Hiking, Gem Show and Chicken Feet

Alisha says: The last few weeks of happenings include mountain biking, road riding, trail running, seminary teaching, an epic hike, a trip to the gem and mineral show and trying new foods. The weather has been pretty incredible lately, it has been perfect hiking weather so we got out and hiked a few trails that are close to where we live. Last Saturday we had planned to go mountain biking but then last minute we changed our minds and decided to do a hike that we had talked about for a while and wanted to do before we left Tucson. We hiked up Finger Rock trail and then made a loop out of it and came down Pima Canyon. It is classical Catalina mountain range hiking, tough, steep terrain, with great views. Although the distance of 12 miles really isn't that long, the hike still took us just over 6 hours of hiking time because of the terrain with a little under 5,000 ft. of elevation gain and 5,000 ft. of elevation loss. I was pretty tired by the end and my legs were sore for about a week but we were both glad that we did it.

Some of Dave's family came down from Phoenix recently to go to the famous annual Tucson Gem and Mineral show. This year the focus was on Silver, Gold and Diamonds. We walked around and around looking at all sorts of neat things. I liked the red rhodochrosite and Dave enjoyed the case that showed replicas of all of the famous diamonds (although he made it clear that he still hates diamonds).

For Dave's school it is the time of year when the U of A brings out potential candidates for the program next year. We hosted one of the potential students. We went out to eat with all the PhD students and candidates for Korean food (two of the current students are Korean). Luckily they helped me pick out something delicious and I ate my whole dinner with chop sticks. The next day for lunch we went out with Mike and Cherry who are Chinese for dim sum. Dim sum is kinda like a brunch type meal, anyway so they bring around these carts that have various items in small portions and then you just pick what you want and they stamp a paper at your table to keep track of everything. Then they put it in the middle and everyone shares it. Dave and I tried lots of new things, some were tasty but I have to say that the chicken feet that I tried were not. Dave would not even try them and that was probably a good idea. I don't know they were just bony, grisly and tasted like feet. I do like to try new things though so it was a fun lunch that we followed up by going to see the really funny Lego movie.