post). I let my kids climb trees until the tree top bends with their weight so high up. (Livia is famous for falling out of the apple tree three times in one week. The third time, she came in the house quite scratched up after I let her in through the front door. I was curious why she had gone around to the front door since the tree is in the back. She had fallen out of the tree, over the fence, into the neighbor's garden. To get out of their yard, she had to go through their front gate. We had a short moratorium on tree climbing after that.)

But I don't say this to brag. In all actuality, I am acutely aware that I am vastly over-protective of my girls. Here we are in the beautiful English countryside, surrounded by woods, streams, fields, and dozens of footpaths that spider out from our front door, and I will not let my girls wander as I did as a child (it should be noted that my mother was accused of teaching me "Independence through neglect.") I could disappear for the whole day if it were not for chores (which I admittedly shirked whenever possible.) I caught things and killed things. I hammered nails into trees, left the hammer out in the elements, and then tasted the pine sap (note: it may look and be sticky like honey, but it is not yummy) (2nd note: if you are the daughter of a forester, do not under any circumstance ever put a nail into a live tree. To this day, the sight of a treehouse makes me wince at the thought of how now that whole stand of trees will be lost to disease (so went the lecture I received -- and no, not a single one of our trees was lost)) (3rd note to my children: don't touch my tools.) Dana and I found a sleeping bat once, brought it home, named it, and then shrieked in horror when it awoke and showed how really uncute bats are. She and I built forts, swam in the pond, fished, mummified grubs (with the leftover raspberry candies that no one would eat out of Whitman's Sampler combined with perfumed filched from my mother -- no, I can't explain the logic behind the candy in the mummification process). Every 5th of July, I dug out any leftover powder from the bottle-rockets with plans to build a bomb (at this very moment, the NSA just flagged my blog). I whittled sticks into, er, um, sharper sticks. I also managed to whittle my thumb once. Only once. I fell on some lumber (upon which I was tight-rope walking), cut my leg on a very rusty nail, and probably needed a tetanus shot and some stitches, but when I went in to tell my parents, they were engaged in an afternoon "nap," so I risked lockjaw and gangrene rather than the embarrassment of admitting that I could hear them, and patched myself up with bandaids. My point? I had a great, wild childhood of solitude and craziness. I still love walking alone in the woods, taking things apart, and starting wacky projects with Dana that we never finish. And I now get excited about snow days, frog spawn, and bird eggs; bike races, books, and boys -- all the wonder and discovery that comes from being Free Range Children (or in my case, their mother).

Do you have a coat? Are you wearing trousers?

We had a few goals for this term break (all 24 days of it) and by the last week, we had accomplished next to none of them. The weather kept interfering, or our schedules, or any such excuse. One of my goals to which the girls had agreed was to go hiking here in England. So, Snowy Sunday we declared that unless it was actually pouring rain, we were going to get into the car and drive a few hours to some acceptable hiking location and not come back until we were sufficiently sore, tired, and blistered.

Monday we awoke to another dusting of snow, but the weather girl promised that the sun was going to come out for a mostly dry and cold day. I found a very lovely but long hike, and though the girls have never been on a hike of more than about 5 miles, when they saw that there were caves, they agreed. We scrambled to get everything together, including maps and food. Lena came down dressed in yoga pants, and I sent her back upstairs to change, specifically into something warmer. Those were almost my exact words for why she needed to change. Morning was wasting, and the girls with the food all packed went to wait in the car for me. The snow-covered car. I finally came out, dusted off the car, tossed the two layers of my winter jackets on the seat next to me, and we were off.

An hour up the road, 30 miles from the trail head, I pulled off of the Motorway to refuel and as I crested the hill of the exit, I could see ominous dark clouds in the direction we were heading. I commented over my shoulder excitedly that we might get to hike in the snow. There was a deep silence from the backseat until Livia spoke up, "I don't even have a sweater!" Turns out that the girls dressed and packed only exactly what I had mentioned to them. Lena had changed into warm pants, and they each had their thin waterproof jackets because I had told them to get them, but neither girl, while sitting for 5 minutes in the sub-freezing car under a blanket of snow had thought to bring a jacket. The flurries started while I pumped gas ($8.40 per gallon, so no whinging from you softy Americans), and I pondered if there was any way to salvage this trip. The service station sold beach chairs, 2-man tents, hard hats, and car-powered coolers, but no sweatshirts for the girls to wear under their rainjackets.
So we drove home.

