Favorite {Photo} Friday! #6

It's Friday so you know what that means!!!

If you are a normal married person (or half of a couple, in any case) then you know how hard it can be to find another couple that makes a great group of four with you two. When all four people get along and have fun together, it's a wondrous thing. When all four people get along and travel well together it is a miracle on this earth and you praise the heavens and travel the globe together. Or at least a chunk of Northern Italy and Southern Austria. :) Such is the case with friends Keith and Katie. I adore and treasure them.

Jason met Keith about a zillion years ago (or, okay, ten) at one of those Air Force training things to which they both got sent. Later that year we met up with Keith and some of his friends for a group trip down to Mexico where we all rented a house and drank Coronas and went to Papas and Beer and one of us bawled her eyes out over a beautiful little girl begging on the streets at 3 a.m. Ahem. I wonder who that was? Anyway, fast forward eight years or so.

Now is a great time for a tangent. And that tangent would be my theory that Boys Don't Stay In Touch. An unmarried man floats in the breeze, unattached, and we never know where he is or how to get ahold of him unless and until he happens to bump into someone we know, or gets married. It is the women who send out e-mails, "We've moved! Here we are now, come visit if you want!" and Christmas cards, and birth announcements. Women keep things connected, I say. I am in touch with wives of our male friends and oftentimes I haven't even met the woman yet. But her husband is connected to us so there she is, holding all of those strings of connection, and if he says, "I wonder how ol' Duncan is doing," she can say, "Oh, his wife just sent out an e-mail, they're moving to Tampa and she's pregnant." Is it just military wives who do this? I sent out--no joke--175 Christmas cards last year. One hundred and seventy-five. And I knew each and every person to whom I sent them (you get to know a lot of people living the military life!). Women are all about connection, I say. But back to the story.

So we lost touch with Keith, as you can imagine from my tangent. Then one day Jason is sitting at his desk in his office in Italy and who should walk through the door but Keith. Half a world away from when we last saw him. He and his wife, Katie, lived a couple of hours away and he was in town (or on base, as the case may be) for business. So there you go; reconnection. Since then we've traveled all over with Keith and Katie, usually doing outdoorsy things like backpacking in the Chianti region or hiking up killer mountains or skiing. And by skiing I mean, of course, that Jason and Keith and Katie went skiing, while I lounged in the sauna or read a book or swam in the indoor pool or went shopping in the cute and overpriced little shops present in every ski-resort town in the world. :)

This photo was taken in the Alto Adige region of Northern Italy, just a couple miles south of Austria. It is not a great photo because it was taken with a pocket point-and-shoot camera on self-timer at dusk with snow all around us. :) But I still love it. I love it because when I see it I remember the rush of sledding down a crazy mountain trail right after this photo was taken--it would never be allowed in the States, there'd be too many lawsuits, that's how fun it was--and having such a rush at the bottom that I made Jason go on it with me again. I remember the saunas at our hotel, and our friend Phil's "towel treatment" that I had forgotten to warn Katie about (but that's a-whole-'nother story!), and Keith and Jason making fun of Phil at dinnertime for it. I remember all the other fun and amazing trips we went on with them.

But mostly I chose this photo for Favorite {Photo} Friday today because it is 96 bloomin' degrees here and I am sick as a dog, but in the photo it is freezing cold and I am feeling alive and wonderful. :)