Elaborate

Since it seems that everybody who reads this wants more info here ya go

Why Ecuador?
Well most of you that read this know that took a trip to South America a few years ago, and ever since then I wanted to go back and I have never been to Ecuador and have heard lots of good things about it. so know I dont know anyone there and am just going to go somewhere during the coldest part of the winter

How did I decide to go?
One day while I was on a helitack (helicopter) fire assignment we were bored out of minds...ok we shouldn't have been bored cuz it was early in the morning, but it had been many long boring days. anyway Ben and I were talking about traveling and he said that he had never really done any international traveling but he wanted to and he was asking me questions about how much spanish you need to know and where to go. And I said well you just need to go with someone that knows enough to get by and that I have wanted to go to ecuador. His reply....well lets go to Ecuador then.
I wasn't sure if he was serious, but then I asked him about it once we were back in AK and he said that he was game. so since then I have been keeping an eye on tickets and been playing phone tag with ben and well we decided to go. We are leaving Jan 11th and coming back Feb 2

Yes the plan is to backpack.....really we dont have much of a plan yet, because ben is still in Alaska and lives where his phone doesn't have access to the internet. But he is headed back to Montana sometime soon so we will have better plans after that


So it seem a lot of you want to know about Ben.

Yes some of you are right I have mentioned him on my blog before. I don't think he reads my blog. I work with Ben up in Alaska we pretty much ended up spending most of the fire season together. I have posted pictures of his plane on here but don't think that I have posted any of him not sure if I have any. We both ended up on most of the same fire assignments. He is a really nice guy and as of now he is nothing more than a friend. We both had the same days off when we were on the helitack assignment and we traveled to the California coast together, and then after we were laid off we took a trip down to Denali together. We have fun traveling together so I think we will have a really good time traveling in Ecuador.

No he is not who I have taken trips with before, that is nick and jake.

Hopefully this satisfies some of your curiosity.

Here is a picture that i have of the first fire assignment to California from this summer. The crew that we took out was making Ben and Dale play an eskimo game and I tried to get some pictures of Ben and Dale trying to outsmart a rope (they didn't exceed)

Edit: so these pictures were taken on day 14 of our assignment and we had maybe showered once during this fire...we were at a spike camp with no showers.......so yes they are dirty and hairy.......