Month: October 2023

For pretty much forever, I had 3 bucket-list things to do in Hawaii. The first, and perhaps the prompt for the other 2, was to watch the sun rise from the summit of Haleakala. That was accomplished in May 1972, a few days after getting married in the old...

This was the first visit to Kauai for both Cathy and I, and since we booked the cruise I’d been dreaming of doing a bucket-list flight along the Na Pali coast. Cathy booked us with Ali’i Air Tours, in a Robinson R44 with the doors off. She was only...

Imagine living in a small community – 3,600 or so residents – which has great music venues, bars, and restaurants, a spa and many other facilities. Now imagine that in that community, you’re one of the 2,600 people that are retired, and the other 1,000 residents do all the...

I don’t know why it’s done, but as with our Hawaii cruise in 2013, we made a detour to spend a day in Astoria, Oregon. This post isn’t going to tell you much about Astoria, but on the 2013 visit I spent a very busy day exploring – see...

We’re now on Day 8 of this trip, which features a 17-night cruise from Vancouver to Hawaii and back on Holland America’s Koningsdam. Often we book trips at least a year ahead but we just decided about 3 months ago to book this, after a lot of discussion about...

My regular readers will have noticed that I didn’t go very far from home this past summer. What began as a simple (but very expensive) replacement of our complete septic system turned into a major landscaping project which lasted the entire season. The main component of the landscaping is...