stuff, and stuff (i hate blog titles)

We had a pretty chill resting week in Hood River, Oregon. Adapting to the time change and recovering from the craziness of the trip has been interesting. It's impossible to fall asleep at a decent hour, and impossible to get up at a decent hour, so regular bed hours for me were typically bed at 3AM (fall asleep around 4AM) and get out of bed around 10 or 11AM. It's starting to get more normal though...

Tomorrow (today actually) we fly to Michigan where we'll be for 15 days. We'll visit with Bethany's family and also photograph our first 2 weddings of the year, so that is exciting.

A lot of people have been asking about our trip photos... Well truth is, we haven't even looked at half of them! There are thousands upon thousands of RAW files (about 600GB total) sitting on many hard drives, and even just thinking about starting this project is overwhelming. It will be fun though. We are looking into leasing an office in downtown Hood River so that we can have all our computers, hard drives, cameras, etc etc etc away from home and into a workspace. I would love that. I'll keep you posted.

The plan for our trip photos is to make a huge very involved slideshow with awesome local music from each country, and maybe even some voice narration. It is a big project, and will probably take 4-6 months to finish. Also we want to make fine art prints, and have a gallery show in Hood River, and possibly another in San Diego. I'll be updating as things progress. Patience is a virtue! :)

These are a few photos from our last day of traveling, flying from Beijing China to Portland Oregon.

Terminal 3, Beijing China

Goodbye Asia!

Check out those weird first class seats! I think they actually fold down flat so it can be a bed too.

Clouds and smog over Beijing.

Welcome to USA, but not really... This was actually in Vancouver, Canada. We went through USA customs there. Strange.

I have never been more tired in my whole life. We had stayed up for sooo many hours, and my eyes hurt so bad just trying to keep them open.

Just after we landed in Portland.

First time stepping on US soil (or pavement more like) in 6 months!

Blaine's plan for weight loss: Travel and eat a ton of food for 6 months

"Blaine's plan for weight loss: Travel and eat a ton of food for 6 months"
Sounds like a spam email you'd get along with the Viagra and OEM software emails that litter everyones inbox.

Its strange though, Bethany kept saying I was losing weight during our trip... I didn't think much about it until I weighed myself yesterday. 162 pounds! When we left for our trip I was around 185. Thats 23 pounds!

All I did on this trip was eat lots of food, especially in Thailand and India! Honestly, I think I just have a big worm inside me thats eating all my food because I've had this weird stomach ache recently.

Ok I'm hungry, time to go feed my worm.

time change

Safe and sound in Hood River, Oregon now! Adjusting to the time change has been interesting. Like I said in the last post, we watched movies the whole time back on the plane. And Bethany informed me she actually watched 5 movies in a row, not 4!
The first night we back we went to bed at 10PM and got up 4:30PM the next! Thats 18.5 hours of solid sleep, a record for both of us!
But last night I didn't fall asleep until 4AM, then I was wide awake at 7AM... so strange.
We've been loving the home cooked food and I've been taking photos of it all (I'll send soon Mike, haha)

Here is a photo I took at the great wall a couple days ago!

North America

We just landed in Vancouver from Beijing for a quick layover before we fly to Portland in a little bit. Bethany and I are totally delirious... it hurts to keep my eyes open right now! Both of us didn't get a wink of sleep during the whole 12 hour overnight flight because they had so many choices of movies to watch, so we both watched movies the entire time, haha. I watched 3 in a row... first was "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" and it was realllly depressing and sad, but entertaining. Second was an old movie called "A Perfect Murder" which was a little cheesy, but overall pretty decent for being made 10 years ago. Third was "There Will Be Blood" which was about Americas oil boom in the 1920's. Very slow movie, not too much happens, but it makes you think a lot about greed and it's repercussions.
Bethany watched 4 totally different movies, I think they were all lame chick flicks! :)

great wall was great

Well, it's crazy that today was the last day of our 6 month long trip! I'm really excited to be heading back home, but really not excited at the same time. It's a strange feeling. I won't go into all of it right now because it's 2:30AM in Beijing and I need to go to bed. Maybe one of these days I'll write a general conclusion of my experiences and some things I've learned... but then again, maybe not! If you've followed my blog for any amount of time, you know I much prefer photos over words.

But anyway, what a way to finish it with a 10km 4 hour hike on the Great Wall of China today! Mike, Andrea, Bethany and I all got up early (thanks Andrea!) and took a series of buses and taxis to an area of the wall that is a bit further, but much less touristy than the most popular place where everyone goes. Apparently at the touristy place, it's impossible to get a photo of the wall without several other people in your photo... so that didn't sound ideal for us.
We had quite the opposite experience and only saw a total of about 10 other people during our 4 hours of hiking!

We finished up with an awesome Chinese dinner, yum.

USA here we come!

PS- Bethany got some incredible photos and wrote all about our recent Annapurna Circuit Trek, check it out!

First Day in Beijing, China

The smog here is the worst I've seen anywhere!

The airport is SOO huge. You can actually see the atmosphere and smog inside the building!

Sweet hair!

There are Olympic countdown signs everywhere

Tienanmen Square

Easy access!

How bout that photographer pose?

Off to China we go

for the last 4 days of this insane trip! Next post will be from Beijing!
PS- I added took this snapshot because we seem to ALWAYS the last people on the plane. Bethany always says I wait for my "personal invitation" onto the plane. Why not though? Who wants to be inside that big stuffy hunk of flying metal any longer than you absolutely have to?

a few portraits from Nepal

I had a chance to quickly browse through the photos from our Annapurna Circuit Trek, and wow, there is a lot of them! For now, I just picked a few portraits to post that stood out. The people and culture on the trek were fascinating. They live such simple lives up in the mountains and it's so fun to get a glimpse of it. Unfortunately when you do a trek like this, you're just passing by and you don't get to spend much time and get to know them.

Nepal has been one of our favorite countries yet, and we'll definitely be back here in the future, hopefully many more times.

Bethany and I have a few more days here in Kathmandu, then we're off to Beijing to see the sights and visit a few friends, then we're back to the states on April 22nd. Very soon!

Now for a few portraits-

back to civilization

For those concerned (Mom and Dad, Mom and Dad) we are safely back from our trek and having a nice relaxing time eating lots of good food in Pokhara, Nepal.

The trek was absolutely beautiful, and such a great experience all around. I took about 50 gigabytes worth of photos, so I have a ton to edit through. Hopefully my portable little "photo downloader" thing works ok and all the photos are actually on there, like it says they are....!?

We'll be back in Kathmandu tomorrow evening (where our computer is) so I'll try and post up a few images and reply to lots of emails too.