Wednesday, we tried again. This time we packed 18 layers deep and somehow made it to Milldale, where we parked the car to begin our hike around Dovedale.
Dovedale is a lovely dale in the Peak District that is very popular with the tourists as it is a fairly flat 3 miles through the valley, so it tends to get crowded with yahoos. After passing a solitary twitcher, we did begin to encounter others along the trail.
Soon, the caves that convinced L&L to undertake this death march came into view.


As I said, this is a popular trail, and it isn't really a hike if it follows a flat, well-beaten path, so when we arrived at Ilam Rock, we turned onto the real trail -- that went straight up out of the valley (the path is the hardly noticeable dog-path that seems to climb up the side of Ilam Rock).

Halfway up we stopped for air and a bite of lunch when the trail cut sideways for about 10 yards. We were surrounded by gobs of wild garlic (all the green in the photo), and from our desperate hand-over-hand climb, we stunk in a sufficiently vampire-safe way.
We emerged from the trees, now at the top of the chasm which is Dovedale, having just climbed 115 meters (377 feet). We were tired, but happy for the view.

The top of the hills makes for great pasture, and we made the most of this being the lambing season by harassing as many sweet little lambs as possible.
Finally we arrived at the highest point, Bunster Hill, which is an ancient reef knoll -- a giant pile of calcium deposits back from the day when all of this was under water (which I'm guessing was last summer). We could see for miles and miles in every direction -- were it not for the fantastic haze. It felt like any minute we would just fall off the earth. L&L wanted to roll down and only abstained from fear of sheep poo, not because they would have rolled into the next county.

We hiked along the ridge line, heading toward the very prominent Thorpe Cloud (which as true blue Americans we had renamed Volcano Hill). Lena wanted to climb it too (though it is slightly shorter than Bunster Hill). But we hit a small snag in this plan as we hit the edge of this ridge...





Yep, it was almost straight down. An 85° decline seemed a little daunting to me, the voice of reason. But we still had to get down. Those tiny little people down there were walking on our route back to the car (on the far right, the nearly invisible dots are the people). We decided to take a longer, switchback route down, and before we set out, Livia stripped off her jacket, packed it into her bag, and then set the bag down -- from where it promptly started rolling down this hill. She went to chase after it (since of course she had also packed some of her non-outdoorsy treasures), and being the great mother that I am, I went sliding down the scree after it, finally stopping when I couldn't compete with gravity unless I surrendered to the gravity completely. The bag came to a rest on a little ledge, and I was able to retrieve it. Woohoo! Wouldn't want to lose any of those sparkly pencils Livia brought!
Near the bottom, we met up with lamp #2. A few weeks ago, I was in the car with a British lady, and there was a field near her home with many frolicking lambs, each with an individual number spray-painted on the side. I joked about picking out Sunday Dinner by number, and she replied that actually the lambs are owned and raised by the village butcher and last year she had #17, and he was delicious. Seriously.
There came a point in the trail when to proceed, we had to cross these stepping stones. Unfortunately, the first 4 were under fast-flowing water. Remember how I'm such a great mother? Yep, I carried each of my lead-bottomed children to the dry stones as they cried and wiggled in fear of falling in. Then, on the other side, they wanted to do it all over again. Of course. We saw a natural arch. Actually, this occurred at about Mile 6, so I wasn't paying attention and nearly walked right past it. Kudos to Livia for being observant enough to see giant limestone formations 30 yards from the trail.
When we were nearly back, I made the girls take a picture of me, just to prove that maybe I had been there. Between the two of them, they took about 10 pictures of which only this one was even slightly passable. To be fair, the camera kept doing funky things with the exposure for me too, so I can't put all the blame on the girls.

We had some really interesting conversations. #1: Lena is as deaf as a post. We had numerous times when I'd say something and she'd hear something totally different. Lena, "What are you eating?" Me,"Cough drop." Lena, "Pasta?" Then later I said we could go into the caves. She heard, "...go into the pigs." This became a running joke as there were about 7-8 caves during the course of the trip. #2: Lena refers to Snickers Bars as "Sneekers." This took a little getting used to. #3: We encountered a man fly-fishing. Livia promptly replied, "Why would anyone want to catch flies?"

We had a stunning time despite the lack of blue skies and the boot-full of stubbed toes from a rapid descent. The hike was a total of 7 miles. When we were near the end, I asked, "So, where do you want to go tomorrow?" Lena was raring to conquer something even bigger while Livia declared that she never wants to do this ever again. For the rest of her life.