Jeff and Jan Moore

Jeff usually publishes our blog posts, but I wanted to share some photos from my recent business trip to Tunis, Tunisia. I really enjoyed the food and the warm, friendly people. The Tunisian land developer that I worked with was a gracious host. He showed me much of the city and the culture, and we had some fantastic meals. With him I toured Sidi Bou Said, a lovely blue and white village perched on the cliffs overlooking the Bay of Tunis, and also we drove around the Roman ruins at Carthage.

On Saturday I went around on my own to the Musse Bardo. The Bardo is housed in a 13^th century palace that has been expanded and restored throughout the centuries. It has a fantastic collection of Roman mosaics as well as mosaics from all the main stages of Tunisia’s history. I also braved the Souk, the lively market place located in the old part of Tunis referred to as the Medina. The trip was great and I hope I’ll have an excuse to return to Tunis someday.

The last two weekends have offered some super skiing, but unfortunately not many good photos – seems the same weather that brings deep snow also commonly brings the flattest of flat light. So flat in fact that some have been observed skiing unknowingly into tall white landscape obstructions. Anyway, her are the few photos worth sharing. Thanks to Kerry for the one of me.

This space is dedicated to all the nice new ski stuff that Kerry left on the train.

Here’s also a rear-facing POV video I made. I’m trying this out and I think it will make for some fun shots when the weather is a little better. Sorry its a bit hard to see, the latter half is better than the first.

a run with jeff and kerry from Jeff on Vimeo.

For those of you who may not get to see pics of the ever changing Hank (or HR or Henry), here are a few photos from my family taken over the last month. Hank’s about 6 months old now, eating sweet potatoes, getting some new teeth, and generally smiling a lot – we got to see him over Christmas.

This was a special kind of Swiss weekend with mountain chalets, homemade wine and bread, schnapps in the morning, witches on the piste, glaciers and mountains and nice moraines, and best of all ski touring. This was I guess our first real ski tour, and was a perfect first tour – not too steep or hard, great snow, and lots of Wallis sun.

Thanks to our hosts Valentin, Othmar and Rosmarie, and Patricia and her family for a great weekend.

I fly in a helicopter about once per month now, so I had the idea recently to put together a compilation of different helicopter themed photos for a blog special. But then I saw that I really didn’t have that many helicopter photos…

So yesterday we were working down at Randa again, and I shot the two helicopter flights on video. They dont really capture the good bits of the flight – the sinking stomach when it drops over the edge, the blood in your face when it banks hard, or the stinging blow of snow on your face when it lands – but they’re the best I could do. If you have 5 minutes free watch em, if not the second one is better. A bit different from the videos is that we normally fly in the smaller Llama helicopter, which is more or less a truss with an engine and a gas tank; yesterday we flew in the larger fancy model.

(note that if you double click the video it will take you to youtube, where you can choose ‘watch in high quality’ to the lower right of the video)

We also worked a bit:

My new look for the week…. thanks to my new goggles and a sweet face plant onto the icy piste. First run of the day and I was just screwing around on a flat cat track and wham, face first into the snow. Blah. The 4 pics are in chronological order; the birth of a shiner.

Today Jan and I went ski touring for the first time here in Switzerland – ok for the first time at all. We had purchased this new ski gear in the US, but waited until this winter to use it. For the first time out we needed an easy place to walk around and get a feel for the new skis, so we went back to the same place that I first skied here: Flumserberg. Some of todays key words – rental car, morning snow, french fries, a looooooong skin, deep fresh snow, afternoon sun, face plant, rope tow, tacos.

not much for pics, but we went skiing today at Engelberg.  And it was pretty great.  We have something like 200% of the normal snow for this time of year, and its been super cold so the snow is hanging around.  We went with our new Scandinavian ski instructor (also a MSc student), Andreas.  One thing is very apparent at this moment: we’re definitely not in shape for skiing.

To round out the cross-country Switzerland super visit, we went west and south to Luzern, Zurich, Geneva, Zurich and finally Locarno. We climbed tall towers, drank lager beers, circled the Locarno town square, and ate a few uncooked eggs. We had a great time and we miss them already.

Thanks to Lisa for some of these photos.

The snow has officially come to Randa, but work continues… We thought maybe 15 cm had fallen, but it was closer to 75 cm. It was interesting to step out the helicopter and sink past your knees. Good time to install our new instrument covers.

oh and a big thank you America. Expats all over the world are coming out of hiding this week.