Our last entry was written long, long ago and now that our
travelling has restarted in earnest some catching up is due.
Quick summary:
· My back recovery / rehab continues as I continue to work to increase my back strength and flexibility. The pain I now have after fast walking for about 2 miles is muscle pain from inactivity not nerve pain. The nerve pain only visits when I forget and make a twisting motion.
· After months of slow mental and physical deterioration my mother passed on during the early hours of May 29th. Helping care for her had been a huge drain on our energy (both physical and emotional) and I think both of us had done much of our grieving as she deteriorated. When I checked on her at the nursing home after she had expired I saw for the first time in months the face of a woman at peace. We have chosen to delay her memorial service until July when all of her family will have had time to recover our energy and good memories.
· In January we flew to Anchorage, Alaska to visit with close friends. More on this trip later.
· Our next outing was a two week cruise from Ft. Lauderdale Florida to San Diego California. More on that trip later.
· Our Albin trawler has continued to be rehabbed and is now sitting in our daughter’s driveway in Welland, Ontario where we towed her with the plan of launching her this Monday to travel on the canals and waterways of Ontario.
In my mother’s memory I don’t want to include a photo of her
in her debilitated state because that does not show the very energetic woman
she had been all of her life. Instead I
will share the only photo I am aware of from her and Dad’s wedding. It was when Dad took
a day of leave as an Army Air Corps Recruit to go to the San Antonio base chapel to
get married. Mom made the comment a
number of times that she and Dad needed to argue more as it was so upsetting to
me the time I saw them upset with each other (because it was such a rare
occurrence in their more than 70 years of marriage.)
We had collected enough air miles that we figured we could
get to Anchorage at minimal costs and visit the house good friends from when we
lived in South Everett had just purchased and were eager to show off. We also planned to visit friends from when we were just married and watched a senior citizen housing
project building in Seattle sharing duties with them.
Deanna and her husband Mike moved to Anchorage to be closer
to his job base (he is a 747 captain for a major package hauler). Deanna moved there to see the animals; we visit
Alaska to see the scenery and if we see animals that just makes the trip that
much better while Deanna moved there to see the animals and if there is some of
the most magnificent scenery in the whole world, well that’s a nice extra. In her previous life Deanna was a zoo keeper
in one of the best job to person matches in history. They now live on a hillside above Anchorage
and look out at Cook Inlet over the city from their main windows and out to
mountains every other direction. Mike
had recently bought into a partnership to own a Piper Super Cub which he gave
me a ride in after we swept off the snow and let the engine get good and
warm. I may have felt pretty cramped
physically in the seat behind his 6 ft+ frame but I soon felt pretty free
looking out at the scenery around us as we flew up river and over a couple
glaciers. We did see a couple moose
during our visit (none of which waited for a good photo) but don’t tell Deanna
that I was most struck with the scenery.
Back when Clarice and I were married we were poor-as-church-mice as the saying goes. To save our pennies (they were still valuable back then) we traded answering emergency alarms at night in a senior citizen apartment house every other night for our room rent. On the opposite nights another recently married couple the same age as us had the same arrangement. Thus began a very long friendship with Bruce and Tina who moved to Alaska many years ago and clearly enjoy sharing their love of the state. They took us to lunch at a remote resort in an old gold mining area. The views were simply amazing over the snow covered ground. Next they took us to their cabin on Big Lake. We have been there before but never in the dead of winter. We can see why they hold this little piece of heaven so close to their hearts.
After a week away we returned back to Lacey where our
friends/pseudo Godchildren and pseudo Grand Godchildren had been caring for the
house and Jarvis.
Our next grand adventure was going on a cruise with someone
else piloting the boat. We never have
seen ourselves as “cruise ship people” (we now know they really exist in large
numbers!) but one of the bucket list items we weren’t able to complete while we
owned Salish Aire was taking a ride through the Panama Canal. Part of our promise to each other when we
sold the boat was that we would plan to take a cruise through the canal at some
point so we found a good price and went for it.
Our cruise started in Ft. Lauderdale Florida and ended in San Diego
California. We also talked our close
friends Grant and Linda into joining us ( the cruise dates just happened to include their Valentine’s Day
wedding anniversary). The
trip was something we are really glad we did but we are not so impressed with
the cruise ship lifestyle that we will go straight from one ship to another (or
stay on the same ship for the return journey) as many of our shipmates were
planning.
In preparation for the trip I read up on the history of the
canal and watched lots of YouTube videos.
In a sense I was amazed that we crossed from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific
Ocean in a few hours’ time but on the other hand I was surprised at how low the
continental divide is and how that “little hill” led to the deaths of so many
many people when they tried to cut it down to size. I never imagined that from Gatun Lake which comprises
most of the canal you could look out and see the oceans not that far below.
We enjoyed the food of which there was lots.
