Our Small Loop

We bought our home on Colvos Passage in 2004, and our first motor boat in the summer 2005. That path eventually led us to our 2012-13 Great Loop adventure, but the lead-up to that odyssey involved many smaller loops. Every year since 2005 we’ve traveled at least one, and sometimes several, circumnavigations of Vashon Island, the land mass in our view across Colvos Passage.

The joke about Vashon Island is that it’s just like Manhattan Island because it’s the same geographic size. In fact, it has less than 1% of Manhattan’s population, so is sparsely developed and mostly rural. Yesterday we made our annual circumnavigation so we could check out the waterfront homes and enjoy the sunny 88-degree day, keeping cool by traveling at trawler speed on the surface of the 53-degree waters of the Salish Sea, also known as Puget Sound.

We saw always-spectacular views of both the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges, including Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainier, boat traffic of every variety, and beaches full of people flying kites and playing with their dogs. Bob cranked up the music, we sipped a beer, and life felt pretty darned good. So we’ve completed our 2013 Small Loop.

We retired  in 2007. Historically this blog, which began in 2008 as our “Travel Journal”, not a Great Loop blog at that time, only covered trips we took. It began with photos, no stories, of our month-long trip to Tanzania and South Africa in 2008, then stories were added in later years to cover Morocco, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Portugal, 3 winters in our small RV on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, and more.

Now we’re getting encouragement from folks who followed our blog during the 15 months we lived on Next To Me and traveled the Great Loop to keep up the blog. While we don’t have any big trips planned until January when we depart for Guatemala and Mexico for 3 months, we’ll try to put up a post here and there about other activities in our life.

Meanwhile, we were supposed to board an airplane two days ago to fly to Toronto, then ride a bus or rent a car to join Looper friends Mark and Allyn on Second Wind, spending a week traveling with them in the Trent-Severn Waterway or Georgian Bay. Or at least that’s where we thought they’d be when we bought our tickets six weeks ago.

But it’s been raining heavily in New York for more than a month, the Erie Canal has been closed for almost 3 weeks due to flooding and damage, and Second Wind still sits at a marina between Locks 6 and 7 on the Erie Canal, going nowhere, with no foreseeable re-opening date. So we cancelled our trip to join them, sadly. See the flooding and lock damage above, joined by out-of-position navigational buoys. What a mess!

Instead, Bob had time to finish the new deck he built on top of our bulkhead, and we’ve been enjoying sitting at the water’s edge with a glass of wine, either at cocktail hour with friends, or late at night by ourselves after the solar lights have come on.

The next big thing for us is our youngest daughter’s wedding here at our home. Adrienne and Justin will marry on August 2, and we look forward to time with our family, his family, and friends. So we’re in wedding preparation mode! And on New Year’s Eve our son Ryan will marry Jaime, bringing the year to a wonderful end.