Happy New Year all! We got a bunch of snow overnight to wake up to on the first of January. So we went back to the Blackwell Forest Preserve and took some real wintery pictures, they are kind of dark but hey that’s the weather….. A great day for cross country skiing, ice fishing, and snow tubing as you can see on these pics. For more pics click here.
I recently had the chance to make a quick visit to Quito, Ecuador. The old town center was one of the two first Unesco world heritage sites. It is the best preserved historic city center in Latin America, a beautiful city with a lot of great atmosphere (apart from the exhaust fumes from buses and trucks).
The equator runs about 20 km outside the city center, this is the place to be in the northern and southern hemisphere at the same time.
Outside the city center, there is plenty of mountain around to do a lot of hiking and biking. I would take some time to acclimatize though before doing any strenuous exercise, the air is thin at 2500 to 4100 meters altitude. We did one mostly downhill ride descending 1600 meters on a mountain bike on one of the rocky and muddy slopes of the Pinchincha. Easy to do with a bike rental of 5 dollars a day, the guy who invented double suspension mountain bikes deserves a medal. Further away from the city, towards Papallacta, there is great hiking areas with lots of volcanic hot springs to relax in afterwards. The views over the mountains and especially the peak of the Antisana at 5700 meters are really breathtaking.
This are just a couple of the photos, for the rest go the main Quito picture page.
Starved Rock is a great State Park in Utica Illinois. It has a lot of hiking trails and beautiful views over the Illinois River. At this time of the year, there is lot of nice autumn forest colors, but the waterfalls were not much more than my dripping kitchen faucet The falls should be very nice in winter when they freeze into a icefalls, I will go check that out for you later this year… For more pictures, click the photo below.