We quickly learned to limit ourselves at the buffet and to make sure we
included fruits and salad with each meal.
Crossing the Caribbean to Cartagena Columbia the water was quite rough –
so much so that when the movement of the ship matched the frequency of the
swimming pools the water would come splashing over the sides. We had both looked forward to Cartagena
after years of fascination with the idea of this perfectly shaped natural bay protecting the
riches of Spain before they were shipped from the New World to the Old. On the
ship we both spent a lot of time getting some much needed exercise walking
around the decks and swimming in the pools.
At our southern Mexico stop I tried snorkeling next to the cruise ship
wharf and quickly was reminded what a few years of deconditioning due to nerve
damage will do (Clarice has refused to allow me to even consider going back to
SCUBA diving until I build up a lot more endurance.) Once we reached our final
stop before San Diego we had a chance to meet up with the new owners of Salish
Aire who own a Casa in Puerto Vallarta.
Since we had explored the town a lot while visiting with Salish Aire we
decided to spend time talking over a meal about our boating experiences (they
have crossed the Atlantic on a sailboat) and giving them some hints on caring
for their new boat. We have since spent a
lot of time visiting with them on the boat and coaching them on her various
systems and have come to consider them good friends with common interests.
After two weeks we arrived back in the USA. We disembarked in San Diego near where we had lay at anchor while waiting for the hurricane season to end so we could push on to Mexico a couple years before.
The next couple of months were spent finishing the rehab
work on Hyacinth The Boat and working around the house. I have also agreed to be the Junior Warden at
St. Benedict Episcopal Church (which translated from Episcopalese) means I am in
charge of buildings and grounds.
The house projects included getting the yard ready for
spring and filling the garage walls with blown-in insulation which has long
been on the todo list. After we blew in
the insulation we tidied up the sheetrock and painted the walls and ceiling
with white primer so the work area is now much brighter and friendlier to work
in. We also used the blower to fill the
underside of our under insulated hot tub which seems to have made a huge difference
in our electric bill!
On May 10th I finished another set of medical appointments and we headed out to Ontario via the northern USA states. We took more time than we usually do crossing the continent. We visited friends along the way and spent a couple of nights in Montana before crossing into North Dakota where we stayed at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. (This is a definite return-to park as we were pleasantly surprised at all it has to offer (including buffalo and wild horses wandering through the campground).) Most of the way we stayed in either HarvestHost.com sites or BoondockersWelcome.com sites which saved us a bundle of cash and we got to meet some really nice people.
Over the past year one of our boat related projects was changing axels on the
trailer so it would accept new brakes and adding an electric-over-hydraulic
brake actuator. This project was a
continuous challenge as if became clearer as the project moved along that our
trailer was never really designed for brakes.
To us on the West Coast the idea of a boat trailer without brakes is ludicrous,
dangerous, and illegal as we have mountains to cross. To the folks east of the Rockies the idea of
fighting with maintaining brakes on a trailer made to be submerged is purely
crazy as trailers stop just fine on flat land.
Also the trailer is painted steel which is guaranteed to rust quickly in
salt water. We had originally planned to
swap out the trailer for a used
galvanized or better yet, aluminum trailer when we initially got it back to
Washington but being the middle of Covid when everyone wanted to go boating (it
was considered being safely isolated) no trailers were available for any
reasonable price. Instead we put money
and labor into it until we were convinced it was ready for cross nation travel. We were soooo wrong.
This brings us up to the present. We have been planning for months to tow the
boat to our daughter’s house in Ontario Canada, travel the waterways of Ontario
and then attend our grandson’s graduation from high school the end of
June. We initially started the trip by
crossing Snoqualmie Pass and all went well.
At the Eastern side of the pass we stopped and I had a phone meeting for
church business at a closed diner. On
the way out of the diner we hit a huge pothole and probably should have stopped
as the thud was really loud. Instead we
pulled the trailer over Sauk Pass with its curvy downgrades (carefully
controlling our speed by gearing down) and ended up at Clarice’s long time
friend’s home in Wenatchee where we discovered that one of the brake calipers
had broken clean off and broken the hydraulic brake line in the process. We did an emergency repair at Myra and Clint’s
house and then drove on across the Rockies with only one axel having brakes. We stopped at some very neat places and
really enjoyed our crossing of Montana and the plain states blissfully unaware
that we now only had about 1 ½ functioning brakes. When we discovered the damage at Erin’s house
we threw in the towel and found a really nice used trailer locally and have
spent the last 4 days madly working on it to make it fit under our boat. We believe we are now ready to move on (the
old trailer was given away for scrap).
So now that out poor old diabetic and blind (but happy) dog
is getting oriented to the house (he quit rolling down the basement stairs) it
is time to tow the boat to Trent Port Marina at the southern end of both the Rideau
and Trent-Severn Canals on Monday (the end of a Canadian holiday weekend) and begin the next phase of this adventure.
