HAPPY AUTMUNAL EQUINOX!

That means that today, the amount of daylight and night(light?) are equal. It also means that you should be able to balance an egg on end with relative ease. Good luck!

And another tidbit: "The Fall Equinox is also known as: Alban Elfed, Autumn Equinox, Autumnal Equinox, Cornucopia, Feast of Avilon, Festival of Dionysus, Harvest Home, Harvest Tide, Mabon, Night of the Hunter, Second Harvest Festival, Wine Harvest, Witch's Thanksgiving, and the first day of autumn" compliments of ReligiousTolerance.org!

OK, so been quiet a lil' while. First off, or rather second off, it's not only the first day of Autumn (Fall to you US folks), today's the first day of KEXP's web drive. If you know them, support them, if you don't, check'em out at:

www.kexp.org

They stream great music world-wide, and have no commercials!
John in the morning just had a little baby, name Arlie. Congrats John!

OK, so back to me. I've continued the interviewing process and have lost count of how many I've had. More than 12 for sure. The good news is I start part time with English First (http://www.englishfirst.com) next week, and training begins Friday. It looks like I'll mostly have afternoon and evening classes, though I'm trying to keep at least 1-2 week nights semi-free so Jill and I can go to the rock gym, watch a movie, etc. But, I'm the new guy with little experience, so we'll see how nice they are to me with scheduling. The good news is that I don't have any classes on Fridays, and I'm going to try to keep it that way! Looks like I'll be doing all the packing for our trips on the weekends.

Oh, totally unrelated, if you're ever in a fine chocolate shop, look out for E. Wedel Chocolates (http://www.wedel.pl/), I imagine they're somewhere in the US. They're Poland's finest chocolatiers. I'm munching on some Czekolada Gorzka (Dark Chocolate) at the moment. YUM!

So, last post I talked about doing a trip to Szlak Orlich Gniazd aka Trail of The Eagle's Nests.
Wow, pretty cool place!

Here's Lonely Planet's paraphrased description:
"An excellent way to explore the Upland is the Trail of the Eagle's Nests hike. The trail, signposted in red, winds for 164 km (104 mi) from Krakow to Czestochowa and passes through the most interesting parts of the Jura, an area formed some 150 million years ago n the Jurassic period (the name comse from the Jura mountains in France). Erosion of the upland left behind a variety of strange rock formations, taking the shapes of freestanding pillars, clubs and gates, for example. There are also between 500 and 1,000 caves, the overwhelming majority of all those in Poland. The Jura is also dotted with a dozen ruined castles, which King Kazimierz Wielki set about fortifying the frontier against the Bohemians in the mid-14th C. The Bohemians never bothered the Poles again, but the Swedes came in and whooped their butts in 1655, and then successive invasions in the 18th C. reduced most of the castles to ruin."

Well, along with the 9th graders of the American School, we got to explore one of these caves, hike a 10k stretch of the path, and climbed on 2 different limestone outcrops. The cave was definitely the highlight of the trip! It was a 'Challenge by Choice' trip for the kids, and not everyone partook in the adventures. I, of course, did! The cave was pretty crazy. It has a tight start (on your belly!), then pops into a spacious room, about 8 by 10 with a 5-6' ceiling, then, you have to go through another man-eating slot, getting dirty and keeping your flashlight in front of you. There's two left turns which are particularly demanding, and you have to exhale once or twice to get through a few spots. SCARY!

The finish is the hardest. You see the light, and can somewhat stand up (and hand your flashlight to the kids above who are rootin' you on!), but it's another very tight squeeze, and there's not really anything to stand on or grab to pull yourself up. Fortunately, with my rock climbing (chimneying) skills, I was the only one who could get out by myself, and not have to get yanked up by my arms like the rest of the kids. Granted, I'm not a big guy, and there were some tight spots for me-my shoulders actually got stuck once, and I had to squirm backwards to free myself again. We went through the cave in groups of 7, and I was the caboose. After me, though, were the bigger boys. The biggest kid to go through was Sean-this 'kid' is about 6' and 185, maybe more (he was pretty heavy when I was belaying him later!) Oh, it took us about 10-15 minutes to make it through the whole thing, and we all had headaches when we came out.

