Catching Up

I am really behind on our blog posts, so I'll try to do a bit of catching up with these posts. Let's see, what has happened? Well, we went to Agra and never posted any pictures. So I'll start with a Part 1 of our Agra trip. It is entitled "On the Road" and has all the stuff we saw while riding around in the car. It was our family's first trip out of the city to the 'country' and you see some pretty amazing things. In the slide show, look for little cars packed full of people, a car stuck in the mud up to the undercarriage, some monkeys, a couple of camels, women carrying huge bundles of grass on their heads, and lots of very typical things that you see riding around here. Of course, Part 2 - the Agra Fort and Part 3 - the Taj Mahal are still to come - someday.

The trip to Agra was really amazing and a lot of fun for our family. You will see we went with the Clegg family, who have become our good friends. If you come to India, the trip to the Taj is worth the effort. It really does live up to its billing as a wonder of the world. It is a great sight to see and a great love story. The Agra Fort was as interesting to me as the Taj. It has a lot of very different styles of architecture, representing the various kings who lived there. I'll write more on them when I post the other videos.

Anyway - here is "On the Road - Agra Part 1".

On October 7, Rebecca turned 18 years old. What a great age! It won't be long before she is off to the University (BYU we all hope) and Michelle and I will be empty nesters. That is a somewhat scary thought, although we are really looking forward to the whole grandparent gig (congratulations again to Jameson and Becky).

Michelle and I spent some time trying to figure out how we could make Rebecca's 18th a birthday to remember. Finally we hit on the idea - an elephant! So we figured out where we could 'rent' an elephant for her birthday. Well, I have to say that it was a huge hit with her and her friends. All the folks that showed up later in the evening (and there were lots), were disappointed that they missed the elephant ride.

Here's a short video of one of the rides - link here. Here are some pictures of the day.

Here's Raja (he's 45 years old and weighs in at 3 Tons), his trainer (the guy on the ground), his driver (on top of course), and the Birthday Girl.

Some friends that came to ride the elephant and celebrate Rebecca's birthday.

Elephants have really stiff, course hair - who knew about that?

What's a celebration in India without flowers?

And what's a birthday without cake?

Our driver Jogender (on the left) who bought the flowers and arranged the elephant and one of the guards (on the right) who helped put the flowers up.

Our stuff is now here, and I'll publish another post about that in a day or so.