I love this picture. I took this one our second day in Hoi An, in the early morning just as the shops were opening. Hoi An is gorgeous, and well known for it’s tailor shops and silk goods of all kinds. When I took this shot, I was walking around on my own  just peeking into the shops and enjoying the relative quiet of the day. After the shops open, it gets a little intense to stop and look at anything because if the shop owners spot you checking something out, they immediately approach you to make the sale. But walking around at 8 in the morning was like a whole different world: there were almost no cars or motorbikes on the street and half the shop owners were still setting up, so I was able to take some photos uninterrupted.

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I took this picture at the beach in Nha Trang. We had just gotten off a long bus ride from Dalat, and it was a hot walk over to the train station to see if we could get a train out that same day. All told, we only spent a few hours in Nha Trang, but we did make it to the beach just in time for the epic rainstorm you can see brewing on the horizon. We could see the storm, but everyone on the beach was still playing volleyball and soccer and swimming with abandon, so I assumed that maybe the storm wasn’t going to head our way. But come it did! It went from sunny to instant downpour in seconds. The rain felt great, but we had all of our bags with us, and I worried about testing their waterproofness.

We ended up grabbing the first taxi we could find, and spent at least 3 minutes trying to explain to the driver (who spoke no English at all) that we wanted to go back to the train station. I even tried saying “choo choo” out loud! Leanne eventually got our guidebook out from the trunk (getting even more soaked in the process) and we were able to point the train station out on a map. Despite that breakthrough in communication, our driver took us on the most confused journey through Nha Trang in the complete opposite direction of the station. We made it eventually, and spent the next several hours hanging out at the park across the street with a pleasant drizzle making the heat a little more bearable.

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While down in Bishop for my sisters wedding, I had the opportunity to check out a real California history landmark: the ghost town of Bodie, CA. Bodie had been a booming gold mining town in its day before being nearly leveled by a series of fires and ultimately abandoned. The eerie thing about the town was the amount of stuff left behind. The houses still had furniture, clothes, books, even bottles of drinks. All just left behind to stand as a testament to the strange frontier society.

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Boots the Kitten grew up all of a sudden! My sister brought him to visit for Christmas and he’s a much bigger, but still wonderfully playful kitty. He’s also quite devious now, my sister warned us that he really enjoys stealing her socks and eating them and sure enough he tried to steal some of mine too.

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