2 . Though Armenia isn’t exactly ready for groups of foreign hikers, the country rewards those who make the effort. When my son recently finished graduate school, I seized the_________to spend a week hiking_________him in my own father’s homeland. Not long ago, no outsider would have considered such a_________through the former Soviet Republic. But we_________the paths with hikers from Australia, Canada, England and France,_________we left hoping to return.

Armenia isn’t for every_________. “You often will not find marked trail heads, and if you find a map, it will_________be written in Armenian — which doesn’t_________the Latin alphabet.” We couldn’t find a guide until we arrived in the country, and then we had to_________. After spending a day in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, we visited the Dilijan National park. In the forested national park, we__________, the ruins of a 1,000-year-old monastery (修道院)__________in a mountain top clearing. That__________me of the people who hiked to the site to__________when it was built. “It seemed such a very different__________from driving to a church parking lot these days.”

Marc and I never did reach the summit (山顶) of Aragats, Armenia’s__________mountain. That would have__________the climbers to cover 6,000 feet in one day. and when a storm__________, we settled on the mountain’s secondary peak.__________so, “we weren’t disappointed.” A mountain doesn’t always__________to a climber’s first attempt, and a country doesn’t reveal all its treasures in a week. Our adventure, we know, had “only scratched the__________.”