Tbilisi Botanical Gardens

The other day I had several hours between lessons and decided to walk to Narikala Fortress in Old Town Tbilisi for some exercise. While I was climbing around on the fortress walls I peered down over the edge to see a network of bridges and manicured flower beds. "What is this?!" I exclaimed to myself.

It turns out I had found the Tbilisi Botanical Gardens. I walked along the walls looking for a way down. I came upon a turnstile but was given the international symbol for "NO! Don't go there!" (which, in case you're curious, looks like 2 forearms crossing in front of your chest) by a man sitting in a little guard house. So I left. Defeated.

The following weekend our friend Brad took us, along with his 2 children, down a bumpy back street to the lower entrance of the gardens. It was worth the wait. Tucked away behind a looming fortress and hidden among a snake-like network of streets is a gem among the crumbling foundations of this city.

A 1 Lari entrance fee ($0.70) gets you access to a beautifully manicured network of paths, flower beds and streams. Gurgling irrigation pools trickle past you along the paths as you climb past collections of trees and flowers (virtually garbage free, except for this one cave which has a pile of trash in it...alas, the rule of 80%)

The kids were told that they could not pick any flowers except dandelions. As a result, we all carried fist fulls of yellow weeds by the end of the hike. We did our part to clean up the landscape.

We even spotted a couple of people practicing Tae Chi among the trees. As we wrapped around the stream to head back toward the cars one of the kids pulled up short and said, "LOOK!" I looked down to see 3 pink sequins on the ground. Leave it to a 4 year old girl to find the smallest, shiniest pink object in this huge garden.

As we neared the parking lot a noise, which I had mistakenly took for some very large and aggressive birds, became louder. We crossed a foot bridge over the stream and came upon a frog pond (ahhh...so NOT huge killer birds then.) These frogs were having a heated debate over who could boast the biggest "lily pad." Can you spot them?

The Botanical Gardens has made our list of "Places to take people who visit us in Tbilisi."

Of course I said yes!

She said yes!
Originally uploaded by SethTri

The much anticipated story of "How Seth Proposed."

I had arrived in Durango, CO the night before. After racing to make all my connections Seth picked me up at the airport and I could not have been happier to see him (actually, I may have been happier to see all my luggage had made it, but I digress.) We went back to our friend's home and met up with some more great friends whom we hadn't seen in a while.

Thursday morning, January 31, we piled in the cars and headed to Purgatory Ski Resort for a day on the mountain. Being the baby skier that I am I headed toward the "all green" lift while everyone else went to go throw themselves down the mountain the most challenging way possible, with the plan to meet up for lunch at the bottom.

After lunch I had a private lesson scheduled for the rest of the day. As I was heading out to meet my instructor Seth said (ever so casually), "Hey Meg, why don't you have your instructor drop you off at the Powderhouse (a restaurant halfway down the mountain) and we can do the last run of the day together."

It sounded like a good plan to me so I headed out to get schooled on some skiing. Around 3:30 my instructor and I realized that we had lost track of time and were running late. We high tailed it to the Powderhouse. I saw Seth standing, very patiently, by the signs directing skiers to various runs waiting for me.

After quick introductions and thanks for a great lesson my instructor took off and Seth and I turned to head for the bottom of the hill. After a few turns, however, he headed over to the side of the slope and called out, "Hey babe, come over here for a second."

I made my way over and side stepped into the powder next to him.

"I love you." he said.
"I love you too,"

BAM! After luring me in with his sweet talk he pushed me down into the powder, tackled me and started a tickle fight right there on the mountain. Tackling and tickle fights are par for the course with us and after we composed ourselves and caught our breath, we sat up again laughing.

Seth looked at me smiling and said, "I want to make you happy."
"You do make me happy."
"I know, but I want to make you happy for the rest of your life." he said, as he reached into his right pocket and pulled out a ring box.

At this point I may have blacked out, but I think I started mumbling something along the lines of "Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God..." When he opened the box I dropped back down into the snow screaming in excitement and flailing my arms around in snow angel fashion. At which point a member of ski patrol happened to be riding up the passing lift and called down, "Are you OK?"

