Our friend Tom Hughey back in California loves to read about our experiences, the people and the interesting places we visit but being a practical kind of guy, he was wondering, about the local infrastructure, so we started photographing items of different nature.

While visiting the Numisi Winery in Velistsikhe, Misha, the Russian husband of Nunu, invited us to tag along to visit their farm where he wanted to pick up some fresh milk.

Happy Thanksgiving!   If you have food in your fridge, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep you are richer than 75% of the world. If you have money in the bank, your wallet, and some spare change you are among the top 8% of the words’s wealthy. […]

We had been looking forward to Georgian wines since we had our last sip of Italian Nero d’Avila. To our disappointment, most of the stores in Georgia stocked plenty of beer, vodka and juices, but rarely wines. Much of the table wine we found in the country was either homemade or produced by wineries and sold in 5-liter plastic containers. It was invariably on the sweet side. This was not Napa Valley, where there is a winery every couple of miles advertising their wine-tasting rooms, tours and picknick facilities.

Crawling up a 14% grade to the Ikalto monastery we found a comfortable flat parking area overlooking the upper Kakheti valley, famous for its Georgian wines. Visiting the church and its grounds, it appeared that wine production had been important from a very early time.

You may recall that Monika loves birthdays and wants to remember every one of them. She does some strange things like climbing Yosemite’s Half Dome, jumping out of an airplane at 18,000 feet, spending two weeks exploring Cuba or riding a camel in the Altai Gobi Desert in Mongolia. What was her choice this year?