Always Onward Adventures

This blog post will be slightly different than ones in the past. I recently went to Europe on a work trip, but I was able to carve out a couple of days for my own adventures. I’m certainly not going to write about work, but the trip had several experiences that I want to remember - hence the post. I had planned to go on a whirlwind trip with 2-3 days in each location (Dublin, Berlin, and Geneva) and the way schedules worked out, I had a free day in Dublin and another one in Geneva.

A week after getting our boat, we joined Derek and Diane for an overnight sailing trip to Poulsbo. We packed everything up and headed down to the boat on Saturday morning - We are still working out what we need on the boat and what can stay on the boat and the outcome of which was a slight overpacking for a weekend trip… We planned on leaving around 8a (ended up actually leaving 9:30a).

We did our first day sail to a destination this weekend on the new boat. Our neightbors in the marina infomed us that this was a fun day trip - go for ice cream in Bainbridge. This sounded like a lot of fun, so with my parents in town we headed off in search of some wind to get us across the sound. We really were… (I say this alot in my day-to-day, thought it was a fun name for a boat)

We got a boat! About 5 years ago, Angela got me an engraved magifying Chart viewer (a magnifying glass that’s meant to sit right on the chart) that said “Onward 2022” - which was meant to represent the name of our future sailboat and the year we were planning to get it. Well, after 5 years of hard work we have achieved the goal set out and we are now the proud owners of a 2007 Catalina 34 sailboat.

After sailing in the Bahamas back in 2016, I have been hankering to go back. The combination of sailing, snorkeling, and warm weather was hard to beat. So for my 40th birthday I enlisted Angela to put together a similiar trip for Derek & Diane and us. With that, the trip to the BVIs was born and, after more than 6 months of planning, we headed out to the BVIs in early July 2022.

Back to back trips! After heading to Utah with the family back in April, Angela has been hankering to get a dutch oven. After some research, she finally found one, ordered it, waited two weeks, and it arrived! We just went camping the weekend before, but you should never let the sun set on a new piece of gear - so off we went. We decided to head back to Whidbey given the fun weekend we had last time.

Knowing we had several big trips coming up, we had been considering laying low for the next couple of weeks but a 3 day weekend combined with good weather was too hard to pass up. I made a last minute camping reservation at Birch bay state park which is just north of Bellingham right before you get to Blaine. We have been to a nearby state park (Larabee) several times so we knew the area, but this was a whole new place to explore.

We kicked off our first backpacking trip of the season this weekend - the forcast was for rain so we decided to embrace it and head out to the rainforest. We had done the Bogachiel river rainforest last year, so we opted for the Hoh river rainforest this year. We were destined for rain, but we had all the right gear so we were ready… :) But first, we headed out on a Friday afternoon and stopped for dinner on our way to the trip.