People ask about the ports we will visit on our Around-the-World Cruise in 2017. Here is a nice image that shows it all. The adventure begins January 4, 2017.

Besides fettuccine, we made a hand cut pasta called pappardelle. This was tossed with a roasted butternut squash and pesto mixture with hazelnuts instead of pine nuts and parsely & sage instead of basil. Yum!

The sauces we made to go with the pasta were simple and tasty. Ron is stirring a lemon cream sauce with salmon. This was mixed with the fettuccine we made.

Ron and I took another cooking class together at Sur Le Table. I’ve always wanted to try making pasta from scratch. It was a pretty easy process. We are going to practice at home and invite some friends to try the result.

It has been a month since we visited Ketchikan, but I just noticed this picture. There is always a “photo op” when you leave the ship at a port. I pity the poor guy or girl in that eagle suit. How many times has it been worn? How many times has it been cleaned?? I…

We took the Park shuttle to the stop for the Riverwalk. The shuttle bus had special windows in the ceiling do you could see the high cliffs as you traveled the canyon. One cool feature of the Riverwalk were the areas where water seeped through the porous sandstone. With this source of water, plants are…

Along with the rains comes the danger of flash floods. The Virgin River that runs through the canyon usually has a current of 40 cubic feet/second at this time of the season. The night we arrived, the flow was measured at 2,000 cu ft/sec. We were hoping to hike The Narrows, where the canyon walls…

We drove into the Park after a day of rainy weather. My expectations of good weather were very low, but I found out that visiting Zion in the rain added something to the experience rather than taking away. We walked to the Lower Emerald Pool because it was a short, easy trail near the Zion…

Just a little lower in elevation than Bryce Canyon was Fairyland Canyon. The hoodoos were more visible in the fog. Hoodoos are formed by erosion caused when water soaks into the sandstone, freezes, and expands (hydrogen bonding in action.) Back in Red Canyon, below the clouds, we had a good photo op with Smokey Bear…

Bryce Canyon is known for its natural amphitheater filled with towering “hoodoos” (eroded sandstone columns with beautiful layers of color.) We had a glimpse of a few in Red Canyon on the way up to Bryce Canyon. Unfortunately, the high altitude (over 8,000 feet) meant we were in the clouds. The lodge where we stopped…