KOSOVO, LITTLE MIRACLES Part 2

I've had a six-week hiatus from posting about our trip to the Balkans while Life Happened (e.g., school started, I had a major publishing deadline, I had some church assignments, we took a trip to Colorado, etc. etc.) It's time to go back to Kosovo and finish up.  

As I discussed in my first post about Kosovo, we had a truly outstanding guide named Inan who spoke beautiful English and spent the day with us in Prizren. One of the many highlights of the day was a short hike he took us on to visit the medieval fortress that overlooks the city. 

On our way up, up, up!

Although it is now largely in ruins, a few sections of the fortress constructed much later than the original Byzantine walls are still intact.  

COLORADO: THE GREAT MUSHROOM HUNT

As I mentioned in my previous post, Bob takes our sons to Colorado every summer to go hiking. Sam, like Bob, enjoys going to the summits, but Andrew is more interested in what can be found below treeline: mushrooms.  His interest in mushrooms began in a botany class at UCLA, and a few years ago he joined the Los Angeles Mycological Society, where he has learned even more about mushrooms at lectures, at fairs, and on field trips.

Andrew and I would follow Bob up to treeline (although sometimes he got there hours before we did), and then for the next four to six hours we would slowly make our way back down to the trail head, searching under trees and bushes on and off trail for, primarily, the somewhat elusive King Bolete mushroom, the most prized of the Colorado mushrooms:

COLORADO SCENERY

I have been buried by work for about the last month.  Not only did the semester start three weeks ago, but I had a HUMONGOUS deadline with the publishing company I work for set for September 9th.  I have been sitting at this desk in front of this computer with my eyes glazed over for far too many hours.  The good news is that Friday afternoon I completed the deadline three days ahead of schedule!

I finally have a few minutes to work on a blog, something I haven't done since August 8th.  That may be the longest I've gone without blogging since I started up this little venture.  We do currently have house guests, but they are self-sufficient and I've slipped away for a few minutes to finish this off.

In early August, Bob and Andrew and I took a five-day trip to Colorado just before school started for me.  This is a trip Bob and Sam and Andrew usually take together, but since Sam couldn't go this year, I was the lucky sub.

Bob's goal on these trips is always to climb as many Fourteeners, or mountains in excess of 14,000 feet, as possible.  There are 68 in the United States, and he has now climbed 30. On this trip, he climbed Quandary Peak, La Plata, and Yale.  (He would have climbed Princeton as well had I not been along, but that's a story for another day.) Because on Bob's blog he writes extensively about his experience on each mountain, I decided my posts about our trip would focus mainly on scenery and people, so this post and the following one will be picture-heavy and text-light.  

Andrew is less interested in bagging a summit than he is in bagging some wild mushrooms, so generally he and I would follow Bob up to tree line (about 12,000 feet in elevation), and then make our way slowly back down the mountain, looking for highly desirable King Boletes, truly the king of wild mushrooms. I'll cover our mushroom harvests in the next post.  

And so, without further ado . . .