I realized that I had not actually said "Yes!" yet. I sat up quickly, took Seth's face in my hands and said "Yes! Yes! Yes! We are going to be such a great team!"

To which Seth replied, "You're gonna have to take off a glove."

I stripped off the gloves and put his beautiful ring on my finger and we headed back down the mountain to meet all of our friends who were waiting for us at the bottom. Only 2 of Seth's closest friends knew what he was up to on the mountain that afternoon so the crowd was thoroughly shocked when we walked in.

Beers were bought, photos were taken and hugs were shared all around.

This story has been told many times already and each time I am reminded how fortunate I am to have the love of a man who would take such care and make such an effort to create a moment that was so true to our personalities. With a backdrop of the snowcapped Rockies, in a pile of snow, he asked me to marry him and I said yes.

My Wild Ski Trip

Me and Ouray, CO
Originally uploaded by SethTri

First, as many have heard already, during this ski trip I proposed to Meg. Meg's working on putting together a post describing how. I'm usually leaving it to her to do it because she's so excited. Why not me? Well, I kinda saw it coming, so while I'm still thrilled that she said yes, I never had any doubt that she would. My tone is a little less "OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!" than hers. So, she's a little more fun to listen to tell the story.

Back to our regularly scheduled blog entry... (not really so regular, sorry about that.)

Meg & I went our separate paths on this trip. I left a day earlier than she did and very different routes. My first endpoint (by plane) was Chicago, where I jumped into a (more expensive than anticipated) cab ride to the train station. After a 3 hr wait due to the train being a little frozen over in spots apparently, we got on the 4 hr ride to Jackson where my ever so patient family were waiting for me. Got to my Aunt's house and passed out.

We spent the entire next day talking and catching up. Had some good food and I told the family the game plan for the trip. Then, after dinner, we all piled back into the car and headed to the train station so I could be back in a hotel in Chicago a little after midnight. Pass out there, back in the airport by 7 for my 9:00 departure to Salt Lake City (SLC), Utah.

Pull into SLC where my friend Stephen is waiting for me. We grab lunch at an Italian Deli, check out the Black Diamond shop and meander our way down to Park City, UT where we found a room in a hostel with 2 beds for relatively cheap.

Why only relatively cheap? 'cause for those of us who don't pay attention to Hollywood much, apparently during the last couple weeks of January, there's this little thing going on in Park City called Sundance. Hotels are packed and expensive, parking is insane, but no one is on the mountain because they're all watching movies.

On Wednesday night we did manage to snag a movie. A kinda funny French flick, but we both were struggling to stay conscious for the last 30 minutes. Thursday we hooked up with a ski patrol buddy of Stephen's who got us discount lift tickets to The Canyons and took us into the backcountry. So glad we got the discount tix, because full price for only 3 rides seems insane. Seth's a pretty cool guy who relocated himself from Maine to do the fun stuff in Utah. In a lot of ways I'm jealous. But his work schedule is pretty insane and I don't have the guts to just drop everything and live the lifestyle. (That and
Meg would probably kill me now.)

Thursday night our buddy Joe showed up. Friday the three of us went to Park City (only 150yds away from the hotel!). We skied pretty hard and threw Stephen down some pretty gnarly stuff. He's a trooper though and managed to get down most of it without serious problems. Joe took a pretty good digger that kind whacked his noggin' a bit while trying to mess with Stephen, but that's about as bad as it got.


Apres ski found us hanging out with 6 - 8 former Tampa Bay Cheerleaders. (Some of them clearly VERY former, if you catch my drfit.) But we all kinda laughed about it and Stephen met a ski instructor for a lesson, so it was good. We had dinner, found Joe's knee had swollen to the size of a grapefruit (but no pain) and passed out.

Saturday, Stephen went to a lesson, while Joe & I warmed up on black diamonds. Joe's knee wasn't bothering him, but was still pretty swollen. My head wasn't in the game (jet lag + a few days of hard skiing taking their toll) and I took a doozy of a tumbler. (2 cartwheels followed by 2 somersaults, and a loss of about 40+ feet of vertical.) That woke me up and we really started hitting it again. Joe's knee made him bail by noon and Stephen and I had a good time reinforcing his lesson while I worked on comfort with speed and being fluid. Another awesome day.



