Just received a new pair of hiking shoes, just in time for our Yellowstone trip. Yellow shoes for Yellowstone. Nice.

Experience shows that the last pair I ordered turned out to be 2 sizes too small. I tried ordering a different model, but I didn’t like neither the fit nor the look. So I got¹ exactly the same model as the one I currently have, only the right size this time.

I don’t get excited about shoes. I also hate shoe shopping with passion. That’s the reason I have 2 pairs of shoes total including a pair of sleepers. Lately, however, I started to realize that probably I should wear something more comfortable than my dress shoes for times when we go hiking, be it either long walks around the city or exploring the trails of some national park. We decided to buy me a pair of sneakers, something that I didn’t have since high school.

That’s where Zappos.com makes its entrance. The selection is huge, the shipping is free, including return shipping and they have all the sizes and a bunch of reviews. We settled on two pairs of hiking shoes near the top of the list when sorted by popularity. Turns out Eldar has ones of those, so that’s what we ordered¹ based on his recommendation — The North Face Hedgehog GTX XCR.

We got two pairs still, since I wasn’t sure on the size, and looks like one of the two pairs is a good fit. First real life test of these will be the upcoming weekend in Pocono Mountains. Either way it’s going to be better then running around the mountains in dress shoes.

P.S. Shipping was extra fast too. Zappos upgraded us to the next level (they probably do this for everyone), so we basically got them 1 day after we ordered.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing through some old photos and I’ve stumbled upon this little gem. The photo was taken during our Phoenix, Sedona, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas trip somewhere in October of 2005.

The hiker was just coming up from the bottom of Grand Canyon after a several day stay there. He said that after he’s been to the bottom once he fell in love with Grand Canyon all over again and has been doing this hike every year since.

To those of you who haven’t seen Grand Canyon — you just must. There is just nothing like it anywhere on this planet. One of these days we must look at it from the bottom ourselves as well.