It was a sunny day a couple weeks ago and I felt ambitious... so I decided to explore the surrounding hills.  You can get some sense of how the village is laid out and the road leading into town.  If you look closely at the bottom of the other picture, you can see the top of a metal statue honoring the Armenian soldiers who died fighting against Germany in WWII.  I am hoping that we have one more good hiking day left on the calendar as 6 of us are going out together on a hike in the forest.  We have been in the Off/On rainy mode the past couple weeks so I am hoping Mother Nature smiles on us.  And if it rains, I am sure we will have a different kind of adventure.  I hired a young man who worked as a guide this summer to take us around as the trails are not well-marked.  One of my "Tourist Business" goals over the next 2 years is to create some hiking maps that we can hand out to tourists.  I have talked to several tourists who came to see the natural beauty of this area and left early frustrated that they could not locate the hiking trails.  With the challenges of today's Post-Soviet economy, we really can't afford to have those tourist dollars leave early.  Getting the trails marked and then finding the funds to print the maps should keep me busy for a while!