Sunday, we bid farewell to Joe at the airport while Stephen and I headed to Ouray, Colorado with the goal of ice climbing on Monday. A major weather system started to hit us though, and when we woke up on Monday morning, 3 passes were closed between us and our final destination (Durango) with a forecast of a long delayed opening, so rather than climb, we drove. What should have been a 1.5-2 hr drive took us 5-6 hrs and 200 miles to get around the 4 closed mountain passes. But we got to Durango, met up with friends and hot tubbed. It was good.

The weather system continued to pound the region and we went skiing on Tuesday, got a bit of ice climbing in on Wednesday, more skiing on Thursday and Friday. (Engaged on Thursday too on the mountain.) We moved into town on Friday where Durango's snowdown was going on. Snowshoing on Saturday morning, Follies (skits) on Saturday night, followed by Superbowl on Sunday. (Not very often I can watch a Spartan catch the winning touch down in a superbowl!)

Monday most of us were planning on leaving. Some had planned on the 6am flight 'cause they had to work on Tuesday and wanted to get to DC at a reasonable hour. We chose the 1pm 'cause we weren't in a hurry. Unfortunately, it had snowed 18" overnight (making that a total of 65" over the course of a week!), and the 1pm was the first flight that wasn't canceled. We got back to DC where my parents were waiting for us and drove us into Arlington.


Dentist, shopping, hang out with my folks, hang out with some friends that couldn't make it into Durango and the next thing you know we're back on a plane to Tbilisi. We did a lot, skied a lot, talked to a lot of people and had a blast. One thing we didn't do: sleep a lot. Wow, I think we're still trying to catch up on that.

Thanks to all for helping make it as great of a vacation as it was. Craig: sorry you couldn't make it this year. It was epic again. How does next year sound?

Snowshoes in Georgia

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Originally uploaded by SethTri

This weekend, it dumped 8-12" over about 48 hours. For Christmas, I had given Meg a set of snowshoes and a down sweater and this was the perfect weather to try it out. We packed up the car at 12:30 and were snowshoeing at Lisi Lake by 1:00pm. (It took us a while to get 'em on the first time.) We spent about an hour hiking around knowing we couldn't get lost because we could always follow our tracks home.

We then sat down and ate some lunch and just enjoyed the peacefulness. We then headed home but had to turn back when I realized I no longer had the camera on me. Apparently when someone (who will remain nameless, but it wasn't me) decided to tackle me in the snow, the camera fell out of my pocket. Not to worry, we back tracked, had more fun hiking in the shoes and found the camera.

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Originally uploaded by SethTri

Wow.. this was fun. With all the fresh powder on the ground and more falling,the entire place was spectacular. So peaceful and quiet, you'd have no idea we were surrounded by city on two sides by no more than half a mile.

I'm a big fan of the saying that photos speak more than words, so here's a bunch just to show you our awesome day.

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Originally uploaded by SethTri

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Originally uploaded by SethTri

Simple Pleasures

Has this ever happened to you...

Your significant other returns from the grocery store and when you meet him outside to help unload the car he says,

"Guess what I found at the store today? Something we've been wishing we had for months."
"You didn't!"
"I did! Open the hatch and see for yourself."

I open the hatch to see the biggest, most beautiful kitchen garbage can I have seen since we left the States. I literally hugged my boyfriend in the garage while giggling like a kid who just got tickets to the circus.

If you haven't had the opportunity to live in a foreign country, you may not know the joy that a full sized garbage can will bring to your heart. Allow me to explain.

For the first 5 months of our life in Georgia we have been making due with a kitchen garbage can that had a flip top lid with foot pedal action. This would have been fine, except each time you put your foot on the pedal you push the can a little bit farther into the corner so that eventually the lid only flips up 1/3 of the way before the sides of the lid hit the wall.



