Summer Holidays are here.

Edna closed the June books in her office today so summer break has officially started! We are heading for the airport in 2 hours--back in BC in 48 hours. In that regard, we probably won't post many blogs in the next six weeks. Here's a closing shot--we'll 'see you' soon.

Birthday Balloons

When I was a kid (this is Dave typing), I heard about kids who had ponies at their birthday parties (and other urban-legend related tall tales). These photos were taken directly across from our house. Kyla's friend Sacha had a birthday party, complete with two rented clowns, lunch at a fairly posh restaurant, and a ride in a hot air balloon. Just another day in Kazakhstan, the land of contrasts.   

Proxy Post

Little mosque on the prairie. This is a test to determine if I can post images via a proxy; thanks Michael.

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New Post

Greetings. China occasionaly blocks people's access to Facebook, Myspace, and Craig's list, while here in Kaz, Blogspot gets locked down for months at a time.

So we haven't been able to post updates, regularly.

However, we will be back in BC in early July and we hope to see as many people as possible before we come back in August.

Thanks for following our blog; hope to see you soon.

44 Degrees North, 79 Degrees East

Check out http://www.confluence.org/ if you have some spare time. Its an e-project designed to visit and photograph every confluence (where a line of longitude and latitude metaphorically cross) on the planet. The image above is our bee-u-tiful Lada Niva. It drove Streeter, Brock, Mims and myself 4 hours north of Almaty and 100km's across the Kazak steppe (prairie/desert), in order to claim a never-before-visited confluence.

The image below is my not-so-bee-u-tiful friend Streeter, waking up in the morning (5:30am) on the steppe, after sleeping under the stars.
We started driving again at 6:00am arriving at the confluence a few hours later. All zeros on the GPS equals success. Check out the horizon below. Past the hazy drumlin in the distance, there is NOTHING, in any direction, for 1,000 km's.
This is the gang: (left to right) Streeter, Brock, Mims.

To get a better sense of the project, visit the site. While you're there, visit 55N and 127W. Brad and Lauri: in ten years, we should do another one with your kids (who weren't even on the radar screen when we did the first one). Cheers!