Our friend Shirley lives in Salem, OR and spends the summer on her sailboat at our marina a few slips down. Every year, she goes on a month long trip with friends to Southern California for some warm weather and R &R. She graciously offered her house for us to use while she was out. We packed up the car and eagerly headed south to Salem. Salem is the State Capital and is centrally located, Read more…
The last few months has brought some interesting weather. We had a white Christmas and a week of record cold and snow around the holidays. The temperatures were in the teens and twenties for a week with about 8 inches of snow that hung around. This is very unusual for Anacortes. The snow was beautiful, but we were glad to see it go after a week. It felt a little like living in an igloo. Read more…
We drove to Arizona after Joshua Tree National Park and headed to Tucson, as we had never visited before. Tucson is a cool small city with the University of Arizona, lots of good food and nice hiking in the surrounding areas. We visited one of Erik’s former students Adam, who took us on a fantastic hike in the mountains above the City. We also visited the Desert Museum, ate tons of good food, and hung Read more…
We finally had a change in weather. We made it to Joshua Tree National Park and slowed down to enjoy true desert. There are lots of rocks in the desert. Some people even hauled in machinery to pound the rocks. And there are cuddly animals. Even the nights are scorching in the desert.
Winter has arrived a bit early in the PNW with harsh weather in October. No worries, we had planned to do a road trip south for November and December so off we go! First stop to visit our friend Shirley in Salem, Oregon. We enjoyed hanging out with Shirley at her house and doing dinner. The next day we headed to Harrison Beach State Park which is on the southern coast of Oregon. It was Read more…
Friends Marc and Sue recommended this very cool website called Trustedhousitters.com. This is a website that pairs people who need a house sitter/pet sitter, with people who are willing to house sit/pet sit and like to travel. We made a profile and went through a background check, and can search for available house sits world wide. You stay for free at the people’s house while taking care of their pets. Seems like a perfect arrangement Read more…
It has been a busy fall. We started out with a trip to the east coast to celebrate both Erik and my mom’s birthdays. Erik’s mom turned 90. We flew to Connecticut for a visit and had a great birthday party with her. She invited her tennis friends. Yes, I did say tennis friends, and at age 90, Erik’s mom is one of the younger members of the group. They came over for a highly Read more…
The weather this summer has been really nice and we have taken advantage of it by going out cruising quite a bit. We went south for a trip to meet up with the Anacortes Yacht Club in Port Ludlow stopping at Langley, Poulsbo, Crescent Harbor and Spencer Spit on the way to and from the event. We visited the Naval Undersea Museum in Poulsbo which was really cool and enjoyed the breweries at Poulsbo as Read more…
We enjoyed our trip to the mountains, but it is always nice to get home as well. Time for some needed boat maintenance projects! Our diver, Brian came and scraped the hull and replaced the zincs on the prop shaft. Thankfully, this task is only required every six months. The water is cold here, so our diver suits up in full commercial dive gear. A little different than completing this task in Miami, which can Read more…
Road Trip! After doing a lot of sailing and activities around Anacortes, we decided it was time to hit the mountains. We took a two week car camping trip to the Cascades, staying in Yakima for one weekend. The first week’s camping spot was just east of Rainier National Park. We got in some awesome hiking every day! We hiked to some waterfalls and braved the cold water to take a refreshing shower. The next Read more…