This too would have been a minor issue if we could have simply reached out and lifted the lid by hand. Unfortunately the garbage can stands about 2 ft. off the ground so we were perpetually leaning over, one foot on the pedal, right elbow propping the lid up a little farther while trying to peel a carrot, cucumber or potato.

Even this would have been manageable if we could have found a garbage bag that would actually fit tightly around the lip of the can. Instead we had to settle for bags that we could only secure around half of the lip, leaving the back half of the can exposed and, invariably, this is where the carrot peel and cucumber guts would end up.

Unfortunately the line of sight to this can, with it's 1/3 open lid and 2 ft. off the ground height, was such that we couldn't actually see that the carrot peels and cucumber guts were missing the bag. It wasn't until a slight odor began to develop that we would realize our error in aim.

All of this would have been tolerable if the can could hold more than a gallon of garbage. As it is we were taking little bags of food waste down 4 flights of stairs to the garbage can outside every day.

Enter the new kitchen garbage can.



Last night, while preparing dinner, Seth walked over to the garbage can with a cutting board of pepper guts and onion peels, slid them easily (and accurately!) into the bag, closed the lid, looked at me from a standing position (instead of stooped over) and said,

"Man, this is nice."

If you find that you are taking the small conveniences of daily life for granted (like the perfect garbage can, light switches on the inside of the room and toilets that flush with a handle) consider an international move or simply a visit with us in Georgia.

Epilogue: The original garbage can has been relocated to the laundry room where it will continue to scoot its way into a corner and mock our attempts to collect drier lint.

The Rockets Red Glare...

Last night we found out exactly what Georgian's mean when they say that New Year's is their biggest holiday of the year. They don't celebrate Christmas on December 25 and the Orthodox Christmas on 7 January retains the religious celebration and avoids the commercialism that the US holiday has. So New Year's is the big one. Keep in mind that this is a society who's sober non-drinkers would give American alcoholics a run for their money.

So last night, Meg & I went to a friends house for a low key night in and to avoid the alleged celebratory gun fire that may be a risk downtown. What we got was quite a show. Tbilisi doesn't exactly have a municipal fireworks show, but the denizens put on a show that beats most fire departments. There were huge volumes of roman candles, bottle rockets, M-80s and all sorts of other stuff. The volume of explosive material going off almost made it sound like we were in a war zone.

We had people launching roman candles horizontally from their tenth story apartments at other buildings, neighbors throwing firecrackers into the backyard, and the sounds of AK47 and pistol fire going off throughout the area.

Also, as we write this, Meg finally realized that it's now 2008. It only took her 16 hours... she's a pretty smart kid. :)

Fresh, Cheap Powda

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Originally uploaded by SethTri

This past weekend, Meg & I headed up to Gudauri to get some skiing/snowboarding in and just to get away from the city for a few days. We stayed in a really nice hotel, that included two meals apiece for pretty cheap.

The lift was a 5 minute walk from the hotel and the powder was awesome. This was the first weekend Gudauri had been open and they had about 2-3 feet of powder that had generally been untouched except for a few "groomed" areas. Saturday was spent getting my board back under my feet and playing in the powder with a few USAID guys I bumped into on the mountain. Sunday I put on the new splitboard got a few turns in with that, then split it apart and hiked up a bit. It's reasonably easy to take the board apart and make it into skinable skis, and I'm sure with more practice I'll get faster.

Once I got accustomed to the new board, it proved its value. Despite the split down the middle, the board does its job and keeps me on top of the powder MUCH better than my shorter resort board. In bounds the board doesn't respond as well, but a good portion of that is probably due to the fact that it's longer and I've pushed my center of gravity way towards the back for the powder. Skinning isn't exactly as fun as riding down hill, but it's certainly easier than hiking and being able to access untouched powder in the future will be great. That said, on Sunday we didn't need the skins to get to the powder, as they opened up the high lift and the steep, deep untouched snow was awesome.

Meg rented a pair of skis (for 30 Lari! Less than $20!) and skied the easy slopes for a while and felt pretty good about it. This place is a little over 90 minutes from home and will be a great place for most of the winter.

Here's a shot of the high lift, there are more shots on flickr that you can find by clicking on the flickr badge to the right.