Marrakesh After a few weeks of driving through all of the cities and town of Morocco, Ben and I were winding down our trip in Marrakech. Marrakech is definitely like no other city in Morocco. In many ways, it's more of a parody of what Westerners think Morocco probably is. In the main square you'll find monkey handlers, falconers, snake charmers, and all sorts of other characters like that trying to make a buck from tourists. It's a fun place, but also extremely chaotic. We had a great time wandering through the various spice markets, shops, and things of that nature, but as we happened to find a riad extremely close to the main square, we inevitably had to walk through all of the tourists to get back to our hotel. And of course from the rooftop on the riad one could easily hear all of the sounds coming from the main square. On the second to last day there, we decided to go for a drive and found an amazing lake about 45 minutes away from Marrakech called Lalla Takerkoust. We wound up staying there for 2 nights instead of inside of Marrakech at the end.

Pembroke Castle After Ben and I decided that we wouldn't rush to catch the ferry that was supposed to take us over to Ireland, we decided spend a few hours in the town of Pembroke before eventually continuing on towards Fishguard and taking the ferry the next day. This gave us a chance to not only hang out in Fishguard later in the day (and drive across more of Wales), but also gave us time to explore Pembroke Castle. As it happens, Pembroke Castle is the site of where Henry VII was born (that's 7, not 8, by the way). It turned out that we got one of the very nicest days of weather they had seen in years. The place was almost empty and all of the staff was telling us how we must have been good luck charms or the like as they couldn't remember the last time it was bright and sunny in Pembroke. Suffice to say, we had a lovely time exploring all of the castle. We eventually found the highest overlook in the whole castle, a site that required a lengthy set of stone-made spiral steps to ascend and just camped ourselves at the top for quite some time.

Playing Around Wadi Rum Along the outskirts of the Wadi Rum desert is a small tourist stop along the train tracks. The tracks feature a replica military train car of the one that Lawrence of Arabia led the united Bedouin tribes against in WWI. The train is prominently featured in the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" and is shot to pieces. Of course, this is historically what happened. Every so often when you visit the train, you will find spent bullet casings in the flat car. I'm told that people can rent the train for parties and events and they will even outfit it with the mounted machine guns and let guests fire blanks into the desert. This is why you'll occasionally find the spent shell casings in the flat bottom car. Ben and Felip had a great time recreating this experience.

Daytrip to Gibraltar Before crossing the Straight of Gibraltar from southern Spain into Morocco, Ben and I decided that we would go and explore the actual Rock of Gibraltar. The entire country (technically UK territory) could be explored in a number of hours. We walked about 2/3rd the way across the entire country in a matter of 20 - 30 minutes. There is a gondola station at the base of the rock and it was entirely empty. We paid for a ride to the top and had the entire gondola to ourselves (and the gondola operator). The top of the rock offers some of the most spectacular views you could imagine. There was a huge cloud that moved in from the north side and it was surreal actually walking through the cloud. To the south you can see the sun glistening far out into the Mediterranean Sea. Another surprise was that the top is full of apes. There are signs posted everywhere informing you that you'll be fined $2,000 for feeding them. It was pretty hard walking around up there without them crossing your path. We assumed that they were all peaceful apes, but it definitely makes one feel a little uneasy walking by an entire family of them.

Exploring Chefchaouen Located in the southwestern part in the north of Morocco sits the town of Chefchaouen, otherwise known as "The Blue Pearl". It's called this because most of the houses are painted a light shade of blue, perhaps more of a periwinkle, and so in the evening sun and from the mountains, the entire town kind of glows in a beautiful blue color. It's a pretty famous tourist town, but not overly so. It's adjacent to the Atlas Mountains and so we were able to do quite a bit of hiking in the area. We also met a pair of Dutch girls and wound up spending an evening with them enjoying dinner and walking around the city together.. One of the prettier and artistic pictures from our trip across Morocco came from this town when Ben spotted bags of dye sitting around.

George Floyd Protests in Austin After the protests for the murder of George Floyd started spreading around the country, it obviously wouldn't be long before Austin stood up against this too. And stand up they did. Unfortunately, there were pretty serious consequences and the protests were quickly labeled as "riots" by APD. It's unclear to me if there was justification for that or not, but the term led to a use of force by APD. Many people, including some from the media, were hit with "rubber" bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, and worse. I believe one young man even lost his eye. Others were rendered unconscious from the impact of "less-than-lethal" munitions. Having heard what was going on, my buddy Claire and I decided to take our bikes downtown just to ride around and see what was actually happening. We definitely saw some pretty awful exchanges between police and protestors, large lines of police barricading streets and properties, and some literal dumpster fires.

Tannehill Branch Creek Cleanup Though Wan Shan was still in town, I was knee deep in the homeless mess that has enveloped my neighborhood. I organized a sizable trash cleanup in part of our creek and managed to get a dozen or so people to show up and help. We worked with one of the local businesses so that we had a place to throw away all of the trash bags at. In the end, we wound up creating like 40 bags of trash. I'm not sure it made much of a dent in the overall problem, but it was a noble effort.

Atti and Baxter in St. Louis Just some random photos I took around the house in St. Louis one afternoon. It had started getting pretty cold outside and so I built a fire in the back. Atters and Baxter were up to their usual hijinks and so I took some cool shots of them around sunset.

The Dogs in the STL Swing I worked hard to get Atti and Baxter to sit in the living room swing together so I could get a picture of them. It took a little trial and error, but I eventually managed to get one or two good shots. Jordan also did a short photo shoot holding both Baxter and Atti.

Suzi Visiting STL Suzi visited us on her way back from the Carolinas one evening and Jordan wanted to get a cute photo of the two of them using the living room swing. Drinks were made. Delicious Indian food was procured. And cute photos were taken.