Kudos to the first spelunkers who pioneered that one! That must've been damn frightening, especially with all the bats flying around!

So, THE CLIMBING!

Eagle's Nest is the closest climbing crag to Warsaw (or so I hear). It is all bright white limestone, and its almost all sport climbing. The rock, when its it's whitest, is it's slickest! However, like most rock, it has its rough spots and its smooth spots. It takes a bit of playing around on it to figure it out. But, simply: Pockets are your friends!

(http://www.camk.edu.pl/~ptz/hobbies/poland/misc/42.html)

Of, course, there's no such thing as crack-pocket climbing (well, actually there is at Smith...), but I was able to find a slightly overhanging 5.7-8ish crack. I hadn't touched rock since leading the summit block of Mt. Challenger in the North Cascades National Park on July 4th weekend in my running shoes. Oddly, I was able to pull off the route. It had a very stiff 5.9 start, with a cobweb filled crack and undercling (I guess Poles only sport/face climb in this area?). The undercling turned into an offwidth hand jam, then a nice lieback. Fortunately, the rock on this part for the feet was semi-sticky! The rest was a cruise of a variety of cracks, mantles and smearing. The finish, though, was a beast all unto itself. For better or worse, Rick (who organized the whole trip) had the TR anchor hanging down in the middle of the monster that was about to consume me. It was an overhanging offwidth fist crack! I made it halfway through, tagged the anchor and was damn glad not to be leading that route for my first technical climb in Poland!

The other routes we set up for the kids were long and short, some juggy, some slabby, and one was a weird chimney. One route even had a freaky coffin-like thing featured in the rock. You could climb up this long route, then shimmy up and into this thing and R.I.P! Only 2 students were ballsy enough to try it, and, unfortunately, I didn't get a chance, being the belay-slave and all...

Most of the kids did pretty well. Many had never tried climbing before. One girl in particular, Carmen, totally kicked butt! She shot up the chimney faster than anyone, and that was her first time ever in a harness!

The Trail! (and the Castles!)

The class was a group of 60 kids-one day half rock climbed, caved and did a high-ropes course with the local Search & Rescue boys. The other half hiked the 10k 'trail' along the Eagle's Nests Ridge. We were team 'B' so we climbed day 1, hiked day 2. Unfortunately, to meet up with our buses, we had to do the hike backwards, and basically had desert first:
http://www.camk.edu.pl/~ptz/hobbies/poland/misc/32.html
This was the most impressive castle along the way. Be sure to click on the arrows to see the following pics. This guys' photographs are great!

So we started at the best castle, then hiked along dusty trails, up and around some rock outcrops and passed another castle that was under reconstruction and supposedly being turned into a RESTAURANT?! The kids were extremely whiny the whole time. They all seem to have asthma, screws in their arches (seriously) or have an 'Achillies' problem. No shit. See what being rich does to you? We did have a talk about the environment, and had the kids pick up a healthy load of garbage along the way. Hopefully we taught 30 more people on the planet to not pollute anymore.

This trip was also the first time these kids had ever camped. They set up their tents and made their own group dinners the first night, in the dark. IMPRESSIVE! The second night was incredibly clear and cold and got down to 1C/33F. Both nights we had 2 horrendous snorers (adults, of course!). I actually had to get out of my tent the first night and walk about 20 yards to reduce the brain throttling from the ladies' tent next door! The 2nd night I moved my whole tent and slept much better!

Anyhoo, more pics of my own coming soon.

Oh, great news. OUR SHIPMENT IS COMING MONDAY!
Yep, over 2 months after it left Seattle, our box of stuff (mostly climbing gear) will be delivered and unpacked by the pros. We're eagerly awaiting our bikes, our CDs and maybe a few more cold weather things, as Autumn has fully begun here way up north! We're also curious to see what we shipped that we really don't need at all...oh, well-live and learn!

I think this post was plenty long, you?
Hope everyone is well, and get out that egg!

Jeronimo!