Asha

When I was on the train coming home from Anapa I went through the usual dreadful September routine of trying to form my schedule. It's nice from one one hand, because now I have a lot of people fighting over me, but the problem is none of them know their schedules yet. It worked out that I got home on Tuesday night, but didn't have any meetings until Friday, where I'm overbooked. Not bad. A little time to unwind. Then Natasha said that her parents were back from their trip, but that her mom didn't start work until Friday. hmmm... sounds like a potential babysitter, getting better. We decided that to try putting together a camping trip for two!So Natasha and I are woken up by a very snuggly Yeva early in the morning. She had been trying to stay up waiting for me, got all dressed up in her prettiest clothes and beads, but fell asleep. When she got up she was so excited, that she pulled me along through 3 minutes of every game and every toy she could think of to play with. Adorable! Her latest thing is "Look what I can do! Can you do that?" From jumping off beds, to making farting sounds with baloons, the whole being able to do thing is a real big deal, her eyes filled with delight each time she finds a new thing she can do, amplified by the possibility of somebody else not being able to yet. Meanwhile, Natasha was free from Yeva, so jumped online to search for destinations and electric train schedules. Mom Tantsura agreed to take Yeva for a while, so after the fun and games, we took her to grandma (who she adores and hadn't seen for a good while) and ran home to start throwing our stuff together.We made it just in the nick of time for the 2:00 train headed to Asha, a town at the very edge of the Ural mountains. (During the ride I was trying to show off my knowledge of knots by teaching them to her. She's a good learner and still remembers the Butterfly bend, figure 8 follow through the cool loading hitch dad taught me that I don't know the name of.) Natasha had been there twice, me never, it took only 2 1/2 hours to ride out there, and it had great cliffs, several nice creeks and various vegetation and wildlife - perfect spot for our needs. Good job Natasha! Another bonus is that we had great cell phone connections the whole time, and because we were going in the middle of the week there was practically no one else there.It didn't take too long to hike through the town and into the beautiful mountains. We decided to find a site early on, so that the next day we could hike in another hour to get to the cliffs. We found several good sites near one location, so we put our packs down and decided to scout around. We ended up coming back to the same place, but along the way we came across a wonderful patch of our favorite kind of mushroom, Opyata. We went back with our camp cauldron and were able to fill it about half way with the mushrooms. We also found the most perfect toadstool ever, like the ultimate powerup for Mario, but em.. well we didn't bother frying that up.We fried up the Opyata along with some potatoes, veggies and canned beef for a better than planned dinner.
There was a good water hole right by our site, so we froze our feet off bathing in it.During the night we had a bit of adventure with some wildlife. We'd passed up a great site because there was a monsterous ant hill next to it, but I would have traded the ants for mice any day. I was really obnoxious about making sure that all the food and bags were away and safe, and that nothing edible in anything we didn't want chewed through. We hung in on a line between two trees about 7 feet above the ground. Before we went to bed we saw a little critter nibbling at our bottle of juice. So cute. So innocent. The next morning we found that this very mouse (at least we think of it that way) had crawled up the tree, across the line and down onto the 40 gallon trash bag, chewed it's way into it, and then proceeded to take two bites out of everything until it hit the chocolate where I pictured him transforming into templeton at the fair, then used the last of his strength to chew an exit hole (which by the way was much larger than the first one), Natasha was woken up by the sound of his exit. Then he went off to brag to all his friends.

Then after breakfast Natasha enjoyed looking at all the different types of birds, woodpeckers especially. We packed everything up, then hiked up to the cliffs. pretty intense hike.On the way back we saw a cool little red frog and a chipmunk. Then we made it to the town, bought some icecream and missed our train by one minute. ehh.... I guess it's like a tradition now, missing our trains coming home from camping trips. Last time the alarm didn't go off because the phone froze. This time we just didn't think we were in too much of a rush and forgot to look at the time. At this time I took out my phone so Natasha and I could play backgammon while we waited 3 hours for the next train, and realized that all of my pictures were deleted. I got angry and refused to have my phone in sight, which prevented my letting natasha borrow it, which made her angry. pretty comic. Once we got in the train I got over it, and we enjoyed playing backgammon for the trip (which was really awesome and I won by the way).