Bye Bye Istanbul

We bid farewell to Justin and Elle. (Thanks guys for letting us join you on your round the world adventure. Sorry about the sleep interruptions!) Their next move is to Prague and some myserious bargain German ski town offering lift tickets at the rate of 10 runs for 5 Euros. A hell of a deal!

Bye bye Istanbul.

Bye bye extremely expensive beverages.

Bye bye super friendly Turkish equivalent of TSA.

Hello Uncle Nate and Auntie Nicole!

Hello super tasty Uncle of the Year pecan chocolate pie!

Genevieve's brother Matty decided there ought to be an Uncle of the Year competition between Paxson Revel's uncles. (He forfeited this year. But he's a final contender for Yoga master of the year.) Uncle Nate and Uncle Regan are neck and neck, but Uncle Nate's chocolate pecan pie, multi-hour rush hour trip to the airport to pick us up, and 4:30 AM wake up and ride back to the airport put him in good standing during the home stretch! Thanks a lot Uncle Nate and Aunt Nicole! Good luck with the new jobs and adventures in the Philly region! And please, hurry up and make some babies for us to teach some bad words to.

Hello Portland friends Jake, Megan and Lori! Keep kicking ass in America's coolest city!
We had a few hours in Portland, so we visited our amigos there. We were extremely jetlagged, (see Boodah. That's about how alert we were too.) but it was still great to hang out and chat. Jake and Megan just sold their last house to a rock star and bought a new one. They might buy a farm on the Oregon coast. Lori is still kicking lots of legal ass.


Last time we were in Portland for Jake and Megan's wedding, we didn't take a single photo. So we were pretty proud of ourselves for taking this one.

We had a spendover in Anchorage before catching one last 3 hour flight home. HF was smiling on us, as the weather was awesome and it was a rare ANC-DUT flight that didn't require any fuel stops in King Salmon or Cold Bay. Uncle Regan and Aunt Nami rallied to put the Uncle of the Year Award at a dead heat, picking us up at the airport after midnight and hanging out with us until after 1, then enduring the sounds of us being up and playing with a wide awake jetlagged Revel Roo from 4AM until they got up, and then taking the morning off work to hang with us.

And Revel Roo got to enjoy some quality cousin time with Musashi and Arashi and the giant dog Musashi recently won. It's always great to soak up the positive energy of the Team WillYo household!



And that is the end of our first international family adventure! What's next? Baja, but that doesn't really count. We're hoping we'll have to lay low for '08 if our procreation plans come through, but contenders for '09 are Cuba (depending on who's our next president), Tobago, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. We'll be sticking to this hemisphere to avoid the jetlag issue, which was the most challenging part of the adventure.

Hello Dutch Harbor!

Snowboarding and sledding! Big mountains! Bald eagles! Stormy seas! Ahh, it's good to be home!


(Yesterday Dawson snowboarded Ballyhoo for the first powder turns of the season, and Paxson Revel got to see Santa. Today we took Senor for some winter time at Summer Bay fun. Incidentally, if we had a surfboard, Dawson could've caught some small tasty waves with perfect